Japanese Women Poets: An Anthology

An Anthology

Hiroaki Sato

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317466963
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Throughout history, Japanese women have excelled in poetry - from the folk songs of the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters) compiled in 712 and the court poetry of the 9th to the 14th centuries, on through the age of haikai and kanshi to the 19th century, into the contemporary period when books of women's poems have created a sensation.This anthology presents examples of the work of more than 100 Japanese women poets, arranged chronologically, and of all the major verse forms: choka, tanka, haikai (haiku), kanshi (verse written in Chinese), and free verse. The poems describe not just seasonal changes and the vagaries of love - which form the thematic core of traditional Japanese poetry - but also the devastations of war, childbirth, conflicts between child-rearing and work, experiences as refugees, experiences as non-Japanese residents in Japan, and more.Sections of poetry open with headnotes, and the editor has provided explanations of terms and references for those unfamiliar with the Japanese language. Other useful tools include a glossary of poetic terms, a chronology, and a bibliography that points the reader toward other works by and about these poets. There is no comparable collection available in English.Students and anyone who appreciates poetry and Japanese culture will treasure this magnificent anthology. Editor and translator Hiroaki Sato is a past winner of the PEN America translator prize and the Japan-United States Friendship Commission's 1999 literary translation award.

The Modern Age

Shimazaki Tōson (1872—1943), whose first book of poems, Wakana Shū (Collection of Young Herbs), in 1897, marked the arrival of new poetry in Japan, recollected in 1904, when his first four books of poems were issued in a single volume, the excitement he and his fellow poets felt in creating a “new style” of poetry in their own language.

At long last, the time for new poetry has come.

It is like a beautiful dawn. Some shout like ancient prophets, some call out like poets of the West, all as though intoxicated with a bright light, a new voice, and imagination.

Youthful imagination, awakened from a long sleep, adorns the language of our folk.…

Many in the throng of new singers are just simple youths. Their art is childish, imperfect, and yet also without falsity, without embellishment.…

It is said that poetry is “emotion recollected in tranquillity.” Indeed, my songs are confessions of fearful struggles.

Grief and suffering remain in my songs. When you think of it, it is good to speak out. It’s good to speak out without hesitation.…

Tōson’s poetry, in fact, immediately, profoundly, affected the young men and women of the day, among them Yosano Akiko, the first poet to appear in this section. In particular, the cry of O-Kume, one of “the six virgins” given voice in a group of six poems, is thought to be the direct antecedent of Akiko’s more assertive tanka such as, “Spring’s short how can life last forever I said made his hands grope my strong breasts.” Midway through a nine-stanza monologue O-Kume implores: “How can’t you tell that my love for you, / having touched your manly hand, / would not cease, oh, unless I transferred / my lipstick to you, to your mouth?”

Here it may be apt to note that Japan’s ending its isolationist policy in the mid-nineteenth century worked wonders in literature. The first known Japanese anthology to be translated into a foreign language was the Hyakunin Isshu. F.V. Dickins, a physician attached to the British Navy, rendered it into English and published it in London, in 1866; it is a marvel of freedom in approach to translation. The first systematic attempt to introduce Western poetry in Japanese translation was made in 1882, and its three compiler-translators were a sociologist, a botanist, and a philosopher—none a scholar of literature or a poet. The first comprehensive anthology of verse composed by Japanese was one of kanshi. A Chinese scholar compiled it at the request of a Japanese journalist, and it started publication in China, in 1883. And the journalist, Kishida Ginkō, had earlier collaborated with the American missionary-physician James Curtis Hepburn on the first Japanese-English dictionary, which was published in London, in 1867. The romanization Hepburn devised is used to this day.

Yosano Akiko
(1878–1942)

Born to a well-known confectioner in Sakai, Akiko (née Ho Sho) won national notoriety and admiration with her first book of tanka, Midaregami (Hair in Disorder), published in August 1901. At times mesmerizingly narcissistic, the collection of 399 pieces spelled out a young woman’s sexual thoughts and acts. “Not even touching the blood-tide in my soft flesh aren’t you lonely you who teach the Way?”—so she said in an often quoted piece. But the man who “taught the Way,” Yosano Tekkan (1873–1935)—the founder and publisher of the romantic poetry magazine Myōjō (Venus)—was living with one of his former students, who was pregnant. The literary critic Takayama Chogyū (1871–1902) thundered, accusing Akiko of “licentious sentiments and shallow philosophy,” and Sasaki Nobutsuna (1872–1963), a poet and a scholar of classical Japanese poetry, judged that Midaregami was “pernicious to the human heart and poisonous to social education.”

But Midaregami had a liberating effect on young men and women at the time, and its hold remains powerful today. The tanka poet Mizuhara Shion (born 1959), for one, has called Midaregami “an epoch-making work that sought beauty by reaching a woman’s deep [psychological] strata,” concluding that it is “a collection of nightmares that reveal themselves at least once to the dullest and most banal of women.”

Akiko married Tekkan in the fall of 1901 and went on to have six sons—the sixth one died shortly after birth—and six daughters by him, while remaining superhumanly active in a range of literary endeavors and women’s education. In poetry alone, she wrote fifty thousand tanka and seven hundred shi. Among her other works that are still widely read today is her translation into modern Japanese of The Tale of Genji.

From Midaregami (Hair in Disorder)

Cochineal Purple

Hair five feet untangled soft in the water the maiden’s heart I’ll keep secret won’t let it out

The girl twenty flowing through the comb the black hair’s haughty the spring how beautiful

Dark red whom shall I tell...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Brief Contents
• Table of Contents
• Note and Acknowledgments
• Chronology
• Twelve Months
• Introduction
• Ancient Songs
• Poems from the Man’yōshū
• The Age of Tanka
• The Age of Haikai and Kanshi
• Interludes
• The Modern Age
• Japanese Verse Forms and Poetic Terms
• Bibliography
• Index of Poets
• About the Translator