was a Japanese writer of novels, short stories and essays. She was the daughter of writer Rohan KÃ Âda. Among her most noted works is the 1955 novel Nagareru.
Kà Âda was born in Terajima, Minami Katsushika-gun, Tokyo, as the second child of Rohan Kà Âda and his wife Kimiko. At the age of five, she lost her mother, the following year her older sister and still later her younger brother. The relationship with her stepmother Yayoko, a well-read woman, poet, and a devout Christian, but suffering from rheumatism and unable to run a household, proved to be difficult. After failing the entrance exams for the Tokyo WomenâÂÂs Higher Normal School, she entered the Joshigakuin, a Christian high school for girls, and graduated in 1922. She married the son of a sake wholesaler at age 24, but divorced after 10 years and returned with her daughter, Tama, to live with her father. The following years, overshadowed by World War II, she ran the household of her ailing father until his death in 1947 (her stepmother, who had lived apart from her husband, had died two years earlier).
KÃ Âda's first works, written at the request of publishers when she was 43, were memoirs of life with her famous father; they include Chichi: sono shi (lit. "Death of my father") and Zakki (lit. "Random notes"). Meeting with critical acclaim and ongoing publishers' requests, she continued with works such as Misokkasu (lit. "Miso dregs") and Kusa no hana (lit. "Flowers in the grass"), accounts of her childhood and adolescent years. A recurring theme was her own feeling of inferiority, caused not only by her demanding father, but also by measuring herself against her seemingly preferred sister and her two aunts, both musicians who studied abroad.
Kà Âda's subsequent short stories, novels, and essays explored women's lives, family relations, and traditional culture. Her fiction was often being read as autobiographical (jidenteki shà Âsetsu), and many of her stories dissolved the boundary between essay and fictitious writing. In the short story The Medal, the first person female narrator chronicles the attention her father Rohan receives after being awarded the first Medal of Cultural Merit, with herself doing labourer's work for the sake shop which she runs with her husband. Nagareru (lit. "Flowing"), the account of a housemaid who works in a geisha house, used Kà Âda's experiences as a maid in a Yanagibashi district geisha house in the early 1950s, while the troubled youth in Otà Âto (lit. "Little brother") was based on her younger brother Ichirà Â. In addition to her literary work, she edited collections of her father's essays and letters.
In 1976, KÃ Âda was chosen as member of the Japan Art Academy. She spent much of her later years trying to raise funds for the restoration of the pagoda of the HÃ Ârin-ji temple, and writing essays on the subject of trees and landslides. She died of heart failure in 1990. Her daughter Tama Aoki (b. 1929), whose books include Koishikawa no ie (lit. "The house in Koishikawa") about the time living with her grandfather Rohan, and her granddaughter Nao Aoki (b. 1963) are also writers.
The year refers to the earliest publication date.
Kà Âda's novels Nagareru and Otà Âto have repeatedly been adapted for film, stage and television, including the films Flowing by Mikio Naruse in 1956 and Her Brother by Kon Ichikawa in 1960.
KÃ Âda has a young girl character named after her in the manga Bungo Stray Dogs, whose life partially resembles KÃ Âda's own.
In Wim Wendersâ 2023 film Perfect Days, the main character Hiroyama buys a work of hers at a second-hand bookshop. The bookseller says âÂÂKà Âda Aya deserves more recognition. She uses the same words as we do, yet there is something so specialâÂÂ.