Romantic Poems by Princess Nukata, Akiko and Narihira

English translation of the prose

AI-assisted English translation of the prose; quoted poems remain in Japanese. The Japanese original remains authoritative.

Originally published: 11 June 2026.

Material from the Japanese website. The author’s interpretations and historical assertions are retained as written. Quoted poems remain in Japanese.

The romantic poetry of Princess Nukata, Akiko, and Narihira

Seishu Hamano, President, Japan Romanticism Society

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Princess Nukata is the first woman to appear in Japanese literary history. At the beginning of the recorded history of ancient tanka, her work appears as romantic poetry. Its uninhibited feeling rivals Akiko Yosano’s: it is romanticism itself.

茜指す紫野行き標野行き野守は見ずや君が袖振る　額田王（ぬかたのおおきみ）

These thirty-one syllables alone show how richly endowed she was with romantic talent. The poet is not sitting quietly indoors. She is in a field all purple, with madder blooming profusely, addressing a heartfelt poem to the lover waving his sleeve toward her. She watches anxiously from a distance as he beckons, “Here—come here.” Nukata’s warning that the field keeper may see him reveals her anxiety about what would happen if a political rival were told. By shaping that feeling into a poem and revealing her passion, she is an accomplished romantic poet. Across a thousand years, she has something in common with Akiko Yosano’s やわ肌の熱き血潮に触れもみで淋しからずや道を説く君 in Midaregami, which appeared in the early twentieth century.

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Yet Machi Tawara’s mistaken interpretation has made the やわ肌の poem uninteresting. Playfully calling modern language “chocolate language,” Tawara has produced a wildly misguided interpretation.

鳳志よう, later Akiko Yosano, moved into the Yosano household almost as a self-appointed wife. She escaped her merchant family in Sakai and went to Hiroshi Yosano. By then this poem already belonged among those destined for Midaregami. Does it not ruin the poem to interpret it, in “chocolate language,” as pitying a husband who puts on his dress shirt to preach the way of poetry without touching her skin? Another interpretation holds that, while still in Sakai, Akiko fell in love with a young trainee monk at a nearby temple and wrote the uninhibited やわ肌 poem as though dedicating it to him. Even the young monk’s name is known.

She married Tekkan in 1901. Needless to say, their physical relationship was then intense. Tawara reads Tekkan as too busy expounding the way of poetry, which drains the heat from Hiroshi and Akiko’s relationship. It is not Hiroshi devoted to poetry, but someone concerned only with the Buddhist path, apparently unaware of her passion. The adolescent Akiko is saying: that is dull; instead of preaching Buddhism, touch my body and become a monk who breaks his vows—your heart will be fulfilled. Consider how fulfilling that would be. Only by reading the very young woman, barely finished or still finishing girls’ school, as saying that even transgression can make life worth living, the romantic path that honestly satisfies the heart, do we understand her passionate, sensitive romantic poetry. To interpret the poem as saying that he has no time for physical love because he is expounding poetry misses romanticism at its foundation. It is an extraordinary mistranslation, and disheartening to think this is still not understood.

The interpretation that she composed it because Tekkan, busy preaching poetry, no longer caressed her is itself ordinary and uninteresting. While still a student at the prefectural First Girls’ High School, now Senyo High School, Akiko felt sexual desire on seeing a young monk training at a nearby temple. The poem she wrote was a forerunner of modern romantic poetry; any other interpretation misconstrues romantic literature itself.

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やわ肌の熱き血潮に触れもみで寂しからずや道を説く君　晶子

This appeal to love her even at the cost of breaking monastic vows is also a bold arrow aimed at the militarism that praised honorable death in loyalty to the sovereign while preaching rigid moral education and filial piety. It unexpectedly coincides with the feelings of Nukata, who loved and was loved by both Emperors Tenmu and Tenji and exchanged vows with both. One can locate an ultimate aesthetic in the encounter between romanticism’s painful, helpless longing and the modes of stoicism and glorification of patriotic death.

Both Nukata and Akiko, expressing so much in only thirty-one syllables, concentrate the essence of romantic literature. Light and darkness, distant and near views: they depict all of it and project their feelings into the scene. It has been said that Nukata presented the poem playfully in old age, recalling her relationship with Tenmu. But women learn as they age that there is nothing to gain from such joking, so that interpretation is not worth valuing. Rather, recall the relationship with the gamekeeper in D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and recognize its correspondence with what Lawrence calls “livingism.” Seen differently, romanticism justifies sexuality as the joy of living vividly, connecting with a universality that transcends the cultural division between East and West.

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Many poets appeared before the age of the Shin Kokin Wakashu, and the colors of romanticism grew steadily richer.

名にし負はばいざ言問はむ都鳥わが想ふ女はありやなしやと　業平

In every age, officials posted to the provinces grow intensely homesick for the capital. The same is true in Britain. The sardonic British writer Somerset Maugham captures human weakness and petulance in “Before the Party,” “Footprints in the Jungle,” and other stories of the South Seas, repeatedly depicting thoroughly degraded middle-ranking colonial officials.

Maugham sees them all yearning to stand proudly as government officials in London society. In Heian Japan too, provincial officials gazed enviously at court life in the capital. Michizane, of the poem beginning 東風吹かば匂ひよこせよ梅の花…, had reached the end of his demotion. Nakamaro likewise could not forget Nara even after being sent to China, passing the civil-service examinations, and receiving generous treatment from Emperor Xuanzong. Just before returning home, he imagined the moon that rose over Mount Mikasa. In Tang China during Japan’s Nara period, Nakamaro associated with leading writers including Li Bai and Wang Wei. Despite such treatment, he could not shake off the resentment of an unfortunate official in exile. Perhaps a human burden deeper than homesickness was aching within him.

Is this burden selfish desire or resentment? It keeps pulsing across time and oceans, never ceasing. In the 1920s, the lives of worthless officials sent to administer remote British territories in Southeast Asia, at the ends of civilization and culture, revealed their ugliness plainly.

Maugham depicts the officials of the British Empire, pioneer of the Industrial Revolution and holder of the world’s greatest colonial possessions, in this way: a non-elite official habitually spends every morning diligently writing to friends and superiors whom he met only at London parties. Hoping in vain that they will someday bring him back to London, he finally sinks into drink. At last his wife, with a machete used by local people… Story after story ends in such wretched violence. Look at Narihira’s heart with that eye, and the interpretation gains color.

Even seeing a “capital bird,” Narihira thinks: you too bear the name of the capital; you must know its court society. Then tell me how the lover I left there is living now. Has she long since forgotten me? It becomes a painful story.

Ariwara no Narihira is said to have written this in The Tales of Ise. Japanese interpretations contain none of Maugham’s irony, yet the poignancy is shared. Recalling the vulgar feelings of a dispatched official may invite a sneer. But turn instead to the apprehension of someone leaving the countryside to work in the city, as represented by Hachiro Kasuga’s “Wakare no Ipponsugi,” and Maugham-style irony no longer fits. The sarcasm vanishes, leaving only homesickness: purely poignant and helpless. As the pain of one’s circumstances deepens, the orientation of the heart can bring the purest romanticism into being.

End.