Black Arts & Culture Feature:
- The 20 poets, linked as mothers, lovers, tutors, rivals, and friends, composed within and beyond Emperors’ courts, constrained by men's authority.
- A persistent sense of waiting and containment pervades the poems; images like long hair symbolize restricted lives and private rebellion.
- The invention of Hiragana is presented as a female-written breakthrough, giving women new literary voice and cultural power.
- Naoko Fujimoto's Women: 20 Japanese Female Poets pairs poems with paper collages, asserting waka as a lifeline connecting women.
Reviewed by Tula Francesca
of Women: 20 Japanese Female Poets / 20 Waka Poems
edited by Naoko Fujimoto
Tupelo Press
June 2026, 83 pages, Paperback, ISBN-13: 978-1961209572
“Tell me all the rumors you have heard” – Naoko Fujimoto’s new book of Women: 20 Japanese Female Poets is a tactile, juicy pleasure. Juicy might seem an odd word to apply to a sophisticated layering of multiple renderings and contextual frameworks of ancient waka poetry. But through Fujimoto’s arresting haibun paragraphs, interpretive and spacious translations, and visual/graphic pieces that stand on their own right, these 20 women poets, and the eras they lived in, come to life in vivid, haunting detail.
Linked as mothers, lovers, tutors, rivals, and friends, the 20 poets selected by Fujimoto wrote in and out of Emperors’ courts, their fates decreed by the men around them. Some are household names, like Sei Shonagon of The Pillow Book. Others had no names at all. Women skilled with waka were invited to be part of the most esteemed salons in the Emperors’ courts, and drew suitors to the window with plum branches and requests for marriage. Others won instant fame through oral competitions, like the slam performances of the day. And yet – the sense of waiting is deeply felt:
Naniwa overgrown with reeds:
that space between –
their stalks shortest sheaths
how can I bear these moments without you?
Many of these female poets were curtailed – inside rooms, others’ spaces, the rules of custom. Becoming a nun was often the only way to certain freedoms. Even long hair – a symbol that appears often in these waka – was kept in a wooden box next to the pillow, in order to keep it neat. Fujimoto’s multiple explorations of each poet’s work unleash some of the tightness and containment. We can feel the breath of the poems unravel, or as Fujimoto observes, a restoration of “some of the informal freedom out of which many of these works arose.”
The invention of Hiragana – a system of writing entirely used by women – is an exciting development that threads through Of Women, and the reader can only imagine how triumphant it must have felt to use these new symbols. Men were even jealous.
“I have plenty of paper in this palace.” Paper and ink, the wealth shared by women when they had them. It seems utterly appropriate that the author has created a visual collage piece of Japanese papers – torn, cut, and inscribed – for each poet. Fujimoto eloquently, elegantly demonstrates how the art of waka could be a lifeline that connected women to each other and themselves. This is an important – and utterly enjoyable – new work.
About the reviewer: Tula Francesca (she/her) is a writer and artist in Northern California. Her work has appeared in Ambidextrous Bloodhound Press, Crab Creek Review, Fence, Feral: A Journal of Literature and Art, FLARE, Fron/tera, One Art, Phoebe, Piles Press, RHINO, and other places. She is the author of chapbooks If There Are Horns and This Was Like I Said All Gone. Find more at: tulafrancesca.com
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