Review Article
Memories of a Woman, Harue Aoki
Memories of a Woman, Harue Aoki, Mure Bungakukai, Tokyo, 2001 ISBN 4-9900961-0-X, 1800 yen
The tradition of female poets of tanka extends down the centuries from Japan’s first poetry anthology (ca. 759), but the date of modernity, of feminism, must begin with the startling volume of Akiko Yosano’s Tangled Hair in 1901. Akiko jolted the literary world of Meiji Japan with a daring emphasis on her own body and desires, yet modern readers cannot help but see her troubled complexity. While Harue Aoki’s tanka in her Memories of a Woman are not as daringly passionate as Akiko’s, her tanka display their own individual charm and complexity, for in Japanese culture, a woman of sensitivity and intelligence somehow bears up, proceeds with her duties as wife and mother, and turns to art and other sub-stitutes. ‘Charming’ is a complicated word; so one can rebel at its all-inclusiveness since charm can hide one’s honne (real personality) in submitting to tatemae (one’s public response): In the depth of my spirit / with a heavy heart / I do the household chores/assuming a peaceful, calm/contented appearance (p. 153).
In 200 tanka selected from her tanka collection Omoide (Memories, 2000} and translated by the poet herself, we see Harue Aoki’s charm, her poems a diary of her everyday life. The first poem reveals her to be thirty years old; a later poem notes her age as forty (p38). In the earlier poems her two boys are youngsters, and in preparation for the family’s three-year trip to Germany, Harue packs a book of fairy tales (p9). After the return from Germany, she watches, in one tanka, her ten-year-old son pick a spring herb ( p66) , and in a later tanka she hears her boys playing ping-pong at the family’s summer home (p119). I imagine her joy in the following tanka must have occurred when her elder son passed the difficult high school entrance exams: My first son passed his exam / The joy of this news/ surges over me / I bought a bouquet of orchids/and a pack of strawberries, too (p125). In the poem on p150 she talks about her middle-school boy’s height. But the often recurring note on the deficiency of one’s life occurs when feeling her boys are grown up, she wonders if they are beginning to neglect her (p90).
Under the surface of these everyday diary-like poems is the insufficiency, the sadness, the solitariness of the poet. The tanka that discloses her age as forty has the line my marriage is false (p138). I find poignancy in For a while/looking out over a lake / regretting the passing of many years / How many years / have passed without embrace (p157). Another tanka notes how she walked aimlessly one Sunday on her wedding anniversary (p134). To admit such feelings is difficult for any Japanese woman, but Harue is perhaps able to do so as a result of her upbringing after the war: Freedom to speak / my own opinion / This I was taught / Deeply, into the mind / of my childhood, after the war (p180).
I suspect that Westerners might find a number of these tanka overly sentimental, yet in the context of Japanese culture the poems take on a simplicity and immediacy with a charm that becomes disturbing. That her private life has its perpetual disharmony may explain why she has interested herself in the arts: koto playing, classical music, opera, dance, Noh, and flower-arranging. Many allusions appear in these poems, Schumann, Mozart, Chagall, Rouault, Carmen, Zimmerman the pianist, Mad King Ludwig II, and Laurencin, to cite only a few.
I feel a direct connection in Harue’s tanka to Akiko Yosano’s parading of her own beauty in the latter’s rebellion against Japanese culture, but Harue has in her own awareness of her beauty that other note which diminishes narcissism: Putting red lipstick on / It makes me a woman / vivid and happy / fortunate and lively / though I'm empty and lonely (p11); After I looked in a mirror / actual, naked appearance / I’m in silence/all day long with jealous / remembrance of young, sweet days (p78); A dreary feeling / in a spring night / It’s hard to shake off / I comb my long hair / until my heart’s content (p117).
That Harue Aoki translated her own poems into English is itself an achievement. Though she acknowledges the help of a friend, John Payne, she, like a number of American haiku and tanka poets, is perhaps unaware of the dangling participial phrase. At times too the idiom or tense breaks down. Sometimes, as she says in her preface, she has added lines that do not appear in the Japanese version, which accompanies each poem in English on a single page along with the transliteration. But these are small matters. I find in her direct simplicity of language the small personal moment in time that is the essence of tanka, as in her poem on p171: My bright red blood / is sucked into a syringe / till it is full of blood / I look upon the colour / as proof I am alive.
Page(s) 63-65
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