Curved, Deaf, Winding Paths…

Yosano Akiko received a classical education, but grew up in the Meiji era, a time of change, when foreign ideas, customs, and habits flooded into the country. Thus, her work intertwines the canonical form of the five-line tanka, traditional Japanese attitudes towards beauty, and modern motifs of self-assertion and self-admiration of women. Common themes in tanka poetry are love and separation, and many of Akiko's poems are dedicated to the love triangle formed between the poetess herself, her editor Yosano Tekkan, and his first wife Takino. This collection mainly includes poems written at the peak of her creative career – between 1900 and 1906. There is also a poem in this book called “Cowardice,” quoted by the Strugatsky brothers in the story “A Billion Years Before the End of the World.”