Yosano akiko biography sample
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Yosano Akiko
Japanese tanka poet
In this Japanese name, the surname is Yosano.
Yosano Akiko | |
|---|---|
| Born | Shō Hō (1878-12-07)7 December 1878 Sakai, Osaka, Japan |
| Died | 29 May 1942(1942-05-29) (aged 63) Tokyo, Japan |
| Occupation | Writer, educator |
| Genre | poetry, essays |
| Notable work | Kimi Shinitamou koto nakare |
| Spouse | Tekkan Yosano |
| Children | 13 |
Yosano Akiko (Shinjitai: 与謝野 晶子, seiji: 與謝野 晶子; 7 December 1878 – 29 May 1942) was the pen-name of a Japanese author, poet, pioneering feminist, pacifist, and social reformer, active in the late Meiji era as well as the Taishō and early Shōwa eras of Japan.[1] Her name at birth was Shō Hō (鳳 志やう, Hō Shō).[a][2] She is one of the most noted, and most controversial, post-classical female poets of Japan.[3]
Early life
[edit]Yosano was born into a prosperous merchant family in Sakai, near Osaka. From the age of 11, she was the family member most responsible fo
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Yosano Akiko was born in December 1878, into a merchant family in the city of Sakai, nära Osaka. Her childhood was a lonely one, tinged with fear of a cold, at times neurotic mother. She found bekvämlighet in the company of other women, encountering the Heian-era court lady and writer Murasaki Shikibu (c. 973 – c.1014) through her great novel The Tale of Genji. ‘Murasaki has been my teacher’, Akiko would later recall, ‘since I was nine or ten . . . I felt as though I heard this great female writer tell me The Tale of Genji with her own lips.’
Perhaps Akiko sensed in Murasaki a kindred spirit. Though she attained a high position at the Heian court (in modern-day Kyoto), Murasaki was self-educated. The closest she came to formal tuition was eavesdropping on the studies of her brother, who was destined for government office. Surprisingly little had changed nine hundred years later. Once her school days were over, Akiko was left at home while her two brothers went off to university, wom
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Yosano Akiko: River of Stars (Selected Poems), trans. Sam Hamill and Keiko Matsui Gibson, Shambhala, 1996.
For my last #JanuaryinJapan or Japanese Literature Challenge 15 contribution, I picked one of my favourite Japanese poets, who wrote both in freestyle ‘Western-type’ verse but also in the traditional Japanese tanka. The last time I wrote about a tanka poet was back in 2012, soon after starting this blog, and it remains one of the perennial favourites of my blog posts. It was about Tawara Machi, who exploded onto the literary scene in the 1980s and modernised the traditional tanka format. However, long before Tawara became the symbol of her generation of women, there was another woman writer who provoked scandal, ire, but also great admiration. That poet is Yosano Akiko and she is a true giant of Japanese literature, who deserves to be better known outside her own country.
She was also quite a contradictory person both in her personal life and in her writin