YOSANO AKIKO

(1878–1942)

   Yosano Akiko, nee Ho Shiyo, was a tanka poet and feminist from Osaka. During high school, she subscribed to the literary journal Myojo (Venus) and later became one of its major contributors. Through this relationship, she met the founder of the journal, Yosano Tekkan, and the two fell in love and eventually married in 1901. That same year she published the feminist tanka collection Midaregami (1901; tr. Tangled Hair, 1948). One of her most popular compositions was the antiwar poem Kimi shinitamau koto nakare (1904; tr. Beloved, You Must Not Die, 1974), published in Myojo and addressed to her brother who was fighting in the Russo-Japanese War at the time. In 1938, she published a translation of the classical Tale of Genji (ca. 1008) into modern Japanese, an effort that took three drafts spanning 17 years. A pacifist and feminist throughout her career, she became a social activist and promoted educational reform. Her crowning work was a compilation of over 26,000 poems by more than 6,600 contributors collected over a 60-year period and fittingly titled Shin man’yoshu (The New ‘Man’yoshu,’ 1937–39).

   See also POETRY; WAR LITERATURE; WOMEN IN LITERATURE.