NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

Masaoka Shiki is known by Japanese critics as the father of the modern haiku. This book trys to put that image into the context of his life and his total writings.

Shiki was only five when his alcoholic father died. His mother taught sewing to provide an income. Shiki came under the influence of his grandfather Kanzan who taught him literature, Confucian philosophy and samurai morality. As a pre-adolescent he was a devotee of poetry but later became politically-minded.

In 1883 he left home to study in Tokyo. Two years later, he abandoned politics for philosophy. After failing his exams he turned to aesthetics and subsequently to literature. At first he aimed at becoming a novelist as that was a respected pursuit, whilst haiku was regarded with disdain. However, he soon decided that his aim in life would be to reform contemporary haiku and make it respectable. Shiki encouraged his students to compose haiku on topics derived from their own observation of nature, rather than on assigned topics.

The author critically examines many of Shiki's haiku and his writing about haiku and about Basho and Buson in particular. She concludes

it is certain that through his unique combination of intimacy and objectivity, artlessness and intensity, Shiki imbued the haiku with a new psychological complexity, and made it a poetic form that would survive into the modern period.

• Scholars of Japanese literature
• Shinto priests
• Court nobles
• Ladies of leisure
• Girl students
• Clever men with a bit of learning
• Gentlemen newly promoted to high rank or positions
• Young men who want to see their tanka printed in books and magazines

Haiku was considered vulgar and tanka refined, but Shiki saw it as natural that Japanese writers would work in both genres, just as many Europeans wrote not only poetry, but drama and novels as well.

The author examines Shiki's tanka with the same attention to detail as she gave his haiku. Later chapters likewise discuss his prose writings and his diaries, especially their poetic content.

The book concludes with extensive notes and a selected bibliography. For anyone with a thirst for but little knowledge of Shiki or the history of modern haiku and tanka, this book is an excellent place to start.

My poems are my diary, Yosano Akiko once said. Previous English translations of Akiko's work have presented her tanka with little or no commentary on her life. In EMBRACING THE FIREBIRD, scholar Janine Beichman weaves together memoirs, letters, and eyewitness accounts to offer a fuller and deeper portrait of Japan's most famous modern woman poet. This first book-length study details Akiko's artistic and emotional development from childhood to her early twenties when she was catapulted to fame with the publication of MIDAREGAMI (TANGLED HAIR).

Akiko's bold and erotic poems shocked the Meiji world. Before the publication of TANGLED HAIR, poets did not mention-never mind praise-parts of the body, other than a woman's hair. Akiko revolted against this taboo by celebrating the ecstasy of sexual love.

	Pressing my breasts
	I softly kick aside
	the curtain of mystery
	   How deep the crimson
	   of the flower here.

	***
	
	Spring is short
	what is there has eternal life
	I said and
	   made his hands seek out
	   my powerful breasts

In the final section of EMBRACING THE FIREBIRD, Ms. Beichman focuses on the variety, shape and originality of the poems in TANGLED HAIR. She shows us how Akiko infused her tanka with other genres and arts, such as Greek myth, Western painting (particularly the nudes of Titian), and Heian fiction. Gods and goddesses, cupids, nymphs, virgins and young priests enter her poems. This uncharacteristically playful one is written in the voice of a dove.

	Listen, poet!
	It's spring and what are these
	ragged letters
	you've scribbled on the underside
	of my pure white wings

As in her definitive biography of haiku poet Masaoka Shiki, Ms. Beichman has included photographs with the text. It is fascinating to see the volatile, handsome Tekkan and the posed photo of Akiko with her friend/rival Tomiko. These photographs also serve as a visual reminder that Japan was at the cusp of a new era of Westernization: women still dressed in kimonos but men were beginning to sport mustaches and wear Western suits.

The firebird (hi no tori) in the title refers to the mythological phoenix that is consumed by fire, then reborn from its own ashes. Like the firebird, Yosano Akiko emerged time and time again from poverty, rejection, betrayal, the travails of giving birth, motherhood and illness to embrace and renew her art. In this superb book, Ms. Beichman has indeed embraced the firebird.