Introduction
A long time ago, in the store-room one day, Akiko found her mother’s bulbs sleeping on a shelf, and she made up her mind never to be a shelf on which flowers sleep all the year round. Therefore, in order to escape from her daily routine and drudgery, Akiko began to create a world of imagination, which comforted and spurred her on. Gradually, however, this world of make-believe became inadequate to her active growing mind, and she longed for the actualities of life.
“I keenly longed to be an individual and free. By a strange chance, I found my soul’s mate, and with desperation I staked my whole life, fought and won my love. With this triumph, I escaped from the family bondage, which had so long imprisoned my personality. Moreover, that very moment, I found I could freely give artistic expression to my inner thoughts and feelings. Thus all at once, I won the three most precious things of life: courage, love, and poetry.”
This significant statement holds the key to Akiko’s poetic genesis. In 1898, when a group of young poets in Osaka started a journal, Yoshi ashi gusa, some of Hiroshi Yosano’s extremely unconventional romantic poems were published, arousing discussion far and wide. In the following year, a small group in Sakai organized a
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