Five Tanka Poems

Yosano Akiko, who brushed the calligraphy on this elegantly decorated paper with a gold and silver gourd vine motif, is one of most highly esteemed female poets of the modern period, active until her death in 1942. The poetry sheet, perhaps part of a longer sheet, is delicately brushed with five of her own tanka (modern poems based on traditional 31-syllable waka), which recall classical poetic imagery while demonstrating how she developed her own distinctive style of calligraphy—at once elegant yet marked by sharp turns and an overall angular quality. Most striking is how she radically simplified kanji (Chinese ideographic characters) so that they are almost as light in visual weight as the kana (Japanese phonetic characters). Furthermore, the use of decorated paper with gold and silver underpainting brings to mind the aesthetic found in Tale of Genji painting and calligraphy albums of the Momoyama period.

Though calligraphers of the modern age trained, as calligraphers of the past had, by studying eminent historical models, it is always interesting to observe how styles and conventions of calligraphy could be marshaled to express a modern sensibility. Akiko, not only translated The Tale of Genji into modern Japanese, but also immersed herself in the recitation and copying of the earliest manuscript recensions of the narrative and achieved recognition as a skilled calligrapher in her own right.

Her poems are cherished for their relatable emotional explicitness, and sometimes even eroticism (during a time women were not supposed to express themselves freely in their literary writings). The publication of her first collection of poetry, Tangled Hair (Midaregami 1901), created a stir in Japanese literary circles for its frank depictions of female passion as well as sexual and spiritual love. At a moment when Japanese literature was opening to the influence of European Romanticism, Akiko’s poetry captured the new sense of expansiveness that marked the period’s revival of old forms of poetry and various experiments in new techniques. Along with publishing over twenty collections of poetry, and numerous tracts on social criticism (she was anti-nationalism and openly critical of government policies of foreign aggression in China and elsewhere).

What makes this calligraphic composition even more interesting is that a previous owner must have also been given the original preliminary drafts of the poems that Akiko used in creating this work, and it is interesting to see how she altered things when brushing the final draft. The final version of the first poem, the first two columns on the right, reads as follows:

かすかなる　風のおとにも　耳立てて　さびしき山のに　して

Kasuka naru / kaze no oto ni mo / mimi tatete / sabishiki yama no / mizuumi ni shite

Even though the sound
of the wind
soughs so softly,
still I feel so lonely
at this mountain lake.

In the preliminary version, Akiko had initially started to think about the loneliness of her “lodgings” (yado 宿) while on journey to an onsen in the mountains. But clearly she was not happy with the sound of that—and circled that character, as if to single it out for revision, and switched to the image of a “mountain lake.”