Akiko’s Breasts

The 1980 BBC documentary series The Shock of the New traced the development of Western art from the Impressionists to the present day. Although the documentary is mostly forgotten now, the core idea conveyed by the title is still relevant. The Shock of the New helps explain how blotches of paint on canvas, or strips of paper glued to a wall, could be considered art.  New ideas only look obvious in retrospect, like electric lights, toothpaste, and democracy.  They can be a shock at first. Artisans create beautiful or interesting objects; artists create something new.  

In 1901, Yosano Akiko and her husband Hiroshi published Midaregami (Tangled Hair), a collection of tanka poetry that challenged traditional constraints on Japanese poetry. The poems followed traditional form and meter, and incorporated references to Chinese and Japanese classical literature. But they pulsed with energy, youth, color, and sexual innuendo. One particularly scandalous poem reads: 

Press my breasts, 
Part the veil of mystery, 
A flower blooms there, 
Crimson and fragrant.[1]

To understand why this tanka and others like it were a shock, remember what was going on in Japan in 1901. For more than 200 years, Japan had been closed to almost all international communication. Only a handful of Dutch and Chinese traders were allowed onto a sequestered island in Nagasaki until 1854. Japanese society had been stagnating for decades. With the arrival of the modernizing Meiji Emperor in 1868, however, Japan undertook an astonishingly quick transformation. Western technology, art and philosophy flooded into Japan. Meiji-era Japanese assimilated modern Western science, technology, and military thought in a matter of a few decades. Cultural assimilation took longer. Akiko and her generation of young writers, despite sometimes harsh criticism, were among the first to take Western literary ideas and make them uniquely Japanese. 

This is not to suggest that Japanese literature prior to Akiko was never titillating, or that Japanese poets were prudes. Far from it. Akiko was not even the first to bring Western-style praise of common scenes and everyday experiences to the classical tanka poetic form. In fact, Akiko’s husband Hiroshi, who was also a noted poet, lead the way. This 1898 poem, written by Hiroshi under the pen name Tekkan, garnered critical attention by describing the most common of scenes: 

Early spring – in a teashop

On Dōkan Hill, a student eating rice cakes

Wears hakama trousers.[2]

But as a young woman talking matter-of-factly about sexual desire, Akiko gave the literary movement another kick in the pants. Tangled Hair sold like cold beer at a baseball game. 

Going back to The Shock of the New, one more thought: Newness alone does not make art. For me, art also needs to evoke an emotional response.  Art should bring insight.  It should express something we recognize on a personal level, even if we cannot not express it ourselves.  Akiko does this for me, and not only in her sexy poems. I love her for those, but there are so many others that transport me. Their accessibility and freshness surprise me, given that Akiko lived long ago and far from the world I know.  Here’s one:

She is a lamb wandering thirsty in the forest

And he is water

I ‘get it’. It is not titillating to a reader sitting in San Francisco in 2021, where talk of breasts and female sexual desire are like daily gossip, but it sings to me, 120 years later.

[1] https://allpoetry.com/Press-My-Breasts

[2] Janine Beichman, Embracing the Firebird,  University of Hawaii Press, 2002, p.71.