1.
As I climb into
The car, I know I am not
Coming back alive.
The hospital gate looks much
Like an execution ground.
2.
I thrash in pain and
Become a baneful dragon.
I wail in anguish
And become a boar in pain.
How else can I endure this?
3.
As a neonate
Tears apart its own mother
From inside out, time
Looks on indifferently,
Without compassion or care.
4.
The healthy child wails
While the other one does not.
My conscience crashes,
Each and every bone inside
Me breaking into pieces.
5.
The child inside me
Tears and bites at my womb
Every time it wordlessly
Thrashes its arms around,
Pain searing that shut even the devils up.
6.
The weaker child died
Inside of my womb before
It had a chance to breath.
It fought against me, its mother.
It fought against her, its sister.
7.
Sad is the sight of
A half-dead mother lying
Next to her unbreathing child.
A barren cold floor
Of the dim birthing room.
8.
This child, who traded
Its own life so I can live,
Is placed inside
A wooden box as if it
Were a mere porcelain bowl.
9.
Delirious in
Pain, in the threshold between dream
And life, I heard the news
Of still-born birth, that I gave
Birth to emptiness itself.
10.
I curse you. I curse
You, men. Not having to give
Birth, you do not risk
Your lives to give birth like us,
Look how much freedom you have.
from An Essay on Birthing
Akiko Yosano
translated from the Japanese by Mariko Nagai
Akiko Yosano (1878-1942), poet and feminist, is considered one of the most important poets in Japanese modern literature. When her first book of poems, Midare Gami, was published in 1901, it met with controversy for pushing the traditional tanka form—which often deals with interiority—by adding exteriority to it. In this book love is not just an emotion, but something that must be experienced physically. The raw emotionality and sexual imagery of these poems caused unease among the still conservative and male-dominant Meiji poetry critics. She also lived an unconventional life for a woman of that period: she eloped with a married man, bore thirteen children (of which eleven lived), became a breadwinner, started a progressive school, and was a proponent of woman's independence, all while having a prolific writing career, producing over 30,000 poems and eleven books of prose.
Mariko Nagai is a poet, prose writer, and translator. She was born in Tokyo, Japan, and raised in Europe and the United States. She has received fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, UNESCO-Aschberg Bursaries for the Arts, Akademie Schloss Solitude, and others, and has won the prestigious Pushcart Prizes for both poetry and fiction. She is the author of Histories of Bodies: Poems (2007), Georgic: Stories (2010), Instructions for the Living (2012), Dust of Eden (2014), and The Promised Land: A Novel (forthcoming from Aqueous Press, 2016). She lives in Tokyo, Japan, and is an Associate Professor at Temple University, Japan.
