EMBRACING THE FIREBIRD
Yosano Akiko and the Birth of the Female Voice
in Modern Japanese Poetry
By JANINE BEICHMAN
Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2002. 337 pages, $55 (hardcover), $23.95 (paperback)

reviewed by Charles DeWolf

On May 29, 1942, Yosano Akiko, renowned (and not infrequently denigrated) since the beginning of the century as la poètesse suprême of Japanese romanticism, died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of sixty-three. With Japan on the eve of the Battle of Midway, her passing seems to have attracted little notice among her compatriots, and even after the war, with her pacifism and feminism now "safe" and, indeed, fashionable, her detractors were still to be found.

In a stunningly brilliant, beautifully written, rich, and enthralling book, Janine Beichman, professor in the department of Japanese literature at Daitô Bunka University and lecturer in the department of comparative literature at Tsukuba University, summarizesand handily demolishestwo false images of this important literary figure: that she was "a romantic who burned out by her thirties," and that she was no more than what Beichman calls "Tekkan's rib," referring to the assumption that Akiko "would never have written a line without her husband's [Tekkan's] encouragement."

Embracing the Firebird takes its title from a poem in Akiko's sixteenth tanka collection, published in 1919.

When they speak
they are looked on with
loneliness
So it was, so it isfor those who embrace
the firebird

Mono ieba / ima mo mukashi mo/ sabishige ni / miraruru hito no / idaku hi no tori

Born to a merchant family in Sakai, the poet, critic, translator of the Tale of Genji into modern Japanese, cofounder of Bunka Gakuin (originally a girls' school, now a coed college), and mother of eleven surviving children, Yosano Akiko (née Ôtori Akiko or Hô Shô) might easily be treated as a stereotypically "larger-than-life" figure, to be either apotheosized or debunked. Instead, Beichman gives us a convincingly human portrait, with touches of humor and gentle irony.

Embracing the Firebird is both a biography of Akiko's early years and an analysis of her poetry, primarily her first collection, Midaregami (Tangled Hair), whose appearance on August 15, 1901, made the twenty-three-year-old an instant celebrity. Beichman comments that "today it may be hard to imagine how daring it was [for the Tokyo New Poetry Society] to publish an entire volume by a woman poet, especially one who wrote so frankly about sexual desire."

The point is well taken, though the book offers examples that may allow even those of limited cultural historical perspectivenotably members of our own secularized, sex-saturated societyto imagine the sensation that Akiko's poetry created. The voice of the following tanka is that of a girl who meets a young Buddhist monk at twilight:

The temple bell
is ringing low this evening
       Come now and
       chant your sutras for the
       budding peach blossoms in my hair

Dô no kane no / hikuki yûbe wo maegami no / momo no tsubomi ni / kyô tamae kimi

Western readers who think of Buddhism as one of the most spiritual of religions may find it hard to understand Akiko's defiance of the Buddhas. But it was not they so much as conventional, institutional religion that was her target. Buddhism for Akiko was not the mystical Zen that Jack Kerouac and the Beats read about in D.T. Suzuki . . . It was the boring sermons she had to listen to as a child, the incense that made her feel queasy, the scoldings she endured when her intellectual curiosity made her ask sacrilegious questions.

Japanese literature and folk tradition are replete with stories of monks and would-be seductresses, told from a persistently misogynist perspective. Akiko was merrily playing with a familiar theme.

Beichman's impressive scholarship provides a wealth of interesting insights for a broad range of readers. Here is but one example, illustrating how Akiko was not only heir to a long poetic tradition but also a startling and brilliant new voice.

Another group of women in Tangled Hair, rather than seeming suspended somewhere between the human and the divine, could be characters in fictional tales, sometimes set in the present, more often in an indeterminate past. . . .

Damp with spring rain
he came through her gate lay
hidden in the grass!
       The crab-apple blossoms
       flushed with pleasure that evening

Harusame ni / nurete kimi koshi / kusa no kado yo/ Omowaregao no / kaidô no yûbe

. . . [Akiko's husband, Tekkan, filling in the background, suggested that the scene is from the early Heian Period, more than a thousand years ago, and that the male lover is riding a horse.] Surely Tekkan is right that the man is on the horse, and that there is an air of medieval Japan about the picture; but the crab-apple tree was only introduced into Japan from China in the Tokugawa period, so this poem is set in a quasi-historical setting, not an actual historical one.

Yosano Akiko has herself proved to be a phoenix. If there is any remaining ambivalence toward her place in Japanese literature, it might be compared to that which many have felt toward the Tale of Genji, that jewel of classical literature that she twice made accessible to contemporary readers by rendering the late-tenth-century language into the modern idiom. Being a once reluctant but now solid "convert" to the latter, I must now thank Beichman for having opened my eyes to a life and to an oeuvre of which, except for the Genji translations, I have been ignorant.