Three Women Poets of Modern Japan/Preface

he Japanese are masters of miniature. Nothing delights them more than to express much in little. They create entire landscapes in gardens measured in inches. It is supreme happiness for a Japanese to sit beside a bowl of water which represents a lake, and to see therein tiny crags of rock, dwarfed sea-plants, infinitesimal fish—all in true proportion so that he gains the illusion of the greater world. In a small earthen pot he will keep a strange stunted tree, old and gnarled, perhaps only six inches high, but with all the majesty of a mammoth oak. If he is a painter he will try to capture in three strokes of the brush the sacred dignity of Fuji-yama. If he is a poet he will devote his life to the task of imprisoning in five short lines the greatest wisdom of man. He will, by the genius of his imagination, discover the ultimate meaning of life in the trembling of a cherry-blossom.

Why this race should have developed so extraordinary a love for art in almost ​microscopic proportions is a question that might easily interest the anthropologist, the psychologist, the economic determinist, or any other person concerned with causes. There are many of us, however, who care more for results than for causes, and when we approach the field of Japanese poetry we accept at once the fact that for at least fourteen centuries a poetry-loving people has contented itself for the most part with tanka, or poems of thirty-one syllables, and that the principal variation from the tanka is the hokku, which contains only seventeen syllables, and which originally formed the first movement of the tanka.

As everyone can imagine, to translate these tiny, delicately wrought poems into English verse is a tantalizing problem. For one thing, they do not make use of meter, for the Japanese language is practically without stress; nor do they use rhyme, except by accident or occasional repetition. Their form is based upon strict rules of syllabic quantity. Thus the tanka is composed of five lines containing respectively five, seven, five, seven, seven syllables. The first three lines constitute a unit, as do the last two. These two movements lend themselves to such natural poetic affinities as question and answer, impression and reaction, the ​particular and the universal. We are familiar with a similar method employed in the Italian sonnet. But in the sonnet, which we consider a highly condensed verse form, there is after all considerable elaboration of idea, whereas in the tanka there is the merest suggestion—a flash of the imagination only, and the wonder is that Japanese poets are so frequently able to accomplish in their thirty-one syllables as much as our sonneteers accomplish in nearly five times that number.

The secret of the Japanese poem is, of course, the secret of all great poetry: namely, suggestion. The minimum of statement and the maximum of suggestion is the creed that most poets, or other artists, would come nearest agreeing on, I believe. At any rate it is astonishing to discover what long flights the imagination can take with no more than the clipped wings of the tanka or hokku.

Those who are at all familiar with Japanese history know that from the earliest times women have excelled in literature. One of the outstanding poets of the ninth century was Ono no Komachi, beautiful, gifted, and destined to be the center of innumerable legends and dramas. Her work appears in all anthologies of classic Japanese verse. Then there is Murasaki Shikibu, who, close ​to the year 1000 composed the great Tale of Genji (Genji Monogatari), which is now appearing in a new English translation and taking the Western world by storm. There are many others—court ladies, for the most part—whose writings have come down to us as proof of their literary proficiency, but space forbids mention of them. In mediaeval days a lady was scarcely a lady unless she could compose clever poems and transcribe them in a beautiful hand.

Today this tradition is not forgotten. Poetry is an important part of everyone’s education in Japan. It is essential to social standing, and is not considered amiss even in political circles, for a member of the House of Peers often prides himself on the ability to epitomize his wisdom in a hokku. The modern woman of Japan, aristocratic or common, makes poetic composition a natural part of her life. The lady of leisure, reclining in her boudoir, fancies herself a modern Komachi, and gracefully indites her choicest thoughts. The bustling housewife pauses long enough in her tiresome routine to scribble a five-line sentiment in her diary. I know of a Japanese woman in America who has covered her kitchen walls with tanka!

​Of the millions of little poems written in Japan, few are excellent, and few survive, but in this survival the poems by women have an even chance with those by men. It would be extremely difficult to find three masculine poets of modern Japan whose work would surpass or equal the work of the three women represented in this collection.

A considerable number of tanka and hokku have been translated into English, especially during this century. These translations, which have given pleasure to innumerable readers, and hints to many poets, have generally been cast in conventional Occidental forms. The rhymed quatrain has been employed most frequently. Now such renderings seem to the present translators inappropriate. An uncharacteristic musical value is introduced by the use of rhyme, and the difficult matter of giving accurate expression to the content is made doubly difficult by adherence to a definite stanza form. Free verse poems, as brief as possible, not too musical nor yet too prosaic, seem best to convey to Western ears the sense and effect of the original. Fully cognizant of the inadequacy of any method of translation, we commend these miniatures to those who admire the delicate and impressionistic in poetry. —G. H.