Diary of a Vagabond (First-Published Version)

A young woman moves through Tokyo’s cafés, cheap lodgings, factories, and employment offices, carrying hunger, restless desire, and an unshaken wish to write. Money runs out, work disappears, lovers disappoint, and unexpected kindness arrives from women who have little themselves. Railway journeys return her to a homeland that is itself shaped by wandering.

Hayashi Fumiko turns these precarious days into a sharply personal record. Poems and songs break into the prose; letters, remembered books, jokes, and sudden images reveal a mind resisting the limits of its circumstances. Her observations can be tender, furious, irreverent, and painfully frank.

This complete English translation presents the version first serialized in Nyonin Geijutsu between 1928 and 1930, distinct from the later revised text. It preserves the diary’s shifting dates, embedded verse and correspondence, censorship marks, and original author notices. Explanatory notes clarify period language, literary references, and uncertain readings while retaining the narrator’s difficult judgments and contradictions.