In reading commentaries on Japanese poetry, especially poetry in the traditional thirty-one syllable tanka form, I have always been struck by the use of the term joryu kajin (woman poet, or poet in the women's tradition). The commentators, for the most part male, appear to use the term as a simple signal of gender; a joryu kajin is a woman poet of any period, and any woman who writes (or who wrote) poetry is by virtue of those two facts a joryu kajin. The presence of the highly imagistic character ryu, while intriguing, seems almost a meaningless curiosity.

Almost meaningless, but not entirely so, for the historical persistence of the stream image in critical commentary and the lexical weight of the word in its meaning of school or tradition suggest that joryu means something more than simply "women." The term's subtle but compelling currents have swept women along for over a millennium, implying that they belong together, insinuating that, in the eyes of the dominant culture at least, one woman writes pretty much like another.

The locus classicus for this custodial use of ryu is Ki no Tsurayuki's early tenth century kana preface to the Kokinshu in which he places the nearly contemporary woman poet Ono no Komachi in the "stream" of the much earlier, quasi-legendary Princess Sotôri, a figure of the ancient chronicles. Introducing Komachi as one of the six saints of poetry (rokkasen), Ki no Tsurayuki declares, "Ono no Komachi is in the tradition of Princess Sotôri of old" (Ono no Komachi wa inishie no Sotôri Hime no ryû nart).

Of the two ancient chronicles, the Kojiki and the Nihongi (or Nihon shoki), it was the Nihongi that was circulated in Heian times, and it was certainly the discrete and patient Oto Hime (nicknamed Sotôri [or Sotôshi] no iratsume) of the Nihongi that Ki no Tsurayuki had in mind when he wrote this line, rather than the ill-fated and incestuous Sotôri iratsume of the Kojiki.

Perhaps of greatest consequence to Sotôri's reputation as an exceptional female figure is the Nihongi gloss of her nickname. (The characters used to write the name indicate a literal meaning of "pass through the clothes.") According to the Nihongi, the name derived from the fact that she was "beautiful of face" and her "charm" (or, erotically appealing good looks, uruwashiki iro) "shone through her clothes."

The Nihongi goes on to tell the story of the Emperor Ingyô's desire for the beautiful Sotôri and Sotôri's discrete handling of the situation made awkward by the fact that Ingyô's empress (Kogô) was none other than Sotôri's older sister. Hidden away in Fujiwara, sensitive to her sister's chagrin, Sotôri waited patiently for the Emperor's infrequent visits. One evening the Emperor approached her dwelling stealthily and spied on her. To his great joy (and Sotôri's good fortune) she was "all alone thinking lovingly of the Emperor." Unaware that he was observing her, she composed and recited the following poem.

Waga seko ga
kubeki yoi nari
sasagane no
kumo no okonai
koyoi shirushi mo

This evening my husband
will surely visit
for this evening the spider
at the base of the bamboo grass
is hard at work

When one takes into account the folk belief that the activity of the spider was an omen that an intimate friend would soon visit, Sotôri's poem becomes a prototypal expression of patient expectation.

In Heian times, when polygamy was widely practiced among the literate classes and, by all evidence, a large number of women were placed in a position of waiting for their men, poems of tedium and longing were standard fare. The five volumes of love poems in the Kokinshu contain many anonymous poems that share the patient and demure tone of Sotôri's spider poem and in that sense could be said to belong to her tradition. The anonymous poem number 730, for example, uses the similar motif of an omen as a sign of an impending visit.

Mezurashiki
hito o mimu to ya
shika mo senu
waga shita himo no
tokewataruramu

Does it mean that I will meet the one
who so seldom visits,
is that why my undersash
keeps loosening
although I do not loosen it?

Central to these poems of feminine patience is the verb matsu (to await). The habit of waiting itself can become the subject of a verse as it does in this anonymous love poem from the Kokinshû.

Ima wa koji to
omou mono kara
wasuretsutsu
mataruru koto no
mada mo yamanu ka

He will come no more
I know and yet
I keep forgetting
and even now seem unable to quit
this habit of waiting

In both Sotôri's poem and these from the Kokinshu, the poet's role is passive. While she is filled with longing for her lover, she takes no action that would bring relief beyond observing the world around her and the movement of her own thoughts.

The eighteen poems by Ono no Komachi included in the Kokinsha are markedly different in tone as well as in syntactic comnplexity from the poems of waiting cited above. The diction used to express her feelings is dramatic and intense: she does not simply yearn for her lover but is "hard pressed by longing" ito semete koishiki (Kokinshu 554); she does not surrender to a simple love but to a "boundless" one kagiri naki omoi (Kokinshu 657); even as she jests, her body and heart are burned by flames of passion hi ni kokoro yakeori; oki… mi o yaku (Kokinshu 1030, 1104). Unlike the poets of the quiet verses of waiting quoted above, Komachi shows us a personality inclined to take action, to move away from rather than toward a domestic center. One of her most well-known poems (Kokinshu 938), for example, has her saying "yes" (at least in verse) to what the headnote would indicate is little more than a casual invitation to go sightseeing in the provinces with a male acquaintance. Far from waiting around for an occasional snippet of her lover's attention, she cautions the overeager against beating a path to her door when there is "no chance to meet" mirume naki (Kokinshû 623).

Despite a poetic personality that was markedly different from Sotori's character type in the Nihongi, the association between physical beauty and women's poetry established by Ki no Tsurayuki's reference to Princess Sotôri in the preface to the Kokinshu became inextricably bound with Komachi's name. As legends about Komachi developed over time, filling a void left by the lack of any reliable historical reference to her person, it became commonplace to declare the talented Komachi a world-class beauty, the equal not only of the clothes-penetrating Sotôri but also of China's Yang Kuei-fei or Madam Li. She became the paradigm of the saishoku kenbi no onna, the talented woman of erotically appealing good looks.

Even while she remained unequivocally in Sotôri's "stream" of talent and good looks, however, Komachi in her legends acquired attributes and motifs that agreed with the persona established in her eighteen poems, but which cannot be found in the Nihongi's Sotôri. She developed, for example, a reputation for cruelty. She was said to have spurned her many devoted lovers and, as karmic retribution for her arrogant heartlessness, suffered an old age of hardship and neglect. As early as the eleventh century the stories had her dying by the wayside in the remote provinces, a plume of pampas grass growing through the eye socket of her weather-bleached skull.

Recently, Victoria Vernon and others have commented that the situation of belonging to a mainstream literary tradition founded largely by women is a distinct characteristic of twentieth century women writers in Japan, and they have noted how sharply this contrasts with the circumstances of pioneering modern women writers in the West. At the same time these scholars have pointed with chagrin to the post-Heian eclipse of women writers, an eclipse that persisted with painful tenacity up to the end of the nineteenth century.

While the presence of women writers in the bedrock of the literary canon has relieved modern women writers in Japan of the burden of having to prove within their culture the very fact that a woman can write, it has, at the same time, made them obligatory heirs to the rather vaguely defined but culturally unquestioned "women's tradition." During the long years of women's literary silence (and even, as we have seen, before its onset) the women's tradition fell within the power of influence of the dominant culture. Over the years, male scholars, poets, story-tellers, playwrights, essayists all had a hand in determining what it meant "to write like a woman." It now seems impossible to sort out which portions of the joryu tradition originate with women, refracting their experience in ways "hardly possible for a man to duplicate" [Patricia Meyers Spacks, The Female Imagination], and which are, in Gilbert and Gubar's terms, "male-engendered" [The Madwoman in the Attic].…

The tanka collection Midaregami was published in 1901 hen its author, Yosano Akiko, was not yet twenty-three. As Phyllis Larson notes, it was one of the first literary productions by women to be widely read after the "centuries of relative silence" ["Yosano Akiko and the Re-creation of the Female Self," Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese 25 (1991)].…

Critics have termed Midaregami "revolutionary" and on the basis of the Midaregami poems have credited Akiko with the establishment of a new style and the revitalization of the traditional tanka form.

Akiko herself, however, within the female personae of the Midaregami poems, seems disinclined to claim any title as innovator and instead goes to some length to acknowledge her literary debt within a specifically feminine tradition of poetry. An effort to forge a link with an individual woman poet of the past is apparent in poem 245 of the collection.

Uta ni nete
yobe Kaji no ha no
sakusha minu
utsukushikariki
kurogami no iro

Falling asleep on poetry
last evening I dreamed of the author of
Kaji no ha—
How beautiful it was,
the luster of black hair

The author of Kaji no ha (Mulberry Leaves) was an early eighteenth century woman poet. She ran a well-known tea shop near the Gion district in Kyoto. Her personal poetry collection, Kaji no ha, was published in 1706. The haikai poets Takarai Kikaku (1661-1707) and Yosa Buson (1716-1783) both commemorated "Kaji" (the name by which she was known) in their verse. It is interesting to note that Kaji's daughter Yuri was also a poet, and that her granddaughter was the wife of the famous painter Ike no Taiga. The three together were known as the three talented women of Gion.

In poem 245,… Akiko expresses her longing (akogare) for the talented woman poet of the past through the image of beautiful black hair. Black hair itself is a central metaphor for female power (both erotic and expressive) within the Midaregami collection. Again and again Akiko as the female poetic voice claims the almost magical potency of black hair as her own. She is "made with long black hair" and commanded by means of it to "break sinful men" poem 362). Her thoughts run wild like her "thousand strands of black hair, tangled hair" (poem 260).

In using black hair in this erotically charged way, most especially in her use of tangled hair as a metaphor for the confusion and turmoil of feminine erotic emotion, Akiko is mining ancient feminine ore. Japan's oldest poetry collection, the Man 'yôshu (compiled in the eighth century), includes many poems in which women's long black hair is the central image. Spread alongside the woman in sleep, its very length is frequently used to signify the long nights she must spend alone waiting for her wayfaring husband. In the early Heian, the highly graphic image of black hair, either flowing or tangled, is missing from the early imperial anthologies, but the image was taken up with verve by the spirited mid-Heian woman poet Izumi Shikibu. In what Edwin Cranston has termed "probably the most famous of all tangled-hair poems" ["The Dark Path: Images of Longing in Japanese Love Poetry, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 35, 1975] Izumi Shikibu forged an enduring link between the inner tangle of women's emotions and the outward tangle of her black hair.

Kuro kami no
midare mo shirazu
uchifuseba
mazu kakiyarishi
hito zo koishiki

When I throw myself down
my black hair
hopelessly tangled
I yearn for the one
who first brushed it back so lovingly

Izumi Shikibu's tangled hair poem was followed by another almost equally famous one by Taikenmon-in Horikawa, a late Heian poet who served as lady in waiting to the Empress Taikenmon-in. The fact that this poem was included in the Ogura hyakunin isshu guaranteed its absorption into the cultural mainstream.

Nagakaramu
kokoro mo shirazu
kuro kami no
midarete kesa wa
mono o koso omoe

Not knowing if
you have a mind to love me long
this morning my thoughts are
in a tangle,
a confusion of black hair

Tangled or smooth, the image of long black hair is immediately recognizable within the joryu tradition as expressive of both feminine beauty and emotion. The reader of Midaregami can only surmise that Akiko and the author of Kaji no ha possess this beauty and expressive potency of black hair in common.

On a much less emotional note, Akiko registers the pleasure of contact with a woman poet of the past in poem 131 f the collection.

Michi tama tama
Rengetsu ga an no
ato ni idenu
ume ni aiyuku
nishi no kyô no yama

Just by chance
we came upon the remains
of Rengetsu's hut
going together in search of plum blossoms
in the hills of the western capital

Rengetsu was a Buddhist nun, tanka poet and literary friend of Akiko's father-in-law. While the language of the poem is restrained, the poet's joy at her chance encounter with a representative of the feminine tradition is evident; contact with a sister in the art becomes a more than adequate surrogate for the sought-for blossoms.

In her enthusiasm for contact with women poets of the not so distant past, Akiko seems to display some of the hunger and hope of Western women writers and critics who must reassess the canon, and dig to uncover the "buried roots" of their feminine heritage. The author of Kaji no ha and the nun Rengetsu are little-known writers belonging to Japan's long period of feminine literary eclipse. In terms of the recent literary past, Midaregami reveals a much stronger stylistic debt to male writers than to female ones, yet this relationship with male writers does not become the actual subject of the poems.

As she developed her romantically colored, dramatic Midaregami style, Akiko moved away from an earlier interest in the classic joryu kajin style. Such soft and time honored phrases as "dream on a night of spring" haru no yo no yume favored by women poets of the Shinkokinshu were abandoned in favor of fresher, bolder coinages: "deep purple rainbows" murasaki no / koi niji (poem 10) and "spring rain dripping from the wings of swallows" tsubakura no / hane ni shitataru / harusame (poem 168).

Even while she slipped away from a direct involvement in the style of the earlier women poets, however, Akiko could not escape association with their powerful and enduring legendary weight. Of the two types of saishoku kenbi no onna captured by Ki no Tsurayuki's stream in the KokinshO preface, it was not the demure Princess Sotôri but the spirited and passionate Komachi who provided a subtext for Akiko's early life and work.

Well over a year before Midaregami was published, when she was still at the very beginning of her literary career, Akiko referred to Komachi's bitter fate in a letter she wrote to Kono Tetsunan.

In the end, will I not mutter, "When the autumn wind blows, ah my eye, the pain" (aki kazefukeba aname aname)? I find the thought amusing.

Akiko is referring here to Komachi's ultimate fate as an exposed skull with a plume of pampas grass growing through the eye socket. According to one version of the many legends about the skull, it was the famous poet Narihira who, traveling in the provinces, happened to hear the skull moaning because of the pain in its eye. In the magical world of the legend the moan was metrically correct as the initial three lines of a poem.

Aki kaze no
fuku ni tsukete mo
aname aname

With each gust
of autumn wind
ah, my eye, the pain!

Learning from the local inhabitants that the skull belonged to Komachi, Narihira capped the verse and removed the pampas grass.

Akiko's remark that she finds the thought that she might encounter such a fate herself amusing (okashi) is evidence, perhaps, of her youth and inexperience (she was twenty-one at the time). It was probably about a year later, when she was in more unsettled circumstances, having moved from her native home in Sakai to live with her editor and future husband, Yosano Hiroshi, that she wrote the following poem ( Midaregami 282). Her tone here is considerably less carefree.

Kyô no mi ni
ware o sasoishi
naka no ane
Komachi no hate o
inore to ininu

My older sister,
the one who enticed me
to my present state,
departed saying, "Pray
you do not end up like Komachi"

The admonishing sister in the poem is almost certainly the poet's own creation. The use of the phrase "end up like Komachi" in the second half of the poem leaves us to assume that the "present state" into which the admonishing sister had led Akiko has something to do with Komachi's beginning, with her life of love and poetry. If that is the case, then we might see in the figure of the older sister a suggestion of a female mentor with something of the aura of the beautiful black-haired author of the Kaji no ha about her. But in this particular verse the senior woman's role as a mentor has a darker side; she did not guide Akiko but rather enticed her (sasoishi) to her present state, and, having done so, she departs warning her younger sister of the ultimate fate which society feels the self-fulfilled saishoku kenbi no onna must suffer.

Akiko's tone in this poem is defiant rather than defeated. She is not frightened off by warnings of Komachi's ultimately unhappy fate. Elsewhere in poem after poem of Midaregami she makes it clear that, like the legendary Komachi, she is intent on living her youth to the full, wholeheartedly dedicated to art and to love. She will "pick the evening violets" rather than enter the "green shrine of learning" (poem 275). Undeterred by society's warnings she declares her "blood too young" for her "to burn the poems of spring" (poem 295).

Like any good writer, Akiko took from her tradition what served her purposes, transforming it into her own while she discarded the rest. She accepted with joy the strong elements of the saishoku kenbi stereotype, contemptuously tossing aside the cautionary label that came with the package. Colored by the heady romanticism popular in Akiko's day, the portrait of womankind that emerges from the pages of Midaregami is bold and powerful.

Her female personae are above all temptresses with handsome young priests their favorite prey (poems 42, 103, 229). They are confident in the ability of their "burning lips" (poem 219), their "pure skin" (poem 362) and of course their long black hair to entice the most scholarly, the most devout of men (poem 259). While they are conscious that others might label them sinful, they have no regrets over their so-called misdeeds (poem 218). They believe above all in the supremacy of love (poems 321, 352, 356) and their privileges as original hoshi no ko (children of the stars) (poems 1, 190, 384), a rank that places them above the terms and rules of mundane society. On these grounds they urge their less liberated poetic sisters to do battle with the devil (poem 190), a devil synonymous with the stifling social mores that threaten personal freedom poems 190, 208, 209, 353).

While she enjoys exploring the symbols of western religion—forlorn lost sheep and hotly clasped bibles—Akiko's ultimate faith as expressed in Midaregami is in the power of love and youth. It is a confidence in their own erotic appeal and sensibilities that empowers the brave female personae of the Midaregami poems. Akiko as poet urges both herself and other women to achieve liberation by recognizing this source of strength within themselves.

Katachi no ko
haru no ko chi no ko
honoo no ko
ima o jizai no
hane nakarazu ya

Maiden with good looks
maiden of love, maiden of blood
maiden of flame
look, even now you have
the wings of freedom

Even as the national appetite for romanticist poetry faded in the first decade of the twentieth century, Midaregami's powerful reputation endured. Sensitive to women's past, Akiko had herself become a paradigm of the passionate and spirited saishoku kenbi poet. With verve and energy she had won for herself a central position in Ki no Tsurayuki's broad stream.