Even in her sorrow, the circumstances demanded she take on the family business. Returning home in her thirties, her own heart wrestled with life’s impermanence upon the deaths of both her parents, her brother, and his wife. Chiyo-ni somehow side-stepped these obstacles and one of her earliest haiku (written at the prompt of a Zen master) received widespread acknowledgment. Although there were at least 300 women poets writing during her time and although class strictures had loosened some, women’s conduct remained narrowly defined and most females had to enter the art world through husbands or brothers. There she befriended many artists and attended haiku meetings―sometimes being the only woman in a room full of samurai, merchants, Buddhists, and farmers. In her twenties she made the arduous trek over mountainous terrain to Kyoto, to participate in the cultural renaissance. Born nine years after Basho’s death, Chiyo-ni apprenticed with two of his disciples, which advanced an early recognition of her haiku at age 19. At his school he taught that students must follow the ‘Way of Haiku’ and impart both change and permanence in their poems. Within this milieu a male haiku poet, Basho (1644-1694), rose to great renown. Kabuki theater featured themes of resistance, helping to promote a loosening of hierarchical groupings and a rising prominence of the working and merchant classes. Japan was in the middle of a renaissance, referred to as the Edo period (1603-1867) with arts and entertainment flourishing. In doing so he advantaged her with an education and the opportunity to refine her poetry. Her father recognized his daughter’s promise and at age 12, sent her to work as a servant in the home of a haiku master―a common practice among the merchant class. Within this visionary landscape, she began to compose verse. A road leading to the capital city of Kyoto passed in front of her family’s home and provided a regular flow of poets and artists stopping by to have their work mounted. Takahashi Hiroaki’s “Snow on Ayase River,” woodcut print (1915)Ĭhiyo-ni was born in 1703, into a family of scroll makers. Guided by the image of the translucent water and the chime of the local Buddhist temple bell, Chiyo-ni pursued the way of haiku―merging the mundane moment with the eternal. The fertile agricultural area had four distinct seasons and in spring the winter snowpack overflowed the rivers and streams with crystalline water. Shoen Uemura’s “Composition of a Poem” (1942)Ĭhiyo-ni, one of Japan’s most remarkable female poets, grew up in a village at the foot of one of the country’s three holy mountains.
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