Passage III

HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from Women Poets of the World by Rob Swigart (©1983 by Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.). This passage explains how women from the Heian Period helped to shape Japanese literature.

Poetry begins in life and its necessities, but in order to flourish as a written art it requires leisure, the time to pursue and to perfect. The Heian Period (794-1185 A D.) in Japan provided an abundance of that leisure and the desire to perfect a tradition which is unique in the histories of world literature.

The word Heian itself means "peace," "tranquillity." Culture—visual arts, literature, philosophy, music一was concentrated in Kyoto, where an elegant court gathered around the Emperor and his family. Outside of the capital there was little of interest to these perhaps two thousand people; enormous energy was concentrated injusta few square miles, an energy which could be devoted entirely to clothing, poetry, food, incense and intrigue. There were no wars, no invasions from outside this insulated and insular country, no popular uprisings to distract attention from the refinement of the senses....

...Japanese was, during the entire Heian era, considered unsuited to the lofty thoughts of serious poetry, for which the Chinese language was reserved. Japanese would be used for occasional poems, love verses, the literature of seduction and lament. It was left to women to write in Japanese, in the vernacular, while men reserved the supposedly more difficult Chinese for themselves, unaware that what they were writing was imitation Chinese literature, inferior to the original, and, above all, inferior to what contemporary women were writing in their native tongue. . . . But in time it became apparent that all that once appeared trivial and marginal was in fact the outstanding achievement in Japanese literature, and one of the greatest achievements in all of world literature. Women produced the best, the greatest classics in Japanese: not simply The Tale of Genji, Murasaki's Diary, the Pillow Book of Sei Sho nag on, but the poetry of Ono no Komachi, Ise, Otomo no Sakanoe and others. So important were women to the native literature that when men set their hands to writing poetic diaries, as Ki no Tsurayuki did in the Tosa Diary, they often wrote under the persona of a woman.

It is clear then that women occupied a strong position in Japan during the first centuries following the development of literacy, so long as the vernacular remained outside the realm of power and prestige. During these first five hundred years they created the themes, forms and moods which shaped subsequent Japanese literary tradition: the tanka, with its elegiac tone and characteristic imagery; the diary; and the novel.

Deeply embedded in the poems of [Japanese women] are feelings of regret about the shortness of life, the fickleness of love, and the ravages of age, which imbue them with a brooding melancholy. They rapidly became conventionalized and traditional, a sorrowful lament, perhaps, for the passing of desire as much as for the torment of it. These elegiac feelings, and a dark mysteriousness, are an essential part of the tradition, with special literary terms and meanings; they are no longer confined to women.

At the end of the Heian era, when political and military upheaval destroyed the leisurely culture in Kyoto, men, and martial virtues, took over the vernacular as well as official culture. Then poetry became something to occupy the rare moments of rest in a soldier's life, or in the lives of hermits, priests, or courtiers confined to the distant court far from important events.

The imitation of Chinese poetry became a secondary occupation even for men; women surrendered their pre-eminence in the vernacular literature, and finally, as in so many other cultures, nearly vanished from the anthologies. The tradition they had done so much to shape was carried on by men.

Not until the beginning of the twentieth century did women reappear as an important force in Japanese literature, despite the existence of one or two significant haiku poets, for example Chiyo, in the Tokugawa period. Some modern women poets, like Yosano Akiko, returned to traditional forms, haiku and tanka (which had fallen into disuse), and made use of traditional imagery, but expanded the range of feeling and experience to include more psychological and emotional complexity. Others, like Shiraishi Kazuko, have absorbed various manifestations of Western culture, from T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and other modern poets to jazz rhythms and cabaret songs. The swift industrialization of post-World War II Japan has produced changes in lifestyle and in the conditions of women; these changes have had a profound effect on their poetry.