『産褥の記』からの歌

Akiko Yosano (1878-1942), poet and feminist, is considered one of the most important poets in Japanese modern literature. When her first book of poems, Midare Gami, was published in 1901, it met with controversy for pushing the traditional tanka form—which often deals with interiority—by adding exteriority to it. In this book love is not just an emotion, but something that must be experienced physically. The raw emotionality and sexual imagery of these poems caused unease among the still conservative and male-dominant Meiji poetry critics. She also lived an unconventional life for a woman of that period: she eloped with a married man, bore thirteen children (of which eleven lived), became a breadwinner, started a progressive school, and was a proponent of woman's independence, all while having a prolific writing career, producing over 30,000 poems and eleven books of prose.

Mariko Nagai is a poet, prose writer, and translator. She was born in Tokyo, Japan, and raised in Europe and the United States. She has received fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, UNESCO-Aschberg Bursaries for the Arts, Akademie Schloss Solitude, and others, and has won the prestigious Pushcart Prizes for both poetry and fiction. She is the author of Histories of Bodies: Poems (2007), Georgic: Stories (2010), Instructions for the Living (2012), Dust of Eden (2014), and The Promised Land: A Novel (forthcoming from Aqueous Press, 2016). She lives in Tokyo, Japan, and is an Associate Professor at Temple University, Japan.