Embracing the Firebird

A study of Yosano Akiko (1878-1942), famous post-classical woman poet of Japan. It follows Yosano from childhood to her twenties, as she freed herself from the alienation and frustration that shadowed her early years and, to use her own words, "danced out into the light" of poetry and self-liberation. Less than a year after meeting the poet Yosano Tekkan, who became her mentor and later her husband, Yosano moved to Tokyo, where she finished writing the poems that would be included in "Tangled Hair" (1901), her most famous work. An extraordinary book for its time, "Tangled Hair" is a hymn to art, love, beauty, youth, and, above all, the individual. In it we see, perhaps for the first time, a Japanese woman consciously and persistently grappling in her creative work with her own individuality. It became a classic of modern Japanese poetry and marked the starting point of Yosano's career as a recognized poet and feminist critic for the next 40 years. This volume also features a representative selection of Yosano's poetry.