Embracing the Firebird : : Yosano Akiko and the Birth of the Female Voice in Modern Japanese Poetry / / Janine Beichman.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Asian Studies Backlist (2000-2014) eBook Package
• VerfasserIn: Beichman, Janine,
• Place / Publishing House: Honolulu : : University of Hawaii Press, , [2002]; ©2002
• Year of Publication: 2002
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (356 p.)

How did a girl from the provinces, meant to do nothing more than run the family store, become a bold and daring poet whose life and work helped change the idea of love in modern Japan? Embracing the Firebird is the first book-length study in English of the early life and work of Yosano Akiko (1879-1942), the most famous post-classical woman poet of Japan. It follows Akiko, who was born into a merchant family in the port city of Sakai near Osaka, from earliest childhood to her twenties, charting the slow process of development before the seemingly sudden metamorphosis.Akiko's later poetry has now begun to win long-overdue recognition, but in terms of literary history the impact of Midaregami (Tangled Hair, 1901), her first book, still overshadows everything else she wrote, for it brought individualism to traditional tanka poetry with a tempestuous force and passion found in no other work of the period. Embracing the Firebird traces Akiko's emotional and artistic development up to the publication of this seminal work, which became a classic of modern Japanese poetry and marked the starting point of Akiko's forty-year-long career as a writer. It then examines Tangled Hair itself, the characteristics that make it a unified work of art, and its originality.The study throughout includes Janine Beichman's elegant translations of poems by Yosano Akiko (both those included in Tangled Hair and those not), as well as poems by contemporaries such as Yosano Tekkan, Yamakawa Tomiko, and others.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- Introduction -- A PROVINCIAL CHILDHOOD 1878-1888 -- ONE Birth, Exile, Return -- TWO Growing Up in Sakai -- ADOLESCENCE 1889-1900 -- THREE Saying No to Reality -- FOUR The Poet Begins -- LOVE AND POETRY 1900-1901 -- FIVE Tekkan Enters -- SIX The Uses of Poetry -- SEVEN Autumn in the West -- EIGHT The Warm Snows of Miyako -- NINE Tokyo and Tangled Hair -- INTERPRETING TANGLED HAIR -- TEN The Variety of Tangled Hair -- ELEVEN The Shape of Tangled Hair -- TWELVE The Originality of Tangled Hair -- EPILOGUE: BIOGRAPHY AND THE POET'S BIRTH -- APPENDIX JAPANESE TEXTS OF CITED POEMS -- NOTES -- REFERENCES -- INDEX -- ABOUT THE AUTHOR