Miyamoto Yuriko (宮本 百合子, 13 February 1899 – 21 January 1951) was a Japanese novelist, short-story writer, social activist, and literary critic active during the Taishō and early Shōwa periods of Japan.

She traveled for several years to the United States and the Soviet Union before returning to Japan, where her works were heavily censored and she was imprisoned repeatedly for her political views.

[1][4] Her father was a Cambridge and Tokyo Imperial University-trained architect, and her mother was a former painter, whose career had halted when she discovered that Ueno National Art School did not accept women.

[1] While in her teens and a freshman in the English literature department of Japan Women's University, she wrote the short story "Mazushiki hitobito no mure" ("A Crowd of Poor People"), which was accepted for publication in the prestigious Chūō Kōron (Central Forum) literary magazine in September 1916.

[6] She broke a number of social norms, including entering a love marriage, proposing herself, and refusing to take her husband's surname.

[7] The two were different in terms of age, socio-economic class, and intellectual interests,[6] and the couple divorced in 1924, inspiring her semi-autobiographical Nobuko (1924–1926), which criticizes conventional ideas of gender and love as it relates the failure of the protagonist's marriage, her travels abroad, and her quest for independence.

[2] Upon her return to Japan, Miyamoto met Russian-language scholar Yuasa Yoshiko, through a mutual writing friend Nogami Yaeko.

[1] The two bonded over their mutual interest in Russian literature, particularly Chekhov,[6] and Miyamoto contemplated dedicating Nobuko to Yuasa, with whom she entered into an intimate relationship after the failure of her marriage in 1924.

[6] Upon return, their relationship became rocky, in part due to the social pressures on women at the time; Yuasa openly identified as lesbian, while Miyamoto struggled with the place of female love in modernizing Japan, as she would express in later works.

[6] Upon their return to Japan, Miyamoto became editor of the Marxist literary journal Hataraku Fujin (Working Women) and a leading figure in the proletarian literature movement.

[10] However, with government enforcement of the Peace Preservation Laws and the increasingly severe suppression of leftist political movements, Miyamoto's works were heavily censored and her magazine was forbidden to publish.

In 1946, Miyamoto wrote "Utagoe yo okore" for the new Japanese Literature Association; this essay urged writers to reflect on the nation's history, their own lived experience, and people's rights.

"[2] The novel is considered mostly autobiographical and was initially received with middling acclaim; however, it enjoyed surprising re-invigoration in the post-war era.

The setting is a rural town in northern Japan, where Miyamoto, represented by the protagonist Hiroko, was living as an evacuee at the war's end.

The chapter captures the sense of confusion with which many Japanese received the news of surrender—Hiroko's brother cannot explain what is happening to his children, while local farmers become drunk.

Fūchisō (The Weathervane Plant, 1947) provides a thinly fictionalized account of Miyamoto's reunion with her husband after his release from twelve years of wartime imprisonment.

[12] She considered women's liberation a part of the path to better social order, pushing against both traditional proletarian literature and mainstream Japanese thought.