Embracing the Firebird: Yosano Akiko and the Birth of the Female Voice in Modern Japanese Poetry

by Janine Beichman

How did a girl from the provinces, meant to do nothing more than run the family store, become a bold and daring poet whose life and work helped change the idea of love in modern Japan? Embracing the Firebird is the first book-length study in English of the early life and work of Yosano Akiko (1879-1942), the most famous post-classical woman poet of Japan. It follows Akiko, who was born into a merchant family in the port city of Sakai near Osaka, from earliest childhood to her twenties, charting the slow process of development before the seemingly sudden metamorphosis.

Akiko's later poetry has now begun to win long-overdue recognition, but in terms of literary history the impact of Midaregami ( Tangled Hair , 1901), her first book, still overshadows everything else she wrote, for it brought individualism to traditional tanka poetry with a tempestuous force and passion found in no other work of the period. Embracing the Firebird traces Akiko's emotional and artistic development up to the publication of this seminal work, which became a classic of modern Japanese poetry and marked the starting point of Akiko's forty-year-long career as a writer. It then examines Tangled Hair itself, the characteristics that make it a unified work of art, and its originality.

The study throughout includes Janine Beichman's elegant translations of poems by Yosano Akiko (both those included in Tangled Hair and those not), as well as poems by contemporaries such as Yosano Tekkan, Yamakawa Tomiko, and others.

Genres: Japanese Literature, Poetry, Japan, Nonfiction, Biography

352 pages, Paperback

First published June 30, 2002

Reviews

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

A woman around twenty years old at turn of the 20th century Japan. Alienated from her surroundings, obsessed with death, the poetry community she recently entered observes her as feminine, modest and immature, but a woman marked by a strong will. Her father became the merchant class, purchased classics, which she begins to pour over, writing forty poems at a go in response to a reading of The Tale of Genji; her mother is isolated, unhelpful, and gets written out of the memoirs when it's time to write them, while the father, having died early, remains adored. She's dutiful in keeping the family store that sells yokan, a slice of sweet bean jelly (if you are ever in Harvard Square the Dado Tea Shop sells them at the front counter - delicious); customers note she is attentive to their needs, when she's not, she's scribbling away at a range almost out of sight. Later on she will address the oppression women writers face when confronted by the male-dominated literary class. But as an unknown gender issues don't concern her; she is being published, even though her poems are conventional, unimpressive (of an "o how I pine for my lover under a crescent moon" sort). The passion when it comes to poetry, the dishonesty when it comes to prose, these are the themes that characterize Yosano Akiko as seen through Janine Beichman's reading.

A passionate group of poets formed around the journal Myojo in 1899 and its leader Yosano Tekkan. One of his aims was to promote women poets. Akiko joined around the time Yamakawa Tomiko did, who was one year older and like Akiko publishing by the time she was sixteen. A near verbatim account exists of an all-day poetry gathering at the seashore of Sakai. Tekkan and Akiko weren't writing poems at it so much as writing coded messages to each other not unlike what you'd find in The Tale of Genji. Tekkan soon loses interest in his wife. Akiko and Tomiko's friendship, their aesthetics, was arguably based on which one should become sensei's lover. A movement formed; Akiko's reputation spread among those following the patriotic fever that felt poetry had its place in setting Japan among world powers. Several years later in 1904 Akiko split the faithful by writing a lament for her brother sent off to die in the war with Russia. But for now the question was, who should Tekkan's main protege be? Consider for a moment the thousands of poetry workshops taking place as we speak and how few people if any come out the other end a world-class poet. Akiko did, with the Myojo group; Tomiko did not, having died, sadly, too young (1879-1909) - it was Akiko who won over the poetry leader of the movement. Together they would have 13 children, 11 surviving infancy.

But before domesticity established itself, and Akiko's astonishingly voluminous output, which included a modernized translation of The Tale of Genji, there came the 399 poems these early love affairs produced. The title Midaregami is usually translated as Tangled Hair or Disheveled Hair. But these translations, title and poems themselves, don't accurately convey the sensation Akiko caused. A sample of the mood and atmosphere she brilliantly evokes is suggested in a poem like this one (which I translate, at best, for now):

みさぶらひ御髪に似るは乱菊と申すと云ひぬ寝てのみあれば

A hairstyle of class, honoring nobility
Floral patterns, my petals are a mess
These chrysanthemums when we are in bed
Tell me they are beautiful, if you wish
But only when I am asleep

The poem is a response to the rangiku 乱菊 hairstyle of the time that she wore. 乱 - tousled, disheveled. 菊 - chrysanthemum.

Beichman is a good scholar but she is definitely not a poet:

Moonlit night above
the lotuses, the railing
You so beautiful
I've not forgotten your
poem on the leaf reverse

One of Japan's greatest 20th century poets reduced to speaking bad English as Second Language ("You so beautiful"!?) with occasional inverted word order. And what a wasted opportunity: Beichman has gathered enough material to write an outstanding book on Meiji-era Japan, but squandered it, an academic lacking literary style. Yosano Akiko these years went through what most of us had experienced in our dorms but unlike us emerged from her experience with an astonishing breadth of vision, writing out erotic and religious impulses from a unique and independent position: her poetry deserves an equivalent, classical style.

In the rangiku 乱菊 poem, for instance, she's saying two things at the same time (among many other thoughts): (a) praise me when I'm asleep, because I only hear you in dreams; (b) praise me only when I'm asleep, because by then we would have enjoyed what we wished. Her poems are constructed on these hinges, which translators, scholars, and readers like ourselves need to embrace if we're to get anywhere near her. Here in America I can only think of Emily Dickinson who is working at this scorching hot a level.

In 1938 Akiko dismissed her early collection as being no more than pastiche; that she borrowed her diction from the popular poets of her time. Indeed she writes herself through historical characters and imagines scenes that never took place - but she's also doing some remarkable things, like incorporating classical motifs in new ways, combining first and third person narratives in these very compressed, powerful poems. She died during The Pacific War, was forgotten thereafter, but has experienced a revival due in no small part to the position women hold in the Japanese education system today for which she helped pave the way. It's clear that Akiko had a narcissistic personality; it served her well in her earlier period of emotional turmoil, because in the exclusions she felt, the world had to center around herself, and through poetry she found a way to make that happen. Her later feminist writings are shopworn, arguments we've heard rehearsed countless times by now; her writings from Japanese-occupied Manchuria in the early 1930s have their moments but overall are politically timid, something you could never say for her earlier, pre-marriage self - thus the enduring interest in Yosano Akiko's brilliant Midaregami.

[Les · Rating 5 out of 5]

Breathtaking translations of so many of Yosano Akiko's works -- and Japanese originals to match. I pretty much slept next to this book for a month.

Adding this book of Beichman's to my permanent collection as soon as I can. It's certainly a must read for tanka lovers...or any poetry lover, really. Whenever I read a poem by Yosano Akiko, my day is changed.

[Naomi Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really important contribution to English-language research and writing about Yosano Akiko.

[d · Rating 5 out of 5]

For girls who drink the wine of love,
springtime is forever
- Yosano Tekkan, Murasaki

[G.G. · Rating 5 out of 5]

My review, originally published in Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 64.1 (2004): 205-210, is available here: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25066735.

[Jaime Robles · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the first two-thirds of the book, which is largely biographical, tracing the early life of the modernist Japanese writer Yosano Akiko (1878–1942). The term modernist Japanese seems to mean that generation of writers affected by European and American writers of the early modernist period. But as modernism it’s not like anything resembling what European or American writers would think of as modernist. What is seems to mean is a those writers, especially poets, who moved away traditional Japanese forms and ideas. Akiko (her first name to distinguish her from her husband Yosano Tekkan) uses a traditional tanka form but her subject matter is love in a very personal and passionate way, rather like the female writers of Heian period, only without the metaphors that had become calcified through imitation and reuse. So the biographical part is fun, because Akiko is just as wild as her poetry. Starting as a neglected girl child forced into a mercantile life style by her provincial family, she breaks loose in her late teen years, writing poetry and joining a band of new-style poets, ultimately falling in love with one of them, requiring him to abandon his common-law wife and children to marry her. It is all very romantic. The poetry isn't bad either, haha. Though the academic categorization and need to justify legitimacy gets pretty tedious at the end.