Tangled Hair/Introduction
Introduction
The New Poetry Society, with the Myojo as its organ, was founded by Hiroshi Yosano in April, 1900, in an attempt to reanimate the tradition of poetry, which, as an “artifact” or a thing made, had degenerated into a mere choosing and arranging of words. Judged by its external result, reasonableness and good taste were the only criteria, and poetry as an activity of the mind was forgotten. Now the purpose of the New Society was to glorify love and beauty and give expression to the larger and more stirring experiences of life. Western romanticism advocated by Professor Naobumi Ochiai (1861–1903) was influential in furthering innovations, but his background was too deeply rooted in the classical tradition and his personality too retiring to lead the new literary revolt. It took such a militant reformer as Hiroshi Yosano, an ex-Buddhist priest, a school teacher, and a patriot, who described himself as “too passionate to be a successful lover and too original to be a good poet,” to initiate the movement. His romantic marriage with his promising pupil Akiko Otori gave the necessary impetus. Between the years 1900 and 1908, headed by the gifted poetess, the New Society was able to count almost all the brilliant young poets among its members and inaugurate a period known as the Age of Myojo or of Akiko.
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Akiko, the third daughter of Soshichi Otori, a proprietor of a confectionery shop, was born on December 7, 1878, at Kaimachi, Sakai City. Once a prosperous seaport, the city lost, after the Restoration of 1868, its shipping industry to the neighboring trade center, Osaka. As a child Akiko remembered a long row of white-washed warehouses, deserted wharves, and musty narrow streets.
Oh, for the sea
Where, in the house of my parents,
I grew up a maiden,
Counting the distant roars of the tides!
This is the only poem which refers to her early environment.
At the age of six, Akiko entered the Shikusei Grammar School in her neighborhood, and later the Sakai Girls’ School, from which she was graduated in 1895. Of her school life or friends, she has little to tell. Years later she writes:
“At school I was a dull student, far below the average. I cared little for the type of education that forced every mind in a certain set mould.”
In the late 19th century, a girl born in a conservative middle class family lived a drab life, but Akiko’s case seemed to be worse.
“Till I was well over twenty, I was brought up in the narrow uncomfortable atmosphere of an old fashioned home…. My father was addicted to strong drink and cared little for his family. My mother, who temperamentally had nothing in common with him, was always quarreling with him.”
In comparison with her highly sensitive and delicate sisters, Akiko, the future poet, was both mentally and physically robust. Hence:
“Ever since I could remember I had to keep house for the family. As soon as I was old enough to read and write, the heavy task of supervising the store also fell on me.”
Little Akiko waited on customers, kept books for her father, and sent out bills at the end of the month. Thus early she was deprived of the usual youthful amusements and found her only consolation in reading. The family, however, were not at all sympathetic with her aspirations.
“Late at night when all my duties were done, I stole a few hours and read books.”
The books she refers to belonged to her great grandmother on her mother’s side, whose personality pervaded the household long after her death. This grand old lady had had an excellent taste in literature; loved beautiful objects such as ancient brocade and prayer beads made of crystal and sapphire; in fact she enjoyed all that pomp and gayety that went with the decadent feudal régime. At the rear of the confectionery shop, in a store-room filled with the great grandmother’s excellent library, Akiko nightly retired to read in secret. Intellectually and aesthetically Akiko’s debt to her was great.
As I read a book
Sitting on a closed chest,
Blows the autumn wind
Through the store-room window.
Perhaps this was the same chest behind which a praying-mantis hid himself, only to surprise her one day by strutting out like an actor. Indeed this dark musty room was her sanctuary, and here she watched the rotation of the seasons. In autumn:
Ten red dragon-flies
Blown by the wind,
Draw a turning wheel
Within my garden hedge.
From this narrow window, Akiko watched intently the moving world and fleeting time, and they seemed to come to a momentary arrest.
“By the time I was seventeen, I had read practically all the important standard works and acquired a certain critical judgment. When I think back on those days, I wonder how I managed to read so much.”
When she finally exhausted her great grandmother’s library, she wrote:
“My brother in Tokyo sent me new books, and I borrowed some from my friends, too.”
By new books Akiko meant current literature, both in form and content modeled after the Western prototype. She was also exposed to the translations of French and English writers.
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 branch of the Osaka Society, and in the early issues of the journal of that year, we find a few poems by Akiko Otori, probably her first appearance in print. In April, 1900, when Hiroshi Yosano published a monthly journal of his own, Myojo, Akiko was one of the first contributors. In August, Hiroshi was the guest of the Sakai group and spent a day with Akiko, Tomiko Yamagawa, and others, in poetic discourse. This day marks the first page of Akiko’s new life.
As a teacher, following the old practice in Japan, Hiroshi must have corrected Akiko’s compositions, for immediately we find his influence on her work. This relation of teacher and disciple was soon converted into an ardent poetical friendship. Passionate Akiko composed still more passionate poems, and she was no longer willing to enjoy their friendship without a consummation in romantic marriage. Under her compelling influence, Hiroshi divorced his first wife, gave up his love for another beautiful poetess, Tomiko Yamagawa, and married Akiko. This was in the early fall of 1901.
In August of the same year, Hiroshi had already brought out a volume of Akiko’s poems, Midare gami (Tangled Hair), which created a sensation, scandalizing the respectable public with her frank admission of passion and desires. After the first shock was over, however, the public began to quote Akiko extensively. With the strength of Hiroshi’s support and the focus of public attention, Akiko’s creative energy reached its highest mark, and between the years 1901 and 1928, she published twenty-one volumes of poetry. That oft repeated statement that she outshone her husband seems unfair, for Hiroshi had a many-sided talent, and poetry was but one of his numerous interests.
The Yosanos started housekeeping in the suburbs of Tokyo, and in spite of their struggle to make both ends meet, they kept open house where penurious but highly inspired men of letters often gathered. What they lacked in material comfort, they made up in their enthusiasm and heated argument. As a discipline, they often spent evenings composing poems. Years later, one of the contributors of the Myojo wrote:
“Of course the Yosanos were the moving power of these poetry evenings. The facile pen and keen wit of Takuboku Ishikawa and Miss Yamagawa astonished us. The subjects given were to be merely suggestions to help concentrate our thoughts.
“By dawn a few could compose one hundred poems, but the majority of us had to stop at fifty or sixty or even fewer. Takuboku used to slip under the mosquito net of Mrs. Yosano’s baby and take a short nap. I remember a young man who used to pull a cloak over his head, getting out once in a while to write down his poems, for, according to him, the light interfered with his muse.”After 1909, with the strong naturalistic trend in the literary field, the New Poetry movement declined. Already the Myojo had been discontinued with its one hundredth anniversary issue, in November, 1908. Akiko, too, seemed to have drained her source of inspiration. Hiroshi went to Europe in 1911, and in June of the following year, Akiko met him in Paris. Together they travelled extensively, returning to Japan in February, 1913. Although she had long been an admirer of France and things French, inwardly this journey did not seem to touch her at all.
In 1921 Hiroshi, together with a few others, founded a girls’ school, Bunka Gakuin, based on broad cultural principles, and Akiko assumed the duties of dean, to which she has devoted much of her energy. After 1920, Akiko began to write occasional essays. She is an ardent advocate of the emancipation and higher education of women, and in spite of her arduous duties in connection with her large family and the deanship, she has written continuously for magazines and newspapers.
Akiko’s ideal companionship came to an end only when, at the age of sixty-two, Hiroshi died of pneumonia on the 26th of February, 1935. Akiko is the mother of twelve children, ten of whom are living.
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Akiko Yosano has had two advantages over her contemporaries. First, she is a woman with a certain audacity and glamour that appeal to the public imagination. Her dramatic appearance, after Hiroshi had set the stage, was extremely timely; she made his creed articulate. Secondly, while the outstanding poets of the modern period have been short lived, Akiko has enjoyed thirty-five years of unbroken literary activity. Had death spared longer Shiki Masaoka, Takuboku Ishikawa, and Tomiko Yamagawa, they might have done great things for modern poetry, because, in spite of their poverty, ill health, and early deaths, they left many significant works. It was Akiko’s special privilege to round out more than a third of a century in her poetic career.
The creed, if it can be called such, of the New Society was embodied in the small volume by Akiko brought out by the Society on April 15, 1901. The Midare gami (Tangled Hair) contained four hundred poems of passionate exaltation of love and beauty. Not only the content, but also the cover design by Takeji Fujishima, bespoke the new spirit. From the tip of a cupid’s arrow piercing a heart, there blooms a flower, which, according to Akiko, is “Poetry.” In fact, to the members of this group, poetry and love were so closely identified that Akiko’s triumph in love, which was also her triumph in poetry, made her the logical figure to preside over their destinies.
This juvenile conception of love and poetry demands an explanation. The one conspicuous feature of Western poetry is its preoccupation with love. Every poet is a potential lover, and the relation between man and woman plays an important rôle in poetry. The Japanese poet, to the contrary, took this relation as something commonplace and obvious. His marriage was arranged, and his wife he regarded as simply an instrument of procreation. For the first time, the Japanese poets accepted the Western habit of idealizing love and began to exhibit themselves in a romantic light.
Akiko’s poetic inspiration was continuous, and during 1904 and 1905, four small volumes were published. In 1906 appeared Mai hime (Dancing Princess), which attained a much higher tone than the previous volumes. Although her writing still gave abundant evidence of the intoxication of love and beauty, both emotion and expression were tempered by intellectual qualities. Skeptical readers of the earlier volumes now acknowledged her genius, and the period was called the Age of Akiko. Of minor significance was the fact that this was the first volume of Japanese poetry to appear in the Western style of binding.
Toko-natsu (Eternal Summer) in July, 1908, and Sao hime (Spring Maiden) in May, 1909, more or less sustained this level of inspiration. The Shundei-shu (Spring Mire) in January, 1911, reveals a depth of thought and contemplation not found in Akiko’s youthful work. Dr. Bin Ueda, who wrote a prologue to Takuboku Ishikawa’s Longings in 1905, honored Akiko’s volume with a preface, in which these lines may be found:
“I feel that a woman has a faculty of summing up the temperament of the age. She can do this in the descriptive and lyrical fields. Akiko Yosano in her present work has achieved this most admirably.”
Though still romantic, she had abandoned the gothic exuberance of her early style. Her artificial and epigrammatic expression had given way to a deeper calling of the spirit.
By 1909, the New Poetry movement, as I have stated, was in decline. Its official organ, now moribund, had served its purpose. The germ of decay had been implicit in the movement itself, but in its last stage, the total loss of restraint, sincerity, and originality as well as the constant singing of one strain, had tired the younger poets; they were no longer willing to identify themselves with the Yosanos or the movement. One by one they dropped out or drifted away.
Moreover, the promised turn of thought which was indicated in the Spring Mire did not materialize, and Akiko’s poems became more and more matter-of-fact and stylized. Despite extensive journeyings through Europe and Manchuria, her inner life seemed barren. This criticism also applies to her longer poems of the later period, of which I have translated fifteen examples.
Akiko’s complete works, both prose and poetry, in thirteen large volumes, were published by the Kaizo-sha in 1934.
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Akiko once wrote:
“Unlike most present day writers, there is not a single poem of mine which was composed to expound poetic theory.”
The statement, probably, is true, and she is hitting at the Araragi school, which, following the classical tradition, insists on devoted and conscientious workmanship in the service of the muse. The Araragi poets certainly do not believe that “to be expressive is to be beautiful.”
In the matter of diction, however, Akiko insists on discipline.
“A poet must develop keen sensitivity for the language…. Any words that are not charged with emotion should put the writer to shame.”
And again:
Critics have been pretty consistently hostile to the Yosanos, first because they expounded something novel and later because they refused to relinquish their principles long after their usefulness had ceased. Although they often speak of the creed of the Myojo, the Yosanos at no time held rigid tenets; they were much more tolerant toward young poets and new experiments than were their critics.
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In the history of modern Japanese poetry, the reign of the Myojo or Akiko, though brief, was significant, for it put the classical spirit of Japanese poetry, that had been drifting along the line of least resistance, to the test. Like the romanticists, the classical poets also played with flowers, jewels, love, dreams and fantasies; in fact all kinds of pleasant things, and somehow forgot that the true poetry is about the human soul. If there is love, there is strife; if life, then death and that which is beyond death. A partial affirmation of life by the romanticists forced the classical poets, who came back infused with new spirit, to affirm the whole of life. Indeed, the excellent poems of the Araragi school that follow the present volume owe much to the immature work of the previous period.