To punish men for their sins
The smoothest skin
The longest black hair
All that
Is me
In the Japanese literary tradition, intimacy, woven with strands of passion, has come largely from the hands of women writers, be it in diaries or prose or poetry.
Men were bouncing their inner thoughts off and against external objects (or people) and searching their souls for an echo. Women were faithfully putting their confessions down on paper, and underlying these confessions with a bold and unabashed honesty.
This tradition goes right back to Heian times, more than 1,000 years ago, when it was women like Shikibu Murasaki and Shonagon Sei who virtually created Japanese literature with their eloquent and sophisticated prose. For centuries after that, female literature went into decline. It could find a place in neither the ascetic warrior culture of the Kamakura Period nor the aggressively vibrant merchant culture of the Edo Period.
It is one writer in particular who can be credited with the revelation and re-creation of this intimate Japanese sensibility in modern times: Akiko Yosano. In the above poem, a prime example of this, she speaks freely of her passion and the power that she takes from it.
Male writers of the 20th century took up a kind of confessional too, initially in the guise of Western naturalism. But the natural male defense mechanism prevented them from confronting their deepest psychological needs, and the result was often posturing: an affectation of disclosure.
Whether out of vanity or a simple and irrepressible sexual urge, even acclaimed Japanese male authors generally treat women as objects to bolster their innate insecurities. This is true of Yasunari Kawabata, Ken Kaiko and Ryu Murakami, to name just three writers from different generations.
Akiko Yosano (1878-1942) gave intimacy a new and genuinely feminist dimension. In 1901 she published her first book of tanka, the classic 31-syllable form of poetry, under the title "Disheveled Hair." Her Japanese is intensely lyrical yet full of realistic detail. There is no doubt that this collection is about the power of women.
Droplets fall from a young girl's hair
Congealing on grass
Giving birth to butterflies
In the country
Of spring
An unfettered intimacy, with its celebration of female passion and the power to give birth, can be seen throughout 20th-century Japan in, for instance, the feminist prose of Kanoko Okamoto and the erotic poetry of Kazuko Shiraishi, women writers who divulge their motivations and desires without the ulterior pretence that characterizes much male unburdening of the soul.
For Akiko, hair disarranged by the letting-loose of desires was not only a feature of her appearance. It reached deep inside her.
My black hair
My thick thick black hair
My wild hair
Its thousand strands my heart
Disheveled, torn apart
"Disheveled Hair" contains 399 poems, a remarkable achievement for a first volume. (Later she went on to publish more than 20 such collections.) Its driving force was an affair with the famous poet Tekkan Yosano, whom she married. Many of her poems are frank descriptions of their relationship. In considering the small selection here, bear in mind that Akiko was living in the Meiji Era in Japan, a period that modeled itself on the prim grimace, the staid posture and the hush-hush hypocritical values of mid-19th-century Europe.
You whisper to me, Stay in bed
But I tenderly shake you awake
My disheveled hair now
Up in a Butterfly
Kyoto morning!
A Butterfly was a hairstyle worn generally by unmarried women at the time. Akiko has clearly been invigorated by the proceedings of the previous night.
As Akiko and Tekkan take an evening walk, it is clear, too, that she is still coming down from an emotional high.
How beautiful they are
The people brushing past me
As I stroll through Gion
To the Temple of Kiyomizu
On this cherry-blossom moonlit night!
Akiko's joy in herself and her whole sense of being as a woman allow her to view the throng of people on a spring night with affection.
Her most intimate moods open her up to others.
What is intimacy, then, in the modern Japanese sensibility?
You see it throughout all Akiko's writing. It is a willingness -- an eagerness -- to be vulnerable and to tell the world about it.
Japanese male writers are, in general, overly concerned with face. Their confessions are often, at best, a shield for their insecurities; at worst they are a boastful ruse: bravado parading itself as vulnerability. This can be seen in a variety of works, from Kawabata's "House of the Sleeping Beauties" to Yukio Mishima's "Confessions of a Mask."
For Akiko, however, there is the frank thrill of disclosure as well as true generosity in the passionate urge.
My blood burns
To give you one night
In the shelter of heightened dreams
As you pass through spring
Do not look down on its god
The phrase "the shelter of heightened dreams" is an erotic metaphor -- a very female one -- and one that Akiko gleaned from Heian times, linking her to her ancestor-sisters. (She translated Murasaki's "Tale of Genji" into modern Japanese in 1912, and then retranslated it in 1939.) She writes about her need for physical love and her mild disdain for her partner's sermonizing.
You spout your words of wisdom
While the current of my blood runs
Hot beneath my soft skin
Don't you miss
Touching it?
And in what must be her two most erotic poems, she shows us a source of her sexual desire.
I press my breasts
Gently parting
The shroud of mystery
Revealing the flower
Redder than red
Spring doesn't last, I said to him
You don't believe in permanence, do you?
And I took his hands in mine
Leading them
To my young full breasts
Opening yourself up like this carries with it a danger. The Meiji world was a cruelly male-oriented one, and the fire of female passion was to be confined. The sense of joyful intimacy that Akiko was bringing to Japanese life was seen as an embarrassment to her husband, an inferior poet who was a pillar of the late-Meiji Era literary establishment. Akiko, Japan's greatest female poet of all time, was obliged to play second fiddle when in the presence of the man who was seen as her conductor. Even today there are literary critics who blame her for crimping his style.
Nonetheless, she was devoted to him. She gave birth to 13 children, 11 of whom survived. This means that she was pregnant for nearly a decade of her life!
In addition to writing her poetry and her two modern-language translations of "Tale of Genji," she was a staunch advocate of women's rights, an anti-imperialist, a prolific literary and social critic, a supporter of many young writers and poets (who were always welcome at her home), and co-founder and dean of the coeducational Bunka Gakuin in the Kanda district of Tokyo.
In Japan she has influenced women writers to a greater degree than any other Japanese literary figure. The literature of nearly every well-known 20th-century female author and poet takes inspiration from her.
While it is overstating the case to claim that the liberated women's magazines of the past 30 years would not have flourished without Akiko Yosano's legacy, it is no exaggeration to say that it was Akiko who set a feminist example in Japan and demonstrated that equality of the sexes need not be thought of as an import from Europe and America.
Despite all that, though, I doubt that many writers overseas have read her work or know of her existence. Is it because of the language? Or is it the pervasive prejudice that literature is a European preserve, a restricted garden that only in the event of drought might welcome the odd and colorful exotic into its soil?
Whatever the reason, it is a shame that the non-Japanese world has been denied the genius of this poet. We look to such poets as Anna Akhmatova and Sylvia Plath for deep and wonderful revelations of female love; but if we glance over their shoulder we find Akiko Yosano standing behind them, queen in the undiscovered country that is Japanese literature.
In her later years, after Tekkan had passed away, someone suggested to her that she do Zen for comfort. She apparently replied, "We women don't need to do Zen."
But long before, when she and Tekkan were still together, she wrote:
What will come between my burning lips?
You answer in your poem
Suck the blood from my little finger.
But that blood is too caked and dried out
For my mouth
Perhaps a strand of cynicism has become entwined into the fabric of intimacy. If so, who can blame her? But if there is cynicism in this modern sensibility, it doesn't belong here . . . and should be put aside for later.