[A Japanese-born critic and translator, Ueda is the author of several volumes of criticism on Japanese literature. In the following excerpt, Ueda discusses Akiko's concept of poetry and her use of the tanka verse form.]

At no time during her long literary career did Yosano Akiko seek to reform poetry, as did Shiki and several other contemporary poets. "Unlike those gentlemen," she once explained, "I have never entertained a self-flattering, immodest ambition like starting a poetic reform." Nevertheless, she became one of the most influential tanka poets in modern Japan, with a reputation that matched Shiki's. She attained her fame and leadership almost solely by virtue of the poems she wrote. When her first book of tanka, Tangled Hair, was published in 1901, it shook the contemporary poetic scene because of its bold affirmation of sensual passion. Despite some older critics' detractions, it proved to have an irresistible appeal for the younger generation. As time gradually eroded the remnants of feudalism in Japanese society, Akiko's tanka and free verse came to seem prophetic of a bright new era soon to come, and before long she was a "queen" reigning over a countless number of young poets. Spurred on by their expectations, she continued to write innovative verse. In all, she produced 23 volumes of tanka and one volume of shi, and both in quality and in quantity her poetry represents one of the highest literary achievements of her generation.

As a poet, Akiko was far more interested in self-expression than in "sketches from nature." She prized human passions and wanted to express them freely, unrestricted by the decorum of contemporary society. The dominant theme of her poetry was romantic love, among the strongest of emotions. Unlike Shiki's oeuvre, which includes few love poems, her books of poetry are filled with pieces expressing her feelings toward her beloved. Her celebrated love affair with Yosano Hiroshi (1873–1935), initially her tanka teacher and later her husband, supplied her with a rich source of inspiration for verse writing early in her career. After she married him, her struggles as a housewife and mother (she raised eleven children) stimulated, rather than stifled, her creative urge. They also led her to write a considerable number of essays calling for the improvement of women's status in society; some of her arguments anticipated the women's rights movements of the 1970's. Her social criticism, contained in both poetry and prose, was consistently humanistic. Whereas Shiki worried about the future of Japan as a modern state and tacitly supported her imperialistic policies, Akiko, seldom blinded by the fervent patriotism of her fellow countrymen, was far more concerned with the individual man and his welfare. One who reads the collected works of both Shiki and Akiko is astonished to discover how modern the latter was in her thought and sensibility, even though in age the two poets were only eleven years apart. Japanese poetry made a significant leap forward with the work of this remarkable poetess.

Akiko published many essays on the art of poetry, mainly with the aim of giving guidance to young women who wanted to write tanka. Her two principal works in this area are How to Compose Tanka and its sequel, Talks on Tanka. In the former, under the heading "There Is No Such Thing as Shasei or Description of Nature in Tanka," she set forth her idea of the relationship between poetry and external reality:

Some poets seem to think there is a specific type of tanka to be categorized under "shasei" or "description of nature" as distinct from "expression of feelings." I do not agree. In my opinion, all tanka are lyrics expressing feelings. Some may refer to fruits or flowers or may sing of mountains or forests, but that does not necessarily make them sketches of natural objects or landscapes. Like love poems, they too express the poet's jikkan ["actual feelings"]. Jikkan are made to emerge by various stimuli, such as an event in life or the sight of natural objects or a landscape, yet in all cases they form the core of the subject matter to be treated in the poem. Hence every tanka ends up becoming a lyric.

To Shiki's selective realism, which advocated discovering one's true feelings through dispassionate observation of one's surroundings (the cycle from copying nature objectively through copying humanity objectively), Akiko opposed a stimulus-response theory of poetry. For her, the poem is the record of an emotional response—an acting out of individual impulses. As such, its course is powered by the inner drive of feeling and governed by the unique nature of each person's emotional life; its imagery need not directly reflect the exact scene or situation that serves as its immediate occasion. Thus Akiko's theory moves away from naturalistic depiction toward fantasy and vision, and away from concern with the objective stimulus that provokes creative endeavor to an emphasis on the outpouring of personal feeling, whether or not aroused by an external event.

Such an expressive theory of poetry was not new; it had been shared, with various modifications, by famous tanka poets from ancient times. Akiko reasserted it because she felt many contemporary tanka poets had swerved from that tradition. But she did not stop there: she went on to apply the same expressive view to all other verse forms, including haiku. Unlike tanka poets, writers of haiku had tended to sublimate emotions instead of expressing them outright…. In sharp contrast, Akiko took a firm stand against shasei, even in haiku. "Needless to say," she wrote, "haiku is a form of poetry. All poetry is emotional expression: its aim does not lie in narration, discussion, reportage, or communication…. All poems express poetic feelings and should therefore be termed lyrics." She was, of course, aware of the distinction between tanka and haiku in terms of expressive capacity. In order to make that distinction, she classified lyrics into two general categories, "active" and "passive." In her view, tanka are "active lyrics," which emerge when the poet vents emotion too powerful to contain. Many haiku, on the other hand, are "passive lyrics," which articulate the poet's response to the sight of a man, an animal, the moon, or a plant. In Akiko's opinion, some contemporary critics wrongly substituted the word "objective" for "passive" in this context, thereby misleading amateur poets into thinking that a haiku should objectively sketch something that lay outside of the poet. "The term 'shasei' has been used among haiku poets for many years," she continued. "But they are totally mistaken." This was a bold statement for Akiko, who was never known as a haiku poet, and it indicates how firmly she believed in the importance of emotional expression in all poetry.

As three of her aphorisms indicate, Akiko's expressive theory included all the arts:

Art lies deep in the painter's soul. It does not lie in the subject to be painted.

The artist does not live in nature. Rather, nature lives in the artist.

A work of art is an image of the self. It needs: first, the self; second, the self; third, the self; … absolutely, the self.

On another occasion her comment was more explanatory. "I do not like to see such terms as 'shasei' or 'description of nature' used in art," she wrote. "These words mislead the reader into thinking that the artist is subordinate to the subject matter. The artist is the principal in all cases. A work of art emerges only when the feelings in the artist's heart, stimulated by things in nature, focus in an image." Her vehement insistence is directed against a prevailing condemnation of individualism, and reflects her awareness of a strong trend toward realism in contemporary literature, a movement advocated by Shiki and his followers in traditional forms of verse.

Akiko's adamant opposition to shasei seems to have been connected with her desire to reach for a truth that lay beyond fact. She distinguished between the truth of art and that of science, identifying the latter as factual truth lying in external reality, the former as subjective truth hidden in the individual human heart. To her way of thinking, a poem that sketches nature merely copies fact, not truth. For example, she criticized these two tanka for being mere snapshots, reproductions of ordinary scenes as anyone could have perceived them:

After rainfall
sparkling rays of sunlight
creep down along the trees,
brightening a small garden
where sweet oleanders bloom.

Dusk has begun
to settle on the highway
buried in snow.
The sunlight, gone from some hills,
still lingers on others.

Akiko charged that these poems were boring because they differ in no way from unpolished prose passages recording scenes of nature. Their authors did not seem to understand the distinction between inner and outer truth. Like them, too many contemporary Japanese, she thought, took a wrong attitude when they read a poem or looked at a painting, even though they readily corrected that attitude when they went to see a no or a kabuki play.

Thus the core of Akiko's poetic was jikkan, the feelings that a poet actually experiences at a given moment. As we have seen, she used the term to define the relationship between a tanka poet and external reality; it appears again and again in her discussions of poetry. The very first heading in How to Compose Tanka reads "It Is Jikkan That Becomes Tanka," and the book opens with the declaration, "My tanka are, almost exclusively, expressions of my jikkan." Talks on Tanka recapitulates the idea, asserting that her effort to articulate jikkan had remained unchanged from her younger days. Indeed, these two books on the art of composition can be read as explanations of what jikkan are and how they can be expressed in poetry. Akiko's third book of poetic criticism, Lectures on Three Hundred Tanka, does the same, using as specific examples 300 tanka of her own. "I took up my pen," she said in the preface, "mainly because I wanted to tell the reader what kind of jikkan it was that gave birth to each poem."

The word "jikkan" is written with two characters, one meaning "actual" and the other meaning "feeling(s)." In Akiko's view, poetry articulates not just feelings but actual feelings. She pointed out that the antonym of jikkan is kyogi, "falsehood." "By the word 'kyogi,'" she said, "I mean deliberately fabricating feelings that one does not actually possess." She felt that too many poets of her time fabricated poems because they wished to follow the example of famous masters or to join in fashionable literary movements. She repeatedly warned that jikkan exclude "arty" emotions already celebrated by many poets in the past; they are fresh feelings discovered by individuals for themselves. "The material for poetry," she said, "is feelings that have newness in them, feelings that have been discovered by each poet on a specific occasion."

From the denotation of "jikkan" Akiko excluded another type of feelings: ordinary, everyday ones. "What I mean by jikkan," she explained, "are a special type of excited feelings that belong to the realm of poetic emotion. These must enable the poet to transcend common sense, to experience an entirely new joy, sorrow, or other emotion, and to feel the soul stirred with extraordinary excitement." In her view, therefore, jikkan are more elevated, more intense, more excited feelings than those people routinely experience in their everyday lives. Ordinary feelings can be expressed in conversation, in letters, and in other forms of prose, but jikkan cannot be voiced in prose because they are too intense.

To show the kind of poem that embodied ordinary feelings rather than jikkan, Akiko once cited two tanka from the works of Kagawa Kageki (1768–1843), one of the most respected tanka poets of the nineteenth century:

There have been days
when warblers failed to come
and sing in our garden,
yet no day has passed
when I did not hear their song.
It snows, darkening
the vast expanse of sky …
the mountains,
so much closer to the sky,
are first to whiten.

It is ironic that Kageki's poems are singled out for this dubious honor, because in his day he was known as an advocate of poetry that expressed truthful feelings. Indeed, these two tanka do vent the poet's feelings: the first sings of his joy at being in the country and hearing warblers every day; the second, of his wonderment at the workings of nature, which metamorphose earth and sky. But, to Akiko's taste, these emotions are insufficiently individualized to make good poetry. Since they are little different from what anyone would feel out in the countryside on a balmy day in spring or a snowy day in winter, Akiko considered them "commonplace feelings," unworthy of a poet's attention. She said she was tempted to ask Kageki why he had uttered such useless words. "Perhaps," she complained, "this poet thought that any commonplace emotion could be made into a tanka if he could verbalize it in the 5–7–5–7–7 pattern."

Akiko offered plenty of examples of what a poem of jikkan is like. In How to Compose Tanka, for instance, is a section entitled "Jikkan as It Is Manifest in My Tanka," in which she quoted 50 of her own poems. The first was:

On spring's white fabric
spread between heaven and earth
there falls, like gold dust,
the sound of young maidens
hitting a shuttlecock.

Akiko explained, "Here is the jikkan I had while listening to the sound of battledore and shuttlecock being played by young girls one day in the New Year's season. Because it was the New Year, I had the illusion that the universe was a pure, white silk fabric, and when I heard young girls happily playing the seasonal game I felt as though the sound of the shuttlecock were falling like gold dust on the fabric. It sounded pure, graceful, and beautiful."

Another tanka Akiko quoted as embodying jikkan is about her happy married life:

In a tower
beautifully painted in gold
I have been asleep
for a whole decade,
this woman of dreams.

Akiko commented, "I am a person peacefully asleep in a tower of beautiful gold, transcending for years the world's good and evil. This is another poem of fantasy, not of fact. But the fantasy accurately represents the mental state I am in when I let myself indulge in the ecstasy of love. It is the jikkan I have as I live a life of love."

The third example is a free-verse poem entitled "One Day":

In the sunlight of a day in March,
the wisteria's purple creeping into my study,
the white of Hikaru's face,
the red of Nanase's sash,
the amber of a tablecloth,
all are full of life and warmth …
Only a branch of higan cherry in a vase
and myself are pale and cold.
Like a still life I live, because
you have been gone for so long.

[In a footnote Ueda explains: "Hikaru and Nanase are the names of Akiko's children. A higan cherry (Prunus miquieliana, or equinoctial cherry) blooms around the time of the vernal equinox."]

Akiko had a lengthy comment on this poem, beginning with the explanation "I jotted down this poem out of my jikkan one day when my husband was traveling in Europe." She continued to say that her jikkan spontaneously flowed out in words at the time, and all she did was put it down in the order it came out. She never changed the wording later, fearing that her attempt to polish might impair the freshness of the jikkan.

These three examples from Akiko's own poetry reveal in specific terms what she meant by jikkan. The emotions appear ordinary if they are described using abstract terms such as "love," "loneliness," or "appreciation of beauty." But they have been individualized; none merely embodies a universal pattern of feeling. Not all people who are in love feel that they are sleeping in a tower beautifully painted in gold; no one else has felt that spring is a huge piece of white silk fabric extending into an infinite distance, and that a shuttlecock sounds like tiny particles of gold falling onto that fabric. It is not merely that similes and metaphors are individualized. Because jikkan are individualized feelings, they automatically take on individualized forms; feeling and expression are one.

In Akiko's view, then, a poet must be a strong individual, who will not fall into stereotyped thoughts or feelings; a poet who lacks a strongly personal sensibility has less capacity for jikkan. Indeed, Akiko asserted that only those who recognize the importance of individuality can succeed in grasping the ultimate truth for which every poet must strive. She wrote:

In actual human life each individual forms a new class all his or her own, like a new plant that has emerged through mutation. Among individuals there are a great many differences, since all lead their lives with different aims and in different styles. The human psyche differs from one person to another, just as fingerprints do. Different persons use the same word "love," but each person's love differs in density, intensity, and color, far more so than plumes of wisteria differ in length. That is the "truth" in human life.

Akiko here seems to imply that this subjective "truth" lies in a direct experience of individual being, unmediated by intellectual stances or predetermined moral, aesthetic, or perceptual categories. All those intervening forms are based on groupings that deny the fundamental fact that, finally, no two things are exactly the same. She valued jikkan as a means of access to the inner truth, this pure experience of being; they provided the only way to reach the most basic fact of one's existence.

Akiko, of course, believed in an objective, generalized truth as well. To her, however, that type of truth is the proper object of study for scholars and scientists. It is grasped through the intellect, in operations that ignore differences among individual beings. Scholars and scientists address collective man, not individual men. For an individual, therefore, their studies have only a secondary importance. "The raison d'être of a scholar's theory," Akiko observed, "lies merely in that it can provide reference material for a person on a specific occasion." Science shows in universal terms how man normally conducts himself; poetry reveals how particular people behave on specific occasions.

Another reason Akiko thought less highly of objective, abstract truth was that the intellect, in its process of abstraction, destroys the immediacy of experience. She explained:

A person who resorts to the intellect may attain a measure of success in systematizing various experiences of love and in making them into a philosophy of love, a history of love, a critique of love, an ethics of love, and so forth. A product thus made may partly touch on the truth about love, but largely it will be removed from the initial experience and will no longer be empirical love…. Intellect may enable us to un derstand love, but in no way can it make us feel or experience love in its immediacy. For this reason, since ancient times no one has tried to learn about the definition of love or the morality of love before he goes out to experience love.

Since poetry depends on the abstracting power of intellect less than do philosophy, history, and ethics, it can present more directly the vitality of experience.

As the two passages cited above suggest, although in principle Akiko maintained that all jikkan can be made into poems, in practice she seems to have been partial to romantic love as material for poetry. This tendency may have been encouraged by biographical factors, for just a few months after she started writing tanka as a young girl, she fell in love with a man—Yosano Hiroshi—for the first time in her life. The feeling of love dominated her daily existence, and as she recalled in Talks on Tanka, "Tanka served as the best expression of my love. It became an inseparable part of my life…. I can honestly say that my love gained its fullest expression by means of tanka, and that my tanka suddenly made progress by means of love."

Many of her finest poems concern romantic love. Here are three examples from Tangled Hair:

Pressing my breasts
with both hands, I gently kick

the door to mystery …
A flower opens there, how
brightly crimson it is!

My small young fingers
dissolving white color
hesitate a moment:
cold in the evening twilight,
a magnolia blossom.

The clear spring
inside me spurted, overflowed
and became muddy.
You are a child of sin
and so am I.

With colorful and sensual images the first tanka boldly expresses the joy of first love as experienced by a young woman. The second poem is more subdued: it portrays a maiden preparing to sketch a white magnolia. Her hand dissolving the paint pauses a moment; because her heart harbors burning—and probably sinful—love, the white of the magnolia looks too pure for her. The third tanka more directly depicts the poet's feelings of guilt: her maiden love, initially as pure as clear water, has gained in sensuality as it intensified. Her guilty feeling increases when she considers the fact that her lover is a married man.

The cover design of the first edition of Tangled Hair suggested Akiko's idea of poetry. It showed a young woman's face with abundant black hair hanging in tangles alongside. The design itself was shaped like a heart, pierced by an arrow; in the wound several flowers were blooming. Poems are flowers of the heart, which bloom when it is pierced by the poignant emotion of love.

Akiko repeatedly stressed the importance of one other aspect of jikkan in poetic composition: she insisted that when she talked of "actual feelings" she included fantasy or, to borrow her favorite word, "vision." Indeed, Akiko's assertion that the jikkan at the core of good poems are not the stereotyped feelings of everyday life might be extended to argue that the farther a feeling is removed from routine reality the more personal—and hence poetic—it becomes. In How to Compose Tanka, Akiko explained the matter more moderately, saying that jikkan include memories of the past, experiences in the present, and hopes for the future, as well as fantasies and visions that are not likely to be realized. Although some people might consider the last only futile imaginings, Akiko thought fantasies part of "actual feelings" as long as they honestly represent inner wishes. Her predilection for fantasy is even more pronounced in Talks on Tanka. In a section entitled "I Consider Visionary Jikkan the Glory of Life," she attacked contemporary realists, calling them "pseudo-jikkanist poets" who did not understand the true value of vision. Indeed, she made vision the raison d'être of all the arts. "Art can claim its usefulness for both society and the individual," she wrote, "because it can symbolically present a vision hitherto unknown to men, thereby suggesting a spirit or mode by which they can enter on a new life." Visionary jikkan belong to one of the highest types of emotion because of their prophetic function.

It was in this sense that Akiko wanted to call herself an "idealist" and a "romantic." By those terms she meant that she was bent on pursuing visionary jikkan, which would enable her to dream of another reality. Some of her most appealing poems show a measure of success in that attempt, for example:

A peony in my hair
is set afire, the ocean
burns in flames—
the dream of a woman, her thoughts
hopelessly entangled.

This evening's rowboat
carrying a monk I love
took longer to return.
Which lotus flowers, the red
or the white, attracted him more?

Many curse poems
I have scribbled and thrown away—
picking up one of
those manuscripts, I trap
a black butterfly.

The first tanka is admittedly a dream, the vision of a woman in distress whose passion would inflame the whole ocean. The second poem presents a visionary love affair, presumably between a woman and a young Buddhist monk. The monk has gone on an excursion through a lotus pond (a Buddhist symbol of the world), and the woman, left behind, wonders whether the red lotus (sensual love) or the white one (religion) so attracted his heart that it delayed the return of his boat. In the third tanka, the poet imagines catching a symbolic black butterfly with a scrap of paper. Frustrated for some reason (in discussing the poem, Akiko mentioned the gloomy atmosphere of her parents' home and the conservative norms of society in her younger days), she thinks that she has finally pinned down the cause by repeatedly venting her emotion in poems, even though they may be imperfect from an artistic point of view. In all three cases the poet's jikkan are expressed in the form of a fantasy—a flaming sea, a lotus pond, and a black butterfly. The tanka about a golden tower quoted earlier falls into the same category, and similar examples abound in Akiko's books of poetry. The Falling Star's Path, in particular, has many such poems, including 54 tanka in which the poet visualizes herself in the world of The Tale of Genji.

To summarize, Akiko's view of the relationship between art and external reality was characterized by a strong assertion of the artist's expressive capacity. She looked down upon shasei because she thought it assigned a passive role to the artist. For her, a work of art should above all be an expression of powerful emotion, an embodiment of jikkan, and in her poetic every poem worthy of the name is a lyric that sings out what lies in the poet's heart. Of all the jikkan that can provide material for poetry, Akiko seemed most to value romantic love and what she called "vision," dreams or fantasies that present an altered reality, one that can embody the heart's inmost urges. Her own poetry excelled in expressing these two emotions.

…. .

"With one arm missing," Akiko once wrote, "the Venus de Milo is a complete statue, a great statue." The aphorism was meant to indicate the insignificance of artistic form in comparison with what the form embodies. In Akiko's poetic, form is subordinate to jikkan. It is not imposed on jikkan; the jikkan spontaneously flows out in a certain form, like gushing water that in time becomes a pond or a mountain stream. It is the force and beauty of the water that matter most, not the shape it happens to take.

Under the rubric of poetry, Akiko included more forms than contemporary scholars would normally have allowed. Categorizing Japanese poetry, she once mentioned nine forms: the "long poem," tanka, sedōka, the "half poem," renga, haiku, the "new-style poem," the prose poem, and the popular song. Sedōka and the half poem had seldom been considered independent or viable verse forms, and the new-style poem and the prose poem were still in their infancy at the time. Her inclusion of popular songs, too, is unusual.

Akiko herself, however, was primarily a tanka poet. She wrote an immense number of tanka in her lifetime: it is estimated that she produced as many as fifty thousand. She did write shi, and some very good ones too, but her output in that form totals fewer than seven hundred poems. As for haiku, she once said that she often experienced sentiments that could only find outlet in the 17-syllable form; but there is no evidence that she seriously tried to write haiku, nor is there evidence that she attempted to explore any of the other six verse forms on her list. There seem to be at least four reasons why Akiko, although she held such a permissive view on verse forms, concentrated so heavily on tanka in actual practice.

The first and most straightforward explanation given by Akiko is that the 31-syllable form is profoundly rooted in traditional Japanese culture, of which she was a part. "The rhythm based on the 5–7 pattern," she said, "has been vibrating in the pulse and breath of the Japanese people for several thousand years. It has been the rhythm of our lives since the time of our ancestors. Accordingly, we get used to it and learn to like it in no time. And when our jikkan reach the stage of combustion, they come leaping out in phrases that inherently contain the tanka rhythm." In other words, Akiko thought that the mind of a Japanese, especially one educated in the traditional mode, was culturally oriented in such a way that powerful emotions would naturally burst out in the tanka form. In Akiko's own case, at least, her excited emotion flowed out in phrases of thirty-odd syllables as smoothly as "yarn loosened from a spool." The fixed-verse form was no restriction, and to her, both haiku and tanka seemed like free verse because they spontaneously expressed the poet's emotion. Akiko's explanation is valid for her own specific case, since as an avid reader, she had from childhood been steeped in classical Japanese literature, in which the dominant mode of poetic expression was tanka. Although attracted to the freedom and individualism offered by Western society, she was deeply Japanese in her literary orientation.

Second, Akiko seems to have been especially partial to tanka because it is a predetermined verse form. On one occasion she compared a fixed verse form to a tensely drawn string that gives forth a sound when touched by the wind. Just as the wind would pass silently by if no string were hung in the air, so an excited emotion would wordlessly subside if there were no 5–7–5–7–7 pattern waiting to receive it. On another occasion she compared the form to a box that traps smoke. Because she had this box in her heart, she was able to scoop up her emotion and present it to herself and to the reader; otherwise the emotion would fade away like smoke disappearing into the sky. The tanka form, in other words, provided her with a ready-made tool with which to arrest her emotions, and since childhood she had used the tool so often that it had become part of her.

Third, Akiko's predilection for the tanka form may be related to her emphasis on jikkan. In her view, the kind of jikkan that becomes material for poetry has to be powerful, and no powerful feeling lasts for long.

Since my songs are short
people think I left out words.
There was nothing to omit in my songs—
what more can I add now?
My heart is not a fish endowed with gills:
it sings out everything in one breath.

In this poem, entitled "My Songs," Akiko compares a poet's heart impregnated with jikkan to a swimmer submerged in water. As the swimmer dives into the water, so the poet sinks into the inner world of the heart for a few moments of intense emotion and, coming up, lets out the experience in a single breath. The swimmer's period of submersion in water is physiologically limited, and so is the poet's period of submersion in the heart. Therefore, for beginners Akiko advocated short free verse, meaning poems of five to ten lines. She warned that in order to write a long poem one must have an appropriately fertile jikkan, which was hard to come by. For Akiko, tanka was like a five-line free-verse poem: it was a form through which she could sing out everything in a single breath.

Finally, Akiko's liking for the tanka form and its brevity of expression seems grounded in a fascination with process. The passage that shows this best appears in one of her miscellaneous notes:

All processes fascinate me. I am especially attracted to a process that is so complex as to look chaotic at a glance. A conclusion or ending usually emerges according to one's expectations, seldom making one's heart leap, and moral stories, which consist merely of conclusions, do not appeal to young people for that reason. The longest process of all is human life. How foolish it is to attempt to put a conclusion to a process that continues endlessly! For this reason, I like the writings of all skeptics. The art best suited to my nature is one that displays a random fragment ripped out of the process that is called human life.

Akiko did not specify what that art was, but presumably she meant 31-syllable poetry. Tanka is a partial or inconclusive art in that its brevity makes it impossible to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. It is a poem with a middle only; its beginning lies in the poet's actual experience, and its end, if any, has to be sought in the reader's mind. It is a piece of life captured verbally, a little chunk of the endless, orderless continuum called life.

Unlike later modernizing poets, who associated a concern for process with writing poetry in the spoken language, Akiko did not favor the use of colloquial Japanese in tanka. Although she sometimes wrote free verse in the spoken language, especially in her later years she insisted on the use of classical Japanese for tanka, arguing that the rhythm of tanka was peculiar to the classical language. Since neither the grammar nor the feel of the spoken language matched the rhythm of tanka, a colloquial tanka seemed to her as incongruous as liqueur served in a Japanese tea bowl. This was a question not only of poetic language but also of jikkan. In Akiko's opinion, a genuine tanka poet conceives jikkan in the rhythm of the classical language; invariably that was the case with her. If she felt her jikkan had the rhythm of colloquial Japanese, she expressed it in a poetic form other than tanka, such as shi.

Perhaps Akiko felt that the grammatical units of modern Japanese did not break up into five and seven syllables as readily as did those of classical Japanese. In explaining why modern Japanese did not harmonize with the tanka form, she referred to the fact that the spoken language, because of its specific particles and auxiliary verbs, generally has longer phrases. "I believe," she said, "that the spoken language is too verbose to be condensed into 31 syllables." In addition, she felt that the colloquial language was more crude, less refined, and less elegant than the classical; as a result, one who wrote tanka in the spoken language resembled an architect who wanted to erect a beautiful structure but ended up building a crude barrack because of the material he used. Thus Akiko, who approved of free verse, firmly opposed free-style tanka and free-style haiku. To demonstrate how unpoetic a free-style tanka was, she once rewrote four of her own tanka in colloquial Japanese and compared them slightingly with the originals.

Although she advocated the use of classical Japanese in tanka, Akiko disapproved of modern poets' borrowing archaic vocabulary from The Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves. She was well aware of the virtues of the ancient poems, which were traditionally considered to represent the kind of poetry that is most expressive of powerful feelings, but she felt that the language used in them was no longer alive in the twentieth century. According to her, latter-day poets who used archaic words were "antique lovers" who tried to cover up their lack of originality with outdated diction. She made an exception for Tachibana Akemi, Shiki's idol, but unlike Shiki she approved of Akemi's tanka because in her opinion his archaic vocabulary was a means of unleashing his vehement dislike of the contemporary age.

Since less than two centuries separate the languages of the Nara Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves and the Heian Collection of Ancient and Modern Poems, Akiko's emphatic distinction between classical and antique language seems puzzling and somewhat arbitrary. Its most likely explanation may be biographical: not only had she been immersed since girlhood in the classics of the Heian period, but she had undertaken a complete translation into modern Japanese of the most massive masterpiece of them all, The Tale of Genji. Thus the language of the Heian period—standard classical Japanese—was very much alive in her life, whereas the language of the earlier period was much less familiar.

Another issue that loomed large in Akiko's thoughts about poetic form concerns what she loosely called "symbolism." The term had been in popular use since the introduction of French Symbolist poetry to Japan during the first decade of the twentieth century, but Akiko used it as a general conceptual term to designate the technique of symbolizing emotion through external objects that has been used in all the arts of both East and West. Apparently she was attracted to symbolic poetry because, by opening up semantic space for multiple meanings, the symbol allows more room for the operation of individual emotion or imagination—in both poet and reader. As she said, "A true masterpiece of art is like a garden occupying the maximum space available. Any number of visitors can stroll, play, or meditate in it. Symbolic art provides plenty of room for empathy. All masterpieces are works of symbolic art."

The best exposition of Akiko's ideas on symbolic tanka appears in a section of Talks on Tanka:

What do I mean by "symbolic"? By that word I refer to a case in which the author, in attempting to express emotion, mentions one thing in a way that suggests many others. Emotion is profound and delicate, distant and formless, intricate and indistinguishable. It cannot be depicted by common, expository language. Therefore a poet uses a special language that by mentioning a fraction of his emotion suggests the whole of it. In this type of language, being grammatically correct is not enough. The language must have elements of music as well as a special complexion that appropriately represents the shades of the author's emotion.

Here Akiko seems to have been making a basic distinction between poetic and scientific language. In scientific description, language is designed to denote as restricted a referent as possible in order to attain maximum objectivity. The language of poetry moves a long way toward the other pole. Because poets aim to present emotions that are private and personal, they must go beyond the accepted use of words and suggest a meaning too subjective to be defined through verbal exposition. They must exploit to the maximum the nuances of denotation and connotation, the play of presence and absence in what is referred to and what is left unsaid, and the nonsemantic elements in the word and its context, such as sight and sound. The language of symbolism, as expounded by Akiko, is poetic language in its extreme.

Akiko classified symbolic poetry into two types. Characteristic of the first type was a poem that has two levels of meaning, the surface level expressing the main emotion and the subsurface level suggesting the subordinate one. A couple of examples Akiko cited will better explain her idea. One was a tanka by her husband, Hiroshi:

Stark naked
the little baby flails and kicks
in an overhand crawl,
determined to meet the challenges of life
at just one year of age.

The main emotion expressed here is the poet's admiration of the vigor of a baby that seems ready to confront any number of adventures waiting for him in the years to come. The lively movements of his arms and legs on the floor look like those of a brave swimmer daring turbulent waves in the ocean. As Akiko interprets the poem, however, beneath this surface meaning is symbolically suggested the poet's own attitude toward life; he views it as a spacious ocean and man as an adventurer who tries to navigate across it to a far-off destination.

Such a double meaning is also present in the following tanka by Akiko herself:

A chrysanthemum
has flowered, its face
forlorn and white
like a thought that coldly
lies within my heart.

On its surface the poem describes a chrysanthemum blooming in late autumn, its whiteness and purity creating an impression of chill beauty. But underneath the tanka suggests the loneliness of the poet gazing at the chrysanthemum, for the white flower is an apt symbol of her heart. Akiko observed that almost all her tanka belonged to this category of symbolic poetry.

The second type of symbolic poetry conceived by Akiko comprised poems in which the main and subordinate emotions are one. Such a poem does not have two levels of meaning; rather, its single level of meaning is complex and all-inclusive. Using the vocabulary of Zen Buddhism, Akiko explained: "In this second type of poetry the one and the many are merged, the particular entirely embodying the universal." She cited several Buddhist and Taoist episodes to explain this type of symbolism. One was the Zen account of Buddha's sermon on Vulture Peak. Asked to teach the Law, Buddha did not say a word, but simply showed a flower to the audience, turning it in his fingers. Among the multitude of people who saw the symbol, only his disciple Kāshyapa understood the message and smiled. In Akiko's view, a tanka belonging to the second type of symbolic poetry must be like that flower, and its ideal reader must be like Kāshyapa. It does not express a specific feeling; rather, it suggests a comprehensive imaginary reality that envelops both the poet's self and the world that surrounds it. Its central image would symbolize not just a happy or a sad feeling but the entire complex of thoughts and emotions unified through the poet's perspective. It would be a pointer directing the reader toward the poet's personal universe, whether religious, metaphysical, or mystical.

Akiko quoted eight poems to clarify what she meant. One was a tanka by her husband, Hiroshi:

Along the slant
of a billow about to break
on the bright
blue ocean, a pair
of white seagulls slide away.

Akiko commented that the two seagulls enjoying their play on the beautiful sea represent the poet's dream of a joyous life of peace, beauty, and love. The seascape, in her opinion, symbolized all of reality as reflected in the poet's mental landscape. A second example is from her own poetry:

Out of black ice
in the land of shadows
it comes flying
to me, to enfold me
in its wings: a bat.

Here the poem does not pretend to describe nature, but presents an inner landscape that is externalized by way of symbolic images. The central image, a bat, bodies forth what Akiko explained as "a cold, melancholy sorrow that sneaks into my heart from time to time." In these instances, the seagulls and the bat are more metaphysical than metaphorical; they are the key that opens the door to the poet's private, esoteric world. In such poems as these Akiko seems to be moving toward Western symbolist poetry.

Akiko was in fact attracted to French Symbolist poetry, and on occasion she referred to it in her explanation of symbolism, citing comments made by such poets as Théophile Gautier and Henri de Régnier. But she had some reservations, the main one being that, in comparison with symbolic poems in the Japanese tradition, French Symbolist poems seemed artificially composed and lacking in vigor. However, Akiko felt that a poet who immersed himself in French poetry might subconsciously be inspired to write a fine symbolist poem.

Symbolic poems of the second type conceived by Akiko are often difficult to understand because they employ symbols that are private and personal. Much of the difficulty of Western symbolist poetry lies in this use of private symbols, and the same may be said of the type of tanka advocated by Akiko. She was well aware of the problem, and conceded that when a poem's symbol was too personal a reader might not experience exactly the same vision as the author. But she thought this was all right as long as the reader could approximate the poet's vision. Indeed, she recognized a positive value in a difficult poem: in the process of trying to understand the poem, the reader's creative imagination was stimulated and he felt the pleasure of being a poet. After calling the poem "a beautiful mystery," she said, "Each reader will endeavor to unravel the mystery by exercising his intuitive power. He will not passively let the poet guide him; rather, he will take the initiative and work creatively in his mind. Herein lies one of the reasons why the second type of symbolic poetry is valuable." In other words, this type of poetry makes the reader an active participant rather than a passive recipient.

Akiko was the first major poet to talk about symbols in tanka. By doing so she confirmed that the classical Japanese verse form was not as obsolete as some detractors made it seem, and that it could be discussed in the same terms as French Symbolist poetry. She helped her fellow poets to realize that tanka could be a daringly modern verse form.