Yosano Akiko was not one to accept passively the limited life script to which many women of her time acquiesced: birth, childhood, marriage, motherhood, and death. Neither was she one to attribute her own significance in the world to the status of the men in her life—her father Sôshichi, a prominent merchant in Sakai, near Osaka, and her husband, Yosano Tekkan, the famous editor of the magazine Myôjô. Refusing to limit herself to the socially acceptable, domestic work of eros and reproduction, she imagined an entirely different script for herself, an ambitious one which embraced action and production of culture in the public sphere. Thus, Akiko wrote her own script, an "autogynography," which gave voice to her own story and ideas, to her particular sense of self.

In this pursuit, Akiko had been preceded by women writers of the Heian period (794–1185); but with the rise thereafter of the warrior class and the deepening influence of Buddhism and Confucianism, women's voices fell mostly silent until after the Meiji Restoration. Akiko herself pointed out the irony of the situation: men writers of her time used the earlier work by women as their models and continued to write in the older female tradition, while women no longer spoke for themselves, nor were active in producing public culture. Akiko's voice was among the first to be raised and widely heard after the centuries of relative silence, when in August, 1901, she published Midaregami (Tangled Hair), her first collection of tanka. The cover alone was arresting, showing a woman's face surrounded by swirling hair and framed by a heart which was pierced by an arrow; but the poems within held their readers' attention with their boldness and passion. Public interest in her work was fueled at the same time by the scandal of her love relationship with Tekkan, begun before he had freed himself from his second wife.

Even decades after the publication of Midaregami, readers continued to associate Akiko with the youth, eroticism, and impulsive utterances of that collection; and although Akiko wrote more than 50,000 tanka in her lifetime, many of them very different in tone and content from those of the first volume, she continues to be remembered today chiefly as the poet who wrote Midaregami. In addition, her free verse poems and her prose works, both fiction and essays, have been neglected by literary critics and the general reading public alike. They deserve to be read, for they show a much richer, more complicated writer than the Midaregami poems suggest.

In fact, in Akiko's essays written in the late Meiji and early Taisho periods, we see her struggling with that earlier erotic script, trying to redefine herself and to set her own direction. She began by considering her situation at home with her husband and children, and then gradually turned from that private sphere toward a much more public one. Akiko collected the essays of this period into two volumes: Ichigû yori (From One Corner), published in 1911, and Zakki-chô (Miscellany), published in 1915. Akiko remarked that she considered these volumes "sister" works, and although she did not explain herself on that point, it is likely that she was referring to the fact that they explored the same time period and theme. The former volume was written before Akiko took her trip to Europe in 1912, making her way to Paris by way of the Siberian Railway across the continent and returning by ship in October. By the time she wrote the second volume, she had seen the world beyond Japan and had had the chance to reflect on the situation of women and writers in Japan in relation to those in Europe.

Akiko was looking forward to the publication of her tenth volume of tanka in 1909 when she took up her pen and began to write the essays which were later collected in Ichigû yori. She was thirty years old, the mother of two sons and twin daughters, and the wife of Yosano Tekkan, the well-known poet whose literary group, the Shinshisha, had just dissolved. The dissolution of the Shinshisha and the cessation of Myôjô, the monthly magazine it produced, was a terrible blow to Tekkan, who slid into a long period of depression. While it was a disappointment to Akiko as well, this turn of events relieved her of her intense involvement in those literary group activities and freed her to take on new challenges. She was confident that she could continue to support herself by her pen and lectures; and, as she responded to requests from newspaper and magazine editors, she quickly found herself reaching out to a new audience and exploring subjects such as childbirth, education, the female sense of self, and women writers, themes she had only touched upon in her tanka.

In 1909 when Akiko wrote one of her first essays from the hospital room where she had been confined after the birth of her third son, she was writing on a topic one might have expected of a woman and mother. Though she had been forbidden by her doctor to do so, she took up her pen to reflect on her recent experience. Understandably, she began by talking about the difficulties of pregnancy and childbirth; but she quickly moved beyond that, asserting that childbirth was a great work that women alone could perform, and that it surpassed the work of government, scholarship, or war. She expressed anger that while women have performed such publicly important work, men have been busy writing sutras, laws, and ethical codes which disdained women as inferior and weak creatures. In this way, she redefined the usual conceptions of work and value. If "motherhood" was a chief element of the script available to women, Akiko viewed it as a noble and significant work, fundamentally important to the well-being of the nation. Thus, she elevated the value of the private realm and rejected the idea that everything of significance occurred in the public realm. She refused to view the reproductive script as an inferior one.

She criticized literary men, in particular, citing a recent article by Tayama Katai, in which he stated that aside from the need for reproduction, there was no basis for a bond between men and women. Akiko held him up as an example of the tendency among men writers to focus on reproduction alone. She angrily insisted that the lives of men and women were in fact intertwined, even if people were not comfortable with that fact. The failure to accept women as human beings of value would have tragic consequences for men, as well as women, for it limited members of both sexes.

I don't want to draw sharp distinctions between men and women and to boast that women are superior beings. Women are only human. I would like to see men and women carry on their lives cooperatively, choosing work to which each is best suited, and giving up their biased ideas, such as that childbirth is disgusting, while war is noble.

Akiko argued that male writers needed to shake off their biases and look at women objectively, for good and bad. Men have created women characters who are figments of their imagination; and in fact, they have defined attractive womanhood for women, so that women have come to model themselves upon men's fantasies in order to appear attractive to them. Disappointingly, men have chosen just one aspect of women, often a weakness, and focused on that as though it accurately represented the whole.

Akiko also gave an example of this process in reverse: Katai's "Futon," a short story filled with sensuality and animality. Women readers might look at the male character and believe that men were dominated by their animal passions. Did that one aspect accurately characterize the whole gender? she asked. Then she concluded:

There are men in the world who have a woman's looks, skin, voice, personality and emotions, and there are women who possess masculine traits. Therefore, one can posit the existence of men who find fulfillment in nurturing children and of women who possess the skills of the writer, teacher, farmer, or philosopher. It may be that when one examines all the theories and realities it will seem that it was a mistake to distinguish between men and women only on the basis of reproduction. In that case, it may be a mistake to say that either men or women are completely sensual; one might have to say that a certain number of both men and women are more or less sensual, or to return to the proposition that some people are more, and some are less, sensual. We cannot say we have progressed until we see the emergence of novels which take these theories and reality into account.

The reproductive and erotic scripts not only limited men and women; they also distorted both sexes. They were inadequate for both—inadequate as a definition. In the passage just quoted, Akiko was reaching for a much more ambiguous line of difference between men and women, and she clearly expressed her idea that men were as oppressed by the erotic narrative as women were.

Further, Akiko seized upon writing as an essential tool for women to use to regain a healthy sense of self. Women needed to write in order to regain the habit of honest observation. Habitually seeing themselves as men did, constantly striving to make themselves attractive to men, they were no longer aware that they had adopted male perceptions as their own. She pointed to the women characters from the plays of Chikamatsu, the beautiful and virtuous Tane and Koharu, at whom modern writers nodded in approval without recognizing the puppet-like quality of their loyalty and faithfulness.

Akiko suggested:

Women writers who wish to succeed will have to stop imitating fiction by men writers and rid themselves of the desire to please by giving the world "woman-like" women; instead, they must polish their sense of self, sharpen their personal observations, and above all, unsparingly reveal the true feelings of women. If women will write with this attitude, they will pull back the curtain and show women as they truly are, allowing men to understand both their beauty and their blemishes. I believe that when women take this attitude, they, too, will be able to write fiction.

In effect, Akiko refused to separate the private from the public. If the productions of women in the private sphere were significant to society, so too were their productions in the public sphere. In fact, in writing fiction, women took up the challenge of presenting themselves accurately to a reading public. In doing that, they would have to develop their own definition of themselves.

Akiko recognized that the reproductive script did not allow women to be themselves; they had to develop ambitious scripts that led to action in the public sphere. But none was more aware than Akiko of the cost to women of attempting to follow an ambitious script. In a piece she wrote in October, 1909, entitled "Nikki no danpen" ("Fragments of a Diary") she sounded weary. Her third son Rin, seven months old, was near death, and cried all night. The two-year-old twin girls were also seriously ill, and her oldest son Hikaru, six years old, had been too slow in recovering from what they feared was encephalitis. She endured five or six sleepless nights. Her husband Tekkan helped by sleeping with various of the children at night, but he maintained his regular schedule as well, going off one night to a poetry gathering at Mori Ôgai's house and returning with an overnight guest. Akiko served them hot chocolate and then went upstairs to make a bed for the guest. At the end of the exhausting ten-day period covered by the diary, everyone was out of danger and on the mend. Akiko prepared her two-hour lecture on The Tale of Genji while patching her husband's haori, and she claimed that in spite of everything, she was able to write poems on most of those trying days.

Such an ambitious script obviously could be followed only by a woman who was hardy enough to juggle her private and public lives. Even someone as sturdy as Akiko nearly wore out. She delineated her exhaustion, but she stopped short of contrasting her situation with that of her husband. She acknowledged no anger over the fact that he continued his regular life and, indeed, made extra demands of her when she was already overextended. She expressed no resentment at having to do her scholarly work while doing handwork—simultaneously. The image she presented in the essay was arresting: to act in the public sphere in the production of culture, a woman writer had to be able to do two things at once. Clearly, too, as a mother and writer, the demands of the private realm—the crisis of sick children—overshadowed everything else. She could not set them aside and simply go ahead with her projects. She could never expect the luxury of a "regular" schedule or of time to concentrate on her writing alone.

Akiko's tone was similarly weary and depressed in an essay written the following year. During a steady, white November rain, Akiko, sitting with her husband in their study, stirred the ashes in the brazier in order to coax a little warmth from it. She thought about the fact that she had no time for herself, that her brain felt sick. She now had six children, and she found herself wondering about the life she would have had without them. While sewing, she thought about the annotated Tale of Genji she was preparing, and about errors scholars had made in their interpretations of it. In the darkening room, Akiko speculated that she needed to live another twelve or thirteen years for the sake of her family. In this essay, Akiko spoke powerfully about the sense of depletion which accompanied her pursuit of an ambitious script. Numbed by exhaustion, she nevertheless struggled to complete her manuscript on Genji and prepare lectures.

In these pieces Akiko followed her own dictum that women should "pull back the curtain" and describe themselves truly, without regard for ornamentation or attractiveness to men. Despite her depression and exhaustion, she seemed to accept the fact that the price of being an "enlightened woman" (bunmei fujin)—of doing public work, of being self-defined and independent—was to do her public work on her own, in addition to everything else. Though she was depressed by her lack of personal time, we know, looking back, that after she returned from Europe she gave birth to six more children. Despite her depression, she continued to see child-bearing and child-rearing as part of the "way of women" (fujin no michi) which was superior to the "way of the warrior" (bushidô). She refused to see reproduction as something confining for women, but regarded it rather as something which expanded their sphere, and therefore was a valuable, creative work. She refused to see herself as someone who had been diminished by her roles as wife and mother. In this sense, she wrote a self-contradictory text. She vehemently rejected the idea that women should be restricted to the reproductive script; but at the same time, she elevated it above the warmaking script allowed to men. While it was too narrow a script for women, it was, in spite of its narrowness, a noble, creative script which was essential to the health of society. She did not reject motherhood; but she did reject being completely defined by it. At the same time, she rejected the erotic script because women falsified themselves when they were bent on being what men wanted them to be. They lost their core, their fundamental sense of self. Akiko argued for a much broader range of choice for women by affirming the value of both eros and reproduction and beyond that, affirming the need for women to develop a strong sense of self in order to imagine their own scripts. The price of her determination to develop her own script seemed in Akiko's view to be the willingness to do everything: to produce in the domestic sphere as wife and mother, and to produce in the public sphere as writer and teacher. She had the energy to embrace the traditional role and to forge a new one for herself, simultaneously. While she did not admit to any innate conflict between the demands of reproduction and production, we have seen that her essays spoke powerfully of the physical and mental toll of doing both.

In spite of the heavy toll of attempting intellectual work, Akiko insisted that women reclaim their brains. They could no longer content themselves with hands, feet, and mouths alone. "Headless," they could not claim to be complete human beings. In an essay she wrote for Taiyô in January, 1911, she wrote about the joy of thinking. She asserted that women needed to create and define themselves for themselves, that they had to use their brains in order to become "enlightened women." She acknowledged that conservative Japanese men feared that a British-style women's rights movement might break out among young women; but she assured them that young Japanese women were not likely to take to political activism quickly. In fact, she predicted that they would put their energies into scholarship, the arts, and education instead. She concluded with her wish that—

Women of this country which worships the Sun Goddess should rid themselves of all their old habits of subservience and confidently conduct themselves as models of enlightened women

In the Taiyô essay, Akiko indicated that she conceived of women exercising their freedom in a relatively small and private arena and in traditional spheres: the home and the school, the arts, and education. She did not see a particular connection between the public and the private—the necessity for activity in the public, political sphere to effect change in the private. If anything, she seemed eager to reassure apprehensive conservatives that Japanese women were different from European women, so they needn't worry. And indeed, Akiko's example suggested that they had little to fear. She married, bore many children, and worked as well, but she did not lead any public crusades (even if she did join the Bluestockings in September, 1911, and was engaged in some political campaigns).

Yet, Akiko did not hesitate to comment on public events or to criticize publicly the values of her time. The controversy engendered by the divorce of a career army man and a music teacher in 1909 gave her the opportunity to talk about ideals in marriage. The two parties had cited "differences in interests" (shumi no sôi) as the cause of their divorce. The president of the music college which employed the woman commented publicly that it was too bad there were differences; it was a situation which would not happen if the couple had followed the prescription "fûshô fuwa" (the wife should agree with the husband's ideas). Akiko seized on this statement as an example of the morals of an uncivilized age. She contrasted the president's comment with the ideal expressed in the Imperial Rescript on Education: "fûfu sôwa shi" (husband and wife should live in mutual agreement). In Akiko's opinion, too many women's colleges subscribed to the concept of "ryôsai kenbo" (good wives, wise mothers) and emphasized home economics courses. Those who agreed with that concept should also subscribe to the concept of "ryôfû kenpu" (good husbands, wise fathers), in her opinion. On the issue of submission she stated:

… we should not speak about forcing one person to submit to another. If there is to be submission, let us cultivate people with the mindset of mutual submission and have them marry only after that has been accomplished.

Akiko habitually used words such as "cooperation" and "respect" when she spoke of marriage; in speaking of "mutual submission," she showed how progressive her concept of marriage was.

Akiko advocated marriage relationships which treated women as respectfully as the men. In her essay "Women and Economic Independence" (1911), she pointed to the new standard in human relations held up as the ideal as a result of the Meiji Restoration: "to value the individuality, rights, and freedom of each person" (kakujin no kosei to kenri to jiyû to wo sonchô suru koto). Before this, in the period of "darkness," custom was valued more than human beings. Everyone in society accepted the norms and assumed that life should be lived according to them. The same kind of thinking assumed that women should continue in the present to be what they had been in the past. According to this, marriage had been and should continue to be the focus of a woman's life. Akiko rejected this, and saw the Meiji period emphasis on the rights of individuals as a shaft of light which would eventually dispel the darkness of earlier times. In fact, she asserted that marriage need no longer be the norm for women. She listed a number of historically prominent single women who had made significant contributions to Japanese society and attributed their achievements, in part, to their singleness. She stated that single women had done more than married women had for the progress of women as a whole. Freed from custom, women could contemplate an entirely new range of choices for themselves:

It is a sign of progress that women can now display their talents as scholars, diplomats, artists, and educators, not only as good wives and wise mothers. Thus, their well-being no longer derives from their roles as wives and mothers, but draws on many sources.

Akiko envisioned women extricating themselves from the burden of custom and making choices for themselves. Although she saw cultural and social obstacles blocking their movement toward freedom, she placed much of the blame for lack of progress on women themselves. In her view, no one could give a woman her freedom; she would have to choose it for herself and act on the basis of it. Because of this conviction, most of the essays in Ichigû yori underscored the importance of women taking responsibility for their own nurture. Akiko affirmed repeatedly the importance of women giving to themselves as much care and respect as they gave to others.

If the essays of Ichigû yori disclosed a writer who was struggling to define a female sense of self and to define her own life script, one could say that the essays of the second volume, Zakki-chô portrayed a writer who had come into her own and was ready to apply that sense of self to the world she encountered. By May, 1915, Akiko had already been back from Europe for two and a half years. In the interval, she had given birth to Auguste, her fourth son, and to Hélène, her fifth daughter; she had also published three collections of tanka, two collections of juvenile fiction, a three-volume modernization of Eiga monogatari (Tales of splendor), and the account, written with her husband Tekkan, of their travels in Europe.

Akiko described Zakki-chô in her brief preface as a companion volume to Ichigû yori and expressed the hope that readers would read the two together, for the latter showed the expansion of her ideas from the first volume. She opened the second volume with a poem which described a scene in Paris, "The Marketplace at Étoile."

Last time she had failed to find her intended destination, but this time she knew her destination exactly, and how to reach it. She was still afraid, but she gathered up her courage and stepped out to cross the intersection. Somehow, the vehicles made way for her, just as they had for all the French men and women she had watched crossing before her, and she reached her appointment on time, and with a sense of triumph.

This poem expressed an internal stabilization, a recognition of the inner change which was depicted in the essays of Ichigû yori. On one level, the poem spoke of Akiko's growing comfort abroad, in Europe. But on another, more fundamental level, it spoke of Akiko's sense of courage about her life and her course. Faced with confusion, multiple choices, even some hostility, she had chosen her own way, she had found the strength and courage to sustain her, and she had put aside her fears.

Akiko's ideas may have expanded and sharpened as a result of her travel abroad, but her fundamental concerns did not change at all. For example, in her essay "Otoko to onna" ("Men and women"). Akiko continued to assert that women were people, just as men were, and that they should be treated equally with men. True equality with men was made impossible by the lack of access to education for women; so, women would have to develop their own program of self-study to compensate. To gain respect, women had to have a life outside their homes. In fact, both men and women derived satisfaction from their lives outside their homes. Akiko insisted that the benefit of modern life lay in the possibility of choice, for both men and women. Both should be able to choose an ambitious script based on their talents, education, and circumstances. Society was no longer static and prescriptive: no longer did someone born a samurai stay one, or someone born a merchant live out his life as one, and so on. Just as men were free to choose their own life scripts, so should women be able to reject the dictates of society and choose scripts suited to them.

The themes Akiko sounded in this essay were repeated in numerous other writings from the same period. She tirelessly affirmed the humanity of women, their common humanity with men. She constantly argued for their equality with men, physically and mentally, and that they should enjoy the same access to education, to work, and to activity in the public arena. She argued that women must value their minds, think for themselves, and act on the basis of a firm, true sense of self. She argued against women allowing the men with whom they lived to subsume their identities; she insisted that women shape and maintain their own individual lives. She argued that the home was a prison if women were confined to it and not allowed to leave. Linked to the imprisoning myth of "home," of course, was the myth of chastity.

In an essay called "My Concept of Chastity," Akiko explored the reasons for which women's chastity had been highly valued. She began by saying that it was a concept which was handed to women to accept as a matter of course, but now it was time for women to reflect and ask why they should accept it. The reason was that women had to live by their minds and had to use their minds to develop the self-awareness which would lead to freedom. Having elevated their sense of self, they then had to choose action over sensuality. Men have always from the time of the ancient Greeks and Indian philosophers to the contemporary period of European science been encouraged in just such an active liberation of the self.

Akiko traced the concept of "chastity" historically. In the beginning there was no specialization of labor in Japan and women participated in all aspects of work. Spouses lived apart; there was no concept of the "ie" (the extended household). Times changed. Work became differentiated, men began to dominate, and the concept of "ie" emerged, with the notion of lineage through the male line. Women became confined to the sphere of the "ie," and they began to be described as "borrowed wombs." Akiko considered her own personal history.

As a young girl, she was not at all aware of her sexual feelings; even the love stories she read did not raise her curiosity. In her opinion, that lack of curiosity probably had a great deal to do with the fact that her family did not give her opportunities to mix with members of the opposite sex. She never left her house unaccompanied. In fact, she so seldom went to another's house that she could count the number of times she crossed someone else's threshold. This state of affairs continued even after she finished her formal schooling:

Increasingly, after I finished girls' school, I only worked at home. My overly-strict parents did not even allow me to go out on the platform on the roof of our house. They feared that I might be seen by some man who would come after me and bring me to ruin. They even took the extreme measure of securely locking my bedroom door each night.

Due to my natural inclination to stay home, to my parents' disposition, and perhaps in some measure to my own obstinacy, I became a young woman seen by very few people, and I refused to leave the shop even when someone asked me to. At this time, my older brother was studying in Tokyo. My younger sister was studying in Kyoto. My younger brother was attending the local middle school. I had to help my parents by staying at home and taking care of the shop. Most people take up household management when they marry; in contrast, I worked hard from the time I was a very young girl for my parents, who used me as though they were my parents-in-law. In such circumstances, I had neither the notion nor the opportunity to fall in love with someone of the opposite sex. Moreover, I never had any experience of being tempted by a man who might defile my chastity.

Eventually, it was Tekkan who awakened her sexuality and thereby helped her to break out of her circumscribed life:

After a chance meeting, I became acquainted with a man and as a result, my temperament changed radically. For the first time in my life, I felt myself burning with real passion. I married that man. I was 24 years old at the time.

Compared to the world of my childhood, my world after I fell in love and married was much broader and livelier. I realized for the first time how jaundiced, unfair, and dark my childhood had been. I realized that if I hadn't married, there would have been many things I never would have understood.

One thing she might never have understood without Tekkan's presence in her life was how stultifying her own and her parents' concept of chastity had been. Her rejection of that earlier concept freed her to develop as a self and a writer.

In her essay Akiko thus took the narrow meaning "chastity" had had and expanded it in light of her own experience. She acknowledged that the concept had become a way of controlling women's behavior, of restricting their freedom of movement outside their homes. But in her own life, her eventual refusal to espouse the concept in the form she encountered it liberated her. She acknowledged that her sexuality was an important part of her understanding and valuing of self. By the end of her treatment of the subject, Akiko had, in effect, redefined the meaning of the term and seized it as a tool of liberation. "Chastity" no longer meant safeguarding the womb; it meant the totality of a woman's sexuality, the totality of the female self, the chastity of the self. Akiko saw that the emphasis on woman as sexual object and her acceptance of that definition had had a stultifying effect on her sense of self. She redefined the word to signify the inviolability of the self and thus argued that for women, preserving their chastity was a very important task, but it was a task that women themselves had to define and carry out.

In the reflections which Akiko contributed to the "Women's World" pages of Taiyô, beginning in 1915 and included in the Zakki-chô, Akiko noted that in the previous twelve or thirteen years she had moved from an inner world to an outer one. Now she wanted to influence the outer world, to exert some shaping power over it. She still thought the first step toward equality with men lay with women and in their realization that they must free themselves. She thought that progressive women were right in struggling for the right to vote, though she ridiculed the political activity of the members of the Women's Patriotic Society ("aikoku fujinkai"), who reminded her of adults playing house, because they merely followed the bidding of the bureaucracy. She asserted that women had to become active in the public sphere of politics; the private sphere did not give them enough scope.

Akiko herself was not very active in the political arena, though she certainly participated in the public sphere through her teaching and publishing of essays and poems. Nevertheless, she saw the political implications of women's awakening to a new sense of self. She was a prescient, intellectual woman who argued her positions before an audience that was not quite ready to hear them. She was an energetic woman who refused to choose between the roles of wife and mother and the role of producer of culture. Rather than advocate the wholesale rejection of tradition, Akiko ferreted out elements on which she could build and frequently worked with old ideas until she had significantly altered them and given them a new content of which she could approve. She placed great faith in the power of the word and of the imagination to transform reality. She believed that she could define herself and that she could create a role for herself based on her talents. Not content with the erotic and reproductive scripts she was handed, she wrote her own ambitious script with a passionate confidence that still has the power to inspire.