"Stunningly brilliant, beautifully written, rich, and enthralling" --Persimmon, Spring 2003 (Read full review)

"Enlightening" --Monumenta Nipponica 58 (2003)

"A welcome addition to the relatively meager amount of writing in English on modern Japanese poets" --Journal of Asian Studies, November 2003

"A richly documented and rewarding study.... [Beichman] really seems to know Akiko better than any other biographer, Japanese or foreign, and she also identifies with her as no other scholar has before." --Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, June 2004

"Valuable" --Daily Yomiuri, 9 March 2003

"Beichman has laboured long and hard to understand Akiko's originals, and her scholarly effort is rewarded in the accuracy of her translations." --Japanese Studies 24 (2004)

"Combining biography, commentary, translation, interpretation, and critique, Beichman traces Akiko's developing career with a fine eye for detail and for the significant factors that led to the poet's astonishing success." --The Japan Times, 29 June 2003

How did a girl from the provinces, meant to do nothing more than run the family store, become a bold and daring poet whose life and work helped change the idea of love in modern Japan? Embracing the Firebird is the first book-length study in English of the early life and work of Yosano Akiko (1879-1942), the most famous post-classical woman poet of Japan. It follows Akiko, who was born into a merchant family in the port city of Sakai near Osaka, from earliest childhood to her twenties, charting the slow process of development before the seemingly sudden metamorphosis.

Akiko's later poetry has now begun to win long-overdue recognition, but in terms of literary history the impact of Midaregami (Tangled Hair, 1901), her first book, still overshadows everything else she wrote, for it brought individualism to traditional tanka poetry with a tempestuous force and passion found in no other work of the period. Embracing the Firebird traces Akiko's emotional and artistic development up to the publication of this seminal work, which became a classic of modern Japanese poetry and marked the starting point of Akiko's forty-year-long career as a writer. It then examines Tangled Hair itself, the characteristics that make it a unified work of art, and its originality.

The study throughout includes Janine Beichman's elegant translations of poems by Yosano Akiko (both those included in Tangled Hair and those not), as well as poems by contemporaries such as Yosano Tekkan, Yamakawa Tomiko, and others.

Janine Beichman is professor in the Department of Japanese Literature, Daito Bunka University, and lecturer in the Department of Comparative Literature, Tsukuba University.

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