SOURCE: "Passion and Patience: Aspects of Feminine Poetic Heritage in Yosano Akiko's Midaregami and Tawara Machi's Sarada Kinenbi," in Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese, Vol. 25, No. 2, November, 1991, pp. 177-94.

In the following excerpt, Strong examines Akiko's poetry as it relates to traditional women's poetry in Japan.

In reading commentaries on Japanese poetry, especially poetry in the traditional thirty-one syllable tanka form, I have always been struck by the use of the term joryu kajin (woman poet, or poet in the women's tradition). The commentators, for the most part male, appear to use the term as a simple signal of gender; a joryu kajin is a woman poet of any period, and any woman who writes (or who wrote) poetry is by virtue of those two facts a joryu kajin. The presence of the highly imagistic character ryu, while intriguing, seems almost a meaningless curiosity.

Almost...