Girl in a Box
The book’s subtitle says “A Novel,” but Girl in a Box is very closely modeled on the life of poet Yosano Akiko (1878-1942). Akiko was born just as Japan was breaking out of its isolationism and opening its arms to modernity and the art and culture of Europe. Although she didn’t make it past middle school, Akiko managed to read all the classics, learning ancient Japanese at home, which enabled her to read the The Tale of Genji, a book that inspired and consoled her for the rest of her life. She wrote Tanka, thirty-one syllable poems that referred to the seasons and included a prompt word. Her parents tolerated it as long as she was unmarried. She was expected to work in her parents’ confectionary shop and marry a man who already worked there. Until then, like many Japanese girls, she was locked in her room at night—the Girl in the Box. But she already saw herself as a poet, and escaped her respectable family to become that. She fled to Tekkan Yosano, poet, publisher, and philanderer, but he enabled and supported her poetry career. Akiko would have thirteen children with him, mostly support the family with her writing, teaching, and lecturing, and become the first modern female Japanese poet of note, just as the author of The Tale of Genji had been the first female novelist nearly a thousand years before.
Kocienda is an American author who lived in Japan and speaks Japanese. She supplies her own evocative translations of Akiko’s poems, poems that spill out of Akiko’s feelings and sensual passions. Her version of Akiko feels very modern, easy for us to identify with even eighty years later after her death. Luckily for us, several of her books are now available in English.
