SOURCE: "Yosano Akiko and the Re-Creation of the Female Self: An Autogynography," in Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese, Vol. 25, No. 1, April, 1991, pp. 11–26.

In the following essay, Larson discusses Akiko's conception of women's role in society.

Yosano Akiko was not one to accept passively the limited life script to which many women of her time acquiesced: birth, childhood, marriage, motherhood, and death. Neither was she one to attribute her own significance in the world to the status of the men in her life—her father Sôshichi, a prominent merchant in Sakai, near Osaka, and her husband, Yosano Tekkan, the famous editor of the magazine Myôjô. Refusing to limit herself to the socially acceptable, domestic work of eros and reproduction, she imagined an entirely different script for herself, an ambitious one which embraced action and production of culture in the public sphere. Thus, Akiko wrote...