THE NIGHT OF AKIKO YOSANO: A whole spring enclosed inside a peony, observing the body where it remains something of yesterday

“Love or blood? Throughout the spring peony is in this that haunts me. Night falls, I’m alone, alone without a poem.”

Her name is Akiko and was born in a winter day in 1878, giving us by her death – in the spring of 1942 – the indelible charm of its tanka poems, where the five lines formed syllables (5, 7, 5 , 7, and 7), still bear witness to the depth of her social commitment in the struggle for the emancipation of women in Japan.

“After the bath, I look in the mirror, and, looking at my body, I feel it still remains something of yesterday: a smile …”

 

Akiko Yosano loved to read, and the library of her father was her lawn of literary, those that formed and moved her to collaborate with a magazine of poetry, knowing the publisher – Tekkan Yosano – who had taught her to the art of poetry tanka . Develops between the two falling in love, and he is separated from his wife. Together they live in Tokyo, marry and create two children.

“What human being could punish me? It is not the whiteness of my arm, who welcomed his head, worthy of a god?”

“Tangled Hair” – her best-known book – it is in 1901 the first volume of 400 tanka poems from her published, where she expresses her femininity extremely original and her love for her husband. During her prolific life as a poet, Akiko wrote tens of thousands of poems and 11 books of prose, but he also helped to found a girls’ school (the Bunka Gakuin).

“Midst dressed in a light silk, from pale red … do not think badly of ‘them that you are enjoying the moon …”

 

The women in “Tangled Hair” are not only sweet and modest, and even their social role obligations is contained in the procreation and education of children, because in those pages of poetry comes a revolutionary new image of femininity, and will be women assertive and free those who make their own – from readers and females – the message of Akiko, and their breasts will never be only the symbol of motherhood.

“Milky Way: in bed with him, I open the curtain and look at it as, at dawn, you split two stars.”