Born in Nagasaki City in
1935, she made her debut as a professional singer at the age of seventeen. In 1957, "Mekemeke" was a big hit, and she took the world by storm with her natural good looks and unique fashion.
In 1966, she attracted attention again with her self-composed "Yoitomake no Uta", and the following year she starred in Shuji Terayama's "Hunchback Man of Aomori Prefecture" and "Fur Mary". In 1968, she starred in "Black Spider". In 1993, she reprised her role in Black Spider. In 1997, she won the Yomiuri Theater Award for Excellence for her reprise of The Two-Headed Eagle. She is active in a wide range of fields such as theater, concerts, movies, TV, radio, lectures, and writing.
Her family ran a small café. After seeing a film called Boy Soprano at the age of 11, she declared his dream of going on stage as a singer and entered the Japanese National University of Music at 15.
She began her professional career as a cabaret singer in Ginza at the age of 17 upon her arrival in Tokyo (1952), singing in various nightclubs. Her favorite songs were French, mainly by Édith Piaf, Yvette Guilbert, and Marie Dubas. He then met Yukio Mishima and the playwright Shūji Terayama, who quickly made her play on stage.
She learned French as a child at school. Yukio Mishima became the great love of her life. This relationship began when Mishima complimented her in a cabaret by saying, "Maruyama, you have only one weakness. It's that you could never fall in love with me." She changed her name after Mishima's suicide on November 25, 1970, to Miwa.
Her fame began in 1957 with the hit "Méqué, méqué", covered in Japanese, by Gilbert Bécaud. Her type of effeminate beauty caused a lot of noise in the public.
In the 1970s, the film industry offering fewer opportunities, she turned more to a singing career for which she resumed a masculine appearance.
As a writer Miwa has written many very committed books on social and military issues, as a result of her great experience of the worst of these subjects, being herself a survivor of the Nagasaki atomic explosion from which she escaped relatively spared but always very critical of the government in all its military initiatives.
She was for a long time the only openly gay in Japan, after coming out at 17. Her boyfriend hanged himself soon after his family had noticed his homosexuality. Her androgynous physique allowed her to play roles sometimes attributed to the masculine gender, sometimes to the feminine, in the tradition of Kabuki theater.
She is one of the greatest pioneers of the LGBT movement in Japan. Her popularity is not only explained by her charisma and identity as an artist but also by the documentation of discrimination that she had to face in a Japan dominated by heterosexual masculinity.
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