Her Tangled Hair
The Story of Feminist Poet Yosano Akiko
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Yosano Akiko (1878 - 1942), Japanese poet and feminist, was an empowered misfit. She is best known for her 31-syllable tanka poems, but they are only part of her story. Introverted and precocious, she spoke quietly, but what she wrote inspired a generation of Japanese women. Her struggle to live authentically in an unsympathetic world speaks to us across time and culture about acceptance, marriage, motherhood, and feminine power.
She was among the first to translate the world’s first novel, The Tale of Genji, into modern Japanese. She helped found Japan’s first co-educational school. She advocated for women’s rights and recognition in Japanese society.
She accomplished all of this despite extraordinary obstacles and personal tragedy. Disowned by her family, drawn into a doomed love triangle, criticized for her sexually-charged poetry and outspoken social commentary, and pushed to exhaustion supporting her eleven surviving children, Akiko’s life was filled with struggle and unexpected beauty.
Her verses feel modern today, not like those of a poet who lived in a faraway place and long-ago time. Her snapshot-short tanka of love and jealousy, working-mom moments, and reflections on backyard beauty, are fresh one hundred years after they were written. Akiko’s story reminds us that the barriers we face today are not so different from the ones our grandmothers faced, and her tanka reaffirm the power of poetry to help us survive pain and celebrate life.
About the Project
I have been thinking about writing this book for thirty years. Akiko’s love poems first took my breath away in the 1980s when I was studying Japanese in college. As I got older, her writing about marriage, childbirth, and women’s rights began to speak to me as well.
This story not a biography, because while I follow the true events of her life faithfully, I am recreating dialogue and imagining what her world looked like in order to make the story come alive. This pushes the book into historical fiction. Check out my May 2023 blog post for an update on my progress.
One more thing — Akiko’s poetry is sensual and beautiful, but it is also filled with classical references and archaic words, making translations challenging. I am not a native speaker of Japanese, although I have been a student of it for many years. I am an enthusiastic amateur, and offer my English interpretations of Akiko’s poetry without any guarantee that I understood or included every nuance or classical illusion. I would have no hope without the help of friends, including Yoko Kato, Kate Mashiko, Chizuru Shimizu, Noriyo Tokuchi, and the Yosano Akiko Club of Sakai, Japan and the Sakai Plaza of Rikyu and Akiko. Together with your help, these translations can be made better. Please contact me at nihonjean@mac.com, or add to the comments section below, if you have suggestions.
日本語ででも、お気軽にご連絡ください。
Jean Gordon Kocienda
About the Illustrations
College student Azusa Smith-Uchida is embarking on a promising career as an illustrator. While juggling college applications and homework, she has created a series of digital, water color, and line drawings for my social media posts and for the book.
I rely on Azusa to bring Akiko’s words to life with her illustrations, to help us visualize her passionate, romantic fantasy world. As you scroll through the poems on this website and in my Instagram and Facebook posts, look for her original artwork (tucked in and around the many downloadable clip art images that I also use). I hope you’ll love Azusa’s work as much as I do.
