After his 1986 publication From the Country of Eight Islands with Burton Watson, a comprehensive anthology of Japanese poetry that spans “Susano-o's Song” in the Kojiki to poems from Takahashi Mutsuo's 1977 Poems of a Penisist, Hiroaki Sato embarked on another monumental undertaking, his 2008 Japanese Women Poets: An Anthology. This long-anticipated work compares in its scope and breadth to Kang-I Sung Chang's Women Writers of Traditional China (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999) or Wilt Idema and Beata Grant's The Red Brush (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), for instance. Once again beginning with the Kojiki, Sato translates selections from more than 100 Japanese women poets, placing considerable emphasis on modern poets, beginning with the well-known Yosano Akiko and ending with Hachikai Mimi, born in 1974.
One of the beauties of this anthology, compared to others that attempt a comprehensive view of Japanese women's poetry, such as Kenneth Rexroth and Ikuko Atsumi's Women Poets of Japan (New York: New Directions, 1977), is Sato's contextualization of the works within literary history, which helps make this anthology not only a great reference work for scholars, but also an appropriate text for undergraduate and graduate courses in Japanese literature. Suggesting that tenth-century imperial women's “desires to understand the poems” of the Man'yôshû “was an impetus to the first systematic attempt to read the large collection” (p. 15), Sato goes on to present the literary criticism of women poets such as twelfth-century Lord Shunzei's daughter (actually the imperial poet and anthologist Fujiwara no Shunzei's adopted granddaughter, as Sato points out in his introduction), who decries in her critical work Mumyô Sôshi (ca. 1200) the “mortifying” state of women poets “who have fine-tuned our sensibilities and studied the Way of Poetry” by have “not . . . been asked to edit an imperial anthology” (cited on p. xxiii). Lord Shunzei's daughter is invoked later when the Nun Abutsu praises her for her surprising poetic interpretation of a poem from the Tale of Genji. Through his editorial choices, Sato creates a series of echoes and reverberations among the poets that further contribute to our understanding of the history of early Japanese women's poetry as a conversation among poets, critics, and texts.
Stressing the “neglected” genre of kanshi (p. xliii), Sato presents a generous array of poems from several female practitioners, included the often-translated Ema Saikô, but also other fairly well-known but less translated poets such as Hara Saihin and Yanagawa Kôran, as well as a few others, such as Kamei Shôkin, who are rarely translated, despite gems such as Shôkin's brief “Japan's number-one plum / will open for you tonight. / Want to know the flower's true intent? / Come treading the moon, at midnight” (p. 208). Sato extends the selection of these poets’ works featured in Timothy Bradstock and Judith Rabinovitch's 1997 anthology of Edo-era kanshi, including, for instance, poems by Saihin that match her “masculine” style and interests with her focus on drinking, as in this unexpected image in “Leaving Hometown for Edo”: “May Father and Mother prosper, / I the traveler be peaceful. / I drink cup after cup to ride a whale” (p. 211). Sato's brilliance as a translator shines through again and again throughout the anthology, especially in his unparalleled sense of diction. Compare his “brew blossoms, which has been translated elsewhere as “bearing flowers,” in Saihin's “I do not know, before it clears up again, / how many branches will brew blossoms” (p. 209). With such an original use of language, we occasionally forget that we are reading translations.
Particularly noteworthy in the modern section is the large selection of poems by women poets who write about the Pacific War and its aftermath, as in Sato's translation of “My Residence After Japan's Defeat” by Fukao Sumako (pp. 208–81):
On the torn shoji
soiled swans flap, flap.
The mirror is covered with cracks,
the rose in the vase thoroughly beaten.
Outside the window
everyone's soiled as soiled can be.
The earth, out of oil, is rickety-rackety.
Isn't there a room for rent on some star?
Like a greedy crow I
bite into enormous sufferings …
In her tanka, Okinawan poet Nomura Hatsuko approximates battle with the unblinking horror of any card-carrying member of the male-dominated Arechi coterie: “Every time the soldier whose jaw is shot though tries to speak maggots splutter out of it ” (p. 350). Proletarian writer Matsuda Tokiko creates her own form of “Resident Registration”: “No question, I, too am Japanese … Eyes: brown. / Hair: turning gray. / Teeth: rotten.” Marveling later in the poem, “Yes, sir, / my two feet remain sucked in the squishy soil of this nation,” Matsuda continues, “But even if you plant rice or wheat seeds in my arms or legs, nothing will grow there” (pp. 309–10). Offering a far wider range of women poets writing about the War than other translators who tend to focus on the same one or two voices, Sato reminds us just how fertile the field of Japanese women's poetry really is.
