Works by
Yosano Akiko
(Aka Yosano Shiyo)
(Poet)
[December 7, 1878 - May 29, 1942]

Biography/Memoirs

• Travels in Manchuria and Mongolia (2001), Joshua Fogel, translator
  In 1928 at a highpoint of Sino-Japanese tensions, Yosano was invited by the South Manchurian Railway Company to travel around areas with a prominent Japanese presence in China's northeast. This volume, translated for the first time into English, is her account of that journey. Though a portrait of China and the Chinese, the chronicle is most revealing as a portrait of modern Japanese representations of China -- and as a study of Yosano herself.

Poetry

• River of Stars: Selected Poems of Yosano Akiko (1997), Keiko Matsui Gibson and Sam Hamill, translators
  Yosano Akiko (1878-942) is one of the most famous Japanese writers of the twentieth century. She is the author of more than seventy-five books, including twenty volumes of original poetry and the definitive translation into modern Japanese of the Tale of the Genji. Although probably best known for her exquisite erotic poetry, Akiko's work also championed the causes of feminism, pacifism, and social reform. Akiko's poetry is profoundly direct, often passionate, exposing the complexity of everyday emotions in poetic language stripped of artifice and presenting the full breadth of her poetic vision. Included are ninety-one of Akiko's tanka (a traditional five-line form of verse) and a dozen of her longer poems written in the modern style.

• Tangled Hair: Selected Tanka from 'Midaregami' (1901, 1987, 2002), Sanford Goldstein and Seishi Shinoda, translators
  Akiko Yosano's Tangled Hair, published in 1901, had a sensational impact on Japanese literature, and we are pleased to make this highly praised translation (originally published 30 years ago) available once again in a revised Cheng & Tsui edition. Akiko reshaped the tanka, the most popular form of Japanese poetry for 1,200 years, into a modern poetic form. In this new work, her tanka appear in their original Japanese, in roman transliterations, and English translations along with a new preface and notes. Suitable for literature programs and translation courses.

• Night Fading to Pale Rose (1986)

See also:

• Embracing the Firebird: Yosano Akiko and the Birth of the Female Voice in Modern Japanese Poetry (2002) by Janine Beichman
  How did a girl from the provinces, meant to do nothing more than run the family store, become a bold and daring poet whose life and work helped change the idea of love in modern Japan? Embracing the Firebird is the first book-length study in English of the early life and work of Yosano Akiko (1879-1942), the most famous post-classical woman poet of Japan. It follows Akiko, who was born into a merchant family in the port city of Sakai near Osaka, from earliest childhood to her twenties, charting the slow process of development before the seemingly sudden metamorphosis.
  
  Akiko's later poetry has now begun to win long-overdue recognition, but in terms of literary history the impact of Midaregami (Tangled Hair, 1901), her first book, still overshadows everything else she wrote, for it brought individualism to traditional tanka poetry with a tempestuous force and passion found in no other work of the period. Embracing the Firebird traces Akiko's emotional and artistic development up to the publication of this seminal work, which became a classic of modern Japanese poetry and marked the starting point of Akiko's forty-year-long career as a writer. It then examines Tangled Hair itself, the characteristics that make it a unified work of art, and its originality.
  
  The study throughout includes Janine Beichman's elegant translations of poems by Yosano Akiko (both those included in Tangled Hair and those not), as well as poems by contemporaries such as Yosano Tekkan, Yamakawa Tomiko, and others.

• A Flowering Word: The Modernist Expression in Stephane Mallarme, T.S. Eliot, and Yosano Akiko (2000) by Noriko Takeda
  In its international and cross-cultural evolution, the modernist movement brought the most notable achievements in the poetry genre. Through their fragmented mode by semantic scrambling, the modernist poems seek to embody an indestructible unity of language and art. In order to elucidate the significance of that "essential" form in capitalistic times, 'A Flowering Word' applies C. S. Peirce's semiotic theory to the principal works of three contemporary writers: Stphane Mallarm's late sonnets, T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, and the Japanese pre-feminist poet, Yosano Akiko's Tangled Hair.

• Yosano Akiko and the Tale of Genji (2000) by G.G. Rowley

• The Poetry of Yosano Akiko (1957) BY Hokuseido