Yosano Akiko and The Shining Prince

A Feminist star in the Taishō firmament

A young Yosano Akiko. Public Domain image.

In 1901, a new book of tanka poetry turned Japan’s literary world upside down. The tanka was a form commonly used in the Heian Period (794-1185). It played a major role in The Tale of Genji, Japan’s and the world’s first novel. The new book in 1901 was titled Midaregami, (Tangled hair), and the poet was a young Yosano Akiko. Her poems were emotional, erotic, and modern. However, they used the ancient tanka form. Their style and voice recalled lines of poetry from Genji.

An unlikely author, Akiko grew up in a merchant family. In her early teen years, she took control of the business. She was the primary reason it survived. She had a good head for business, and was a capable shopkeeper. She was not the kind of person whom one would assume had the time, or the passion, to write a book of poems like Midaregami. Her poems were shockingly modern, even erotic. They were a forthright expressions of a young woman in love. Most were written about her lover and soon to be husband, Yosano Hiroshi (pen name Tekkan). As a historical figure her poetry provides her primary fame. But she was also a scholar and a feminist. She gave birth to thirteen children, and raised the eleven who survived. During that time, she was also the family's primary source of income.

Akiko became one of the most accomplished and lauded members of a group of artists and intellectuals interested in what it meant to be both modern and Japanese. Others with these same interests included the folklorist Yanagita Kunio, poet Kitahara Hakushū , poet and lyricist Noguchi Ujō, and poets Yosano Tekkan (1873-1935), and Ueda Bin (1874-1916). These and others acted upon their nostalgia about Tokugawa-era culture. They hoped to connect the modern people of Taishō with their Tokugawa cultural roots. They focused on the fantasies of countryside tales, songs, and traditions (some imagined). After the Meiji era’s focus on national modernization, they came to believe that Japan’s people should take the time to revisit Japanese tradition and identity. They saw the idea of risshin-shusse (self-improvement) as a romantic pursuit of self-fulfillment through reconnection with Japan’s cultural past. Novelists like Satō Haruo set their stories in the countryside, rather than the urban core, and engaged in nostalgic reflection on ideal Japanese lifestyles contrasted with Westernized cities.

Memorial to Yosano Akiko in a seaside cave on Enoshima, near Kamakura, Kanagawa, Japan. Photo by the author.

Like Akiko though, they were all excited about their own modern times. Ueda Bin encouraged Nakayama Shimpei (1887-1952), a composer, and the father of Japanese popular songs, to create a popular music for Japan in the new age. Yosano Tekkan was the founder of the literary magazine Myojo and leader of the New Poets Society. Other members included Kitahara Hakushū, and Ishikawa Takuboku. They studied France and its Belle Epoch society. They wrote poetry in the French Symbolist style. Like Akiko, Hakushū also took Tanka in new directions.

Akiko fit right into this group of creative intellectuals. Still, for many scholars she is often only a footnote in the cultural history of Taishō. I often wonder if that is just because she was a woman. If Midaregami is her best-known work, though her later poetry was more accomplished. Following her interests, she went to France for 5 months in 1912. When she returned, she began her most important project. It is also today possibly her most overlooked legacy. She translated The Tale of Genji from its archaic Japanese into the modern Japanese of her own time. The project took years of her life.

Japanese today do not speak the archaic form of the Japanese language used by The Tale of Genji author Murasaki Shikibu. Only scholars and devotees of Heian Era literature are able to read and understand Murasaki’s original sentences. The act of translating The Tale of Genji in Japan has, since about 1829, been a process of rediscovery of Japanese culture, literature, and thought.

The original story was partially translated to modern Japanese in 1882 by Suematsu Kenchō. That translation influenced the work of later English translators such as Arthur Waley. However, Akiko’s was the first full translation directly from Heian era Japanese to modern Japanese. She is often not given credit for her importance in the rediscovery of the ancient text. She is overshadowed by male translators Masamune Hakuchō, who in 1933 translated the work into modern Japanese from Waley’s English language version. Her work is also overlooked in favor of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō. This despite the fact that Tanizaki's 1939-41 translation censored important parts of Murasaki’s story. He apparently did this to care for Japanese cultural and nationalist sensibilities as World War II approached.

When Yosano Akiko translated the book, she made some key choices about the way the text should be read. A number of scholars claim that her translation has been the most influential in terms of the rediscovery of the importance of the story to Japanese culture. Akiko emphasized the drama of the story, translating it in such a way that it read much more like a modern novel. The idea of Japanese classical culture as heavily influenced by aesthetics and an appreciation of natural beauty is frequently credited to Akiko. Her work also has inspired research into the centrality of women within the political and literary processes of Heian society. Her interest in modernizing Japan without losing sight of the value of Japanese culture was complemented by her recognition of the importance of women within that culture. This opened up a renaissance for The Tale of Genji. Akiko showed the richness of Japan’s ancient cultural heritage.

In this way, Yosano Akiko encapsulates the spirit of Taishō. She was the hardworking daughter of a merchant family. The passion she displayed in Midaregami made her a sensation. Her rise as a poet, intellectual, and feminist were symbols of the possibilities of Taishō. Akiko was one with a society that found itself nostalgic for old Japan, but rapidly racing toward an exciting future focused, as politics would also become, on Japan’s people. Akako’s story, though, is not just that of a successful woman. She was also the family breadwinner, and a respected intellectual in modern Japan. In many ways, she embodied Taishō.

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