Love’s Religious Purity and Guilt in Yamakawa Tomiko’s Tanka

• In Event: X-Files from Modern Japan: Spirits, Spirituality, and Parapsychology in Modern Japanese Literature

Abstract

Yamakawa Tomiko (1879-1909), a member of the Tokyo New Poetry Society (Tōkyō shinshisha), is perhaps best known for her complicated rivalry with Yosano Akiko (1878-1942) for Yosano Tekkan’s (1873-1935) love. But her poetry deserves special attention, not only because it illuminates one of the most famous love triangles in modern Japanese letters, but also because of the creative and problematic ways in which it translates romantic love into a kind of religious experience—specifically a Christian experience, in line with Yamakawa’s own religious beliefs. Building on scholarship about Meiji-era (1868-1912) discourses of love (eventually standardized as ren’ai), and my own previous work on Yosano Akiko’s multifaceted exploitation of religious exaltation and angst in her early tanka, in this paper I argue that Yamakawa combined romantic anxiety and religious guilt into poems of complex devotion. I examine the effect of her tanka in the context of their publication—a mixture of romantic and religious poems, published in the journal Myōjō and in collections alongside Akiko’s—and I consider the reception of such poems at a time when Christianity was both associated with progressive gender ideals in Japan and a belief not widely shared by her audience. More broadly, this paper suggests new prospects in which to situate poetic acts of mysticism and genius.

Author

• Nicholas Albertson, Wake Forest University