Tangled Kami: Yosano Akiko’s Supernatural Symbolism

Abstract

Yosano Akiko (born Hō Shō, 1878-1942) became a literary sensation in 1901 when she defied conventions of poetic style and morals to glorify a young woman's passionate love in the 399 tanka of Midaregami (Tangled hair). Her transformation into a goddess of poetry—and the key to understanding so many of her perplexing poems—was incubated by her rivalry with the poet Yamakawa Tomiko (1879-1909) for the love of Yosano Tekkan (1873-1935), founder of the Tokyo Shinshisha (New Poetry Society). 1 Akiko married Tekkan shortly after Midaregami was published, and she soon outshone her husband as a poet. In her distinguished and productive career, she also made major contributions as a feminist social critic and as a scholar of classical literature—all while raising eleven children. Those are the familiar contours of a story that is repeated in many biographical studies, annotated anthologies of poetry, and histories of modern Japanese literature. Yet Midaregami, arguably the single most celebrated poetry collection since the Meiji Restoration (1868), is still undervalued and misunderstood. 2 Critics characteristically extol the putative immediacy and unrestrained passion of Akiko's poems. But it is not their passion alone that causes the spark to ignite in the reception of these poems, although they are certainly more explicit and suggestive than their precursors: it is their particular investment of supernatural, religious, and moral meanings in matters of passion. Akiko expands the scope of what her tanka can do by creating friction between her religious metaphors and her sensuous descriptions. The poems stand both sexual and religious mores on their heads. Carnal desire is more than just physical; it is spiritual, and it is augmented by the multiple, tangled metaphysical associations to which the individual tanka of Midaregami commit to different degrees.