Poetry as Love, a reading of Kiyoko Nagase

September 06, 2009 Formative years

In 1868, the Emperor Meiji reclaimed executive control of the government from the Shogunate, which had controlled Japan for over three centuries as a confederation of feudal fiefdoms totally secluded from the outside world. The Meiji government systematically and speedily installed completely new political, legal, social and educational structures. They were modeled on what they thought to be the best practices among Western developed nations at the time, but aimed equally to preserve the moral and ethical structure of a Confucian ideal, which demanded harmony and obedience to superiors. The Emperor’s stated goal was to build a rich and mighty nation that could compete amongst the world’s powers. By the turn of the century, Japan was well on its way to vying with the ambitious nations of the West. 

In terms of general social mindset, the Confucian edicts that had already been drilled into the national psyche during feudal times were reinforced in terms of social protocol and manners. Japanese society was stratified under the newly installed order into a hierarchy, and respect for and obedience to the higher social levels were strictly observed.

In particular, men were considered superior to women. Women were taught to obey, first their parents, then their husbands when they married, then their sons when they aged. They were expected to obediently and selflessly accommodate the men in the house, while men would take women for granted to the extent that it was beneath them to offer any words of thanks at all. Most girls were not allowed to pursue education beyond compulsory level; instead, appropriate training in manners and the domestic arts was considered a must to prepare them for tending to household duties. They were not encouraged to think on their own or stand their ground. Exceptionally creative women artists or writers were often ostracized and at best tolerated.

This unfortunate situation for women remained generally prevalent until after WWII, when the new constitution, ratified in 1947, provided women equal rights with men. The result was a wholesale change in social expectations for women.

But even while social conservatism was the norm, people were also being exposed to the new concepts, theories, and ideas of democracy, basic rights, socialism, and more, which were introduced from across the sea. In the 1880’s, the Civic Rights and Freedom movement had already gained force among young men, which naturally collided with the imperial edifice. Around the turn of the century and inspired by such movements, there were cases of similar activities among young women in Japan. One such group for cultivating awareness among women was established to offer lectures and educational programs for and about women in Okayama, Nagase’s hometown.

Her life

Into this society, energetic and full of new ideas, yet particularly stifling to women, Kiyoko Nagase was born, a landowner’s daughter. She was obviously a bright child, but her school principal advised her father against allowing her to receive higher education, even though she really wanted to continue in school. At least she was fortunate enough to have supportive parents who accommodated her desire to become a poet. At eighteen, she sent her poems to an established poet, Sonosuke Sato, who became her teacher in poetry composition. That same year, her parents arranged a marriage for her with their favorite young man, who would assume her family name. 

Later, Nagase said that her husband-to-be had agreed that he would allow her to continue writing after they married, and he kept his word. Still, her husband was a typical man of the times who was raised to assume that his wife was there to serve and cater to him. For a free-spirited and intelligent young woman, it was not easy to accept the situation, yet at the same time she felt guilty for not being able to be docile and domestic and to put her whole mind into serving her husband and her family as she knew society expected. This sense of guilt and insecurity is apparent throughout her writing. In spite of this psychological conflict, however, she served her husband well through his illness in later life. [See My Dear Silent One, My Indigo Mist, a beautiful and moving dirge for her deceased husband.] 

During WWII she supported her family as a novice farmer. To survive post-WWII hardships, she worked as a town clerk to supplement the income of her household during her husband's illness. Throughout these days, her daytime hours had to be occupied with hard work to make a living, so she got up in the middle of the night to devote herself to writing before the work day began. When we read her poetry we find some poems on convalescence, indications that she became exhausted and ill from the pressures of her life. But nowhere does she complain of the hardship of having to spend precious time on writing. Rather she expresses the joy of weaving her own world in poetry. She wanted to be a poet when she was young, and simply stayed her course no matter what.

Her poetry

Nagase wrote about the very beginning of her career as a poet in the essay “Unforgettable Words” in 1987:

It was 1924 when I first thought I would become a poet. It was the year I read Poems of Bin Ueda and it was also the year I first sent my own poem for a comment to Sonosuke Sato, my poetry teacher. Of course I could not write poetry like Ueda (I was 18 then), and besides, my teacher Mr. Sato said to me: “Forget all old poetic dictions of the past. Observe with your own eyes.”

His words were given to me as the major premise for my poetry writing, and like a duckling believes what it first sees as its mother, I had those words carved into my heart as the absolute command. […]

Then while in high school, I had a teacher who told me about [William] Blake. I found Blake’s proverbs more interesting than his poetry. They directed me towards thinking about how to live:

Improvement makes straight roads, but crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius.
Drive your cart and your plough over the bones of the dead.

and these forcefully urged me on.

These words stuck to me, …. and have stayed with me unchanged over the long years. Thinking back, that happened in early 1920’s.

It is too simple to call it poetics, but it was the spirit needed to break away alone from the conventions of the Meiji Era when poetry meant courtly tanka or pointed to the world of elegance. …


It is truly remarkable that Nagase was directed to probably the most advanced poetics of all time, and also she was already deeply affected by [William] Blake’s proverbs at the young age of 18. She took her teacher’s words to heart. When most other poets were struggling to negotiate with the traditional poetic dictions and syllabic cadences or to experiment in their efforts to break away from the past altogether, her words were smoothly and gracefully vernacular, with a natural cadence to match the emotional flow in her lines. She credits her achievements to Sonosuke Sato’s instructions.

Beyond the pertinent and fortunate guidance she received, she had the uncommon inner fortitude and resilience to pursue her career as a poet in the social circumstances in which she lived, so totally adverse to her ambitions. She had faith in the native survival instincts of women, and their power over their confined world guided by motherhood, even though that world was deeply hidden from general view. Her first book of poetry is entitled Grendel’s Mother. The title poem reads:

Grendel’s Mother

In the depths of her ancient cavern
at the far edge of a cyan marsh
(or at the bottom of a gloomy city
where electric poles cast shadows)
Grendel’s Mother,
with her bronze hair,
holds her children tightly in her arms

Her ancient monster’s eyes
stare at the entrance like a spider
Her powerful motherhood
like a helmet
gives them sanctuary
Her children will become great monsters of the North in due time
(or they will grow up to be
ones who steadily lap up the tears of multitudes in silence)

Even among their gruesome victims
each, alone, will step toward the sublime
will not melt away even amid evil and wrath,
and will not roar in pain
except in Mother’s arms!

Moonlight like fresh ore
rises from the profound depths of night
flares in cyan
over the ancient marsh
(or over the roof tiles in the city)
Grendel’s Mother
is now hiding in the heart of the cavern.

She uses the Beowulf legend to present Grendel’s mother, who had her arm cut off when she went to take revenge after Beowulf killed her son. In later life, Nagase commented that the history is one-sided, favoring the winner, and that the loser, the rebel, is labeled a monster, yet she thought there must have been reasons for the monster to rebel, even though they were considered evil at the time. In essence, she is trying to illuminate Grendel’s mother’s humanity and motherhood by exploring what the intimidating mother might have been like from another viewpoint. And she tells the reader that what she sees in Grendel’s mother is timeless. It astounds me to think that a young woman in a society that demanded her to be meek and submissive actually wrote this poem under the guise of presenting a scene from a legendary tale. Isn’t this a declaration of trust in the power and perseverance every mother or woman has or should have?

However, Nagase is not a one-sided feminist. She also sees the weaknesses of women as clearly as their strength. In ‘You in the Shade of a Tree’ she presents a gathering in a park like an impressionist painting. We see an unfolding drama of subtle interaction between an independent and intellectual woman and a coddled wife. The woman stands tall on her own ground, speaking with an outstanding man of intellect, while his beautiful wife insecurely peers over at them. While she is confident of her purely intellectual motive in speaking with the man, the woman knows that she also dressed herself to enhance her femininity. Her intellect pierces her own duality and finds the same frailty in herself as she sees in other women and she feels dejected. It is interesting that the woman is apparently Japanese, while the wife is a blue-eyed Westerner. Their roles are quite the reverse of what the stereotypes of the time would have led a reader to expect. Nonetheless her eyes are focused on weaknesses of women in general. It is significant, though, that this drama is framed like a European painting.

In one of her Aphorisms, ‘What is a Poet?’, she declares:

A poet must be more honest than anyone else.
In order to speak more honestly than anyone else
about the soul of mankind, about one’s own being
a poet shall master lying.

We see in Nagase a formidable mind at work, insightful, crafty, and fearless.

In terms of her subject matter, her materials were taken from her daily life, “knead[ing] malleable and familiar mud,” as she wrote it in ‘My Dear Silent One, My Indigo Mist’. Her observations were very careful and detailed, and they are placed effectively and succinctly to present her inspired reality.

Take ‘On a Day with a Gentle Breeze’, for example. This is a group of short jewel-like pieces, presenting a new mother still in respite after childbirth. In the first piece, in merely five lines, we share her surprise at the miracle of birth, “crying suddenly, as if you came rolling out of the heavens” and at her strong maternal instinct to protect her baby in the same manner as a wild animal. These five pieces let readers share a mother’s quiet observations of her own state of mind with her new baby, through simple and lucid lines.

From the very earliest stages of her poetic career, Nagase shows an uncommon capacity to focus on mundane details, and to let them project something much deeper and larger, to the point of reaching a higher human truth. And she knows and lets us realize that there are, more often than not, multiple aspects to such truth, depending on how the light is cast through the prism of a poet’s mind.

‘The Heavenly Maidens on Earth’ was written in the 1930’s. It is not hard to imagine that she must have been exasperated and frustrated in living the submissive role of a conventional housewife. At its core, this poem presents an innocent soul born free in the glorious heaven, now tied to the toilsome reality of making a living in this world. As we read this poem, we have a glimpse of the breezy and open heaven from which her soul originates, and which it does not stop yearning for, while we share with her the pain of being denied return to where her soul belongs, and being bound by her fetters to earth. Her experience is captured in detail, and is contrasted with the breezy freedom the heavenly maidens keep yearning for. Together they conjure a picture of heaven and earth.

The heavenly maiden is a favorite figure in Japanese folklore. Heavenly beauty and innocence, personified in a lovely, eternally young, womanly being, appears frequently in illustrations and paintings robed in layers of flowing sheer material that billow in the breezes she rides. She is an object of adoration and inspiration. Her robe is a vehicle to transport her to and from heaven where she belongs. Once she is deprived of her robe, she is bound to this earth, unable ever to return to heaven. There’s a popularly told tale of a young fisherman who steals a heavenly maiden’s robe. As she is bathing in the sea, leaving her robe hanging on a branch of a pine tree on the shore, he hides her robe, thus forcing her to stay with him on earth. The story ends with the maiden reclaiming her robe from the repentant young man to graciously depart to where she belongs.

Nagase’s poem contains many references to this folklore favorite. Its open and ethereal tone may owe something to the happy ending of the familiar tale of the heavenly maiden. But it is not a simple fairy-tale poem. It points to a fundamental belief in women’s inner resources.

As exemplified in this poem, Nagase considers innocent freedom of mind and thought as her birthright, the source of her creativity. That mindset was certainly at odds with the norms of the society she lived in. The real-life conflict between what she felt was her birthright and what life demanded of her and the women of her time adds another dimension to the poem. The contrast between these two worlds is stark; mundane details and fairy-tale elements are together sublimated to show a larger truth of the human condition. This poem illustrates her capacity to elevate her experiences to present a much broader and deeper human truth.

Much later, as she was working to earn a livelihood for her family after WWII, she wrote ‘Song of a Woman’. The working wife’s frustration with and even anger at her husband, as demanding and unreasonable as ever, is palpable. Yet, in spite of the underlying screaming frustration, the poem remarkably floats above bitterness or exasperation, and it achieves a lightness that sparkles in a fairy-tale perspective, delivering us to a comical cosmic wonder. The reader is left wondering whether “the ten billion years of separation” is to be celebrated or lamented.

‘Humor Me with Your Sweet Words’ also presents the complex and nuanced feelings of a woman about her beloved. On one level this poem is so supple and graceful that it could be taken as the voice of a woman coaxing her beloved ever so gently, in a seductive tone, to be more communicative and give her compliments and encouragement to lead her on. But that is just one plane of this poem. Nagase wrote that ‘Humor me with your sweet words’ was her own voice, and that she cried when she read it, recalling the time when she had to deal with her resentment at unreasonable demands for attention by her husband, and her inability to simply reject them. In this context, her resentment and frustrations are directed to both the unreasonableness of his demands and to the trained submissiveness she cannot shake. To make matters more complex, her love for her husband is also quietly but firmly behind it, along with her lack of confidence in her own self-worth.

That is why some read this poem as a submissive wife’s fawning plea. Indeed, her biographer actually expresses disappointment at this aspect of the poem based on her feminist viewpoint. But if a reader has a general understanding of the relationship between a woman and her husband in an old-fashioned family in Japan, without knowledge about the author’s own relationship to her husband, the reader will sense that this poem is a wife’s desperate plea for a nod or a word of appreciation from her uncommunicative husband. Nagase’s experiences prove this point: in an interview in her later years she mentioned that this was one of the most frequently requested poems at her poetry readings over the years, and some women actually cried as they listened to her reading.

In this poem the phrase, “humor me” is damasite-kudasai in the original, which, as words go, has a range of meanings such as “please deceive me, lie to me, sweet-talk me, or whisper me seductive words,” depending on the underlying circumstances. Clearly “deceive me” with malicious intent is totally out of place in this poem. “Lie to me” may be lurking in the folds of nuances in the sense of “even if it is a lie, do tell me.” Seduction is also at work here. The translator chose “humor me” because it connotes the tacit lies in an effort to accommodate the recipient’s perceived needs or desire.

There is yet another layer to this poem. Given Nagase’s capacity to elevate a set of mundane details to another plane of significance, it is not inconceivable that she also meant it to refer to her own writing. Nagase wrote about why she kept writing poetry:

When we climb a peak, we see a new vista open before us, but that is not all. We expect even a broader view when we climb another peak. Such endless urges and yearnings drive me on.
[... .]
I think I envisioned a person who would deeply understand my poetry, and wanted praise from that person. That person would have a broad perspective and good taste, and understand me better than anyone else, or best of all. I always wanted to meet that person’s expectations. I was a cart pulled by two imaginary horses, so to speak: how better I can express my heart, and how well I can be appreciated by the person who understands me well. Thinking back, my master Mr. Sonosuke Sato’s words, “Treat poetry like love,” has been to the point.

Here again, she took her teacher’s words to heart. She takes poetry as her love as seriously as a schoolgirl would cherish her first love. In order to grow her love, she needs to feed it with acknowledgement, recognition, and praise to counter her insecurity about her self-worth as a poet. When we read this poem in this context, ‘Humor me’ is a poem of earnest aspiration, imploring the imaginary someone, who would understand her poetry the best of all, to lead her on to ever higher peaks.

In many of her poems Nagase treats poetry as if it is a living person, the object of her love. ‘O You Who Come to Me at Dawn’ is a lament on and yearning for her love who has yet to come as she ages. With a hint of resignation now, she is still waiting. In a quiet voice, the woman recalls her youthful pain and anxiety, when she was hoping to meet her love, ready to elope. This poem was popularly received when it was published, and some asked the author who this lover actually was. Nagase graciously responded by describing the circumstances in which she wrote this poem one early morning in a coffee shop, and concluded her response with, “I suppose, what came to me was this poem,” according to her biographer.

Her teacher told her to “treat poetry like love,” and until she retired she had to write poetry only during the pre-dawn hours, before the working day started. Her love here is a simile for poetry, and she feels it as a living and waking presence. She wanted to meet a perfect piece of poetry in her youth, but it never materialized in her mind, and she is still waiting for it to come to her in her old age. She is “endlessly yearning” to “climb another peak.”

Nagase also speaks to “My dear one, who has not shown yourself to me/ though you are believed to be in this space” in ‘Dawn’. The words “My dear one” clearly indicate a person, yet invisible “in this space” where she is now. This is another example of Nagase personifying a poetry that seems forever elusive to her.

In order to write poetry, or to pursue her love, Nagase created a cocoon-like world of her own each night. ‘Burning a Light at Night’ gives us a glimpse of her creative process. When we read, “a quiet pathway I take all alone between today and tomorrow—/it filters the painful fevers from my daytime self/to make me into a crystalline droplet,” we find the reasons why her poems are never bitter even when she is openly dealing with subject matter that is so obviously unfair and unreasonable. The powerful energy to “filter the painful fevers” is her awesome resilience and creative drive. The resulting “crystalline droplet” is the prism that separates the human truth. These two books were particularly helpful in writing this essay:
Kiyoko Nagase from the Viewpoint of Women’s History [Post-WWII Period], by Itoko Ikubo, The Domesu Publishing, Tokyo, 2009
teach me to be tender, dialogues by Shuntaro Tanikawa, The Asahi Publishing, Tokyo, 1981