星野 文子

This paper will examine the early career of American female poet Ina Donna Coolbrith from the perspective of social expectations and gender. Coolbrith was a successful poet. She was crowned as the first Poet Laureate of California in June 1915. She started publishing poetry as a teenager, and was a pioneer of the “frontier” period of Californian Literature. When the literary magazine Overland Monthly was founded in 1868, Coolbrith, Bret Harte and Charles Warren Stoddard were known as the “Golden Gate Trinity.” Her peers included poets and writers such as Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, and Joaquin Miller; they were all young and seeking national recognition. Despite her success, being a woman made developing her career difficult compared to male writers. In order to understand her unique situation, this paper will examine her early poems and personal correspondence. It will explore her social circumstances, the gender limitations she faced, and her personal feelings about her career.

This paper will examine Yone Noguchi’s poetics and way of life concerning “being a poet,” as expressed in his English novel, The American Diary of a Japanese Girl (1902). This book was considered his first and only non-poetry book in English published during his eleven years living in the United States and England. In contrast to scholarship that focuses on his work from the point of view of Japonism, or his personal life—Noguchi had a child with his American editor Leonie Gilmour, and their son was the well-known sculptor Isamu Noguchi — this paper will focus on Noguchi’s obsession with poetry and “being a poet,” as expressed in this work. Analyzing his idea of “being a poet,” I will argue that this work, though a fictional novel, constitutes an attempt to write about the development of Noguchi’s identity as a poet. The paper is based on the presentation at The Tokyo American Literature Society’s section meeting of the monthly meeting on September 24, 2016.

This paper will introduce Yone Noguchi’s English article “Dr. M. Anesaki” published in The Japan Weekly Mail on 26 July 1913. Along with the original work, it will provide a new Japanese translation of the article to shed light on Noguchi’s relationship to Masaharu Anesaki. Yone Noguchi (1875-1947), a Japanese poet who gained his international fame with English poetry books in the United States and England, interviewed another internationalist, a Buddhist scholar Masaharu Anesaki (1873-1949) before Anesaki’s departure to Harvard University in 1913, where he was to lecture on Japanese culture for two years. In the article, Noguchi covered Anesaki’s achievements, including his major publications, his scholarship in comparison with the German scholar Rudolf Eucken, a brief biography of Anesaki’s, as well as discussing the people who helped realize Anesaki’s visiting to Harvard. While Noguchi’s writing style is longwinded, his respect and admiration for Anesaki are obvious. Noguchi does not mention how he got acquainted with Anesaki in the first place, but according to the article, the interview took place in Anesaki’s house in Tokyo. Recent research shows that The Japan Weekly Mail published quite a few articles written by Yone Noguchi; in particular, around the time when Noguchi himself was invited by the Poet Laureate Robert Bridges to give a lecture at Oxford University. Noguchi was known to translate his own work mostly from English to Japanese and/or re-publish his works elsewhere. A part of the article “Dr. M. Anesaki” is a reprint from “The Earliest Japanese Poetry” in The Spirit of Japanese Poetry (1913). The current paper is based on the presentation “Eiji Shinbun The Japan Weekly Mail and Yone Noguchi” on 12 November, 2017, for the Popular Culture Association of Japan.

This paper aims to introduce articles written by Yone Noguchi in the Japan Weekly Mail between January 1913 and June 1914. These articles, which were recently identified by researchers, will be used to analyze his sense of himself as a poet, or his poet-self. Yone Noguchi was the first Japanese poet who published English poetry books in United States of America at the end of the19th century, and in England at the beginning of the 20th century. After spending nearly 11 years abroad, he came back to Japan in 1904 as a well-known poet, and continued writing actively for various magazines and newspapers, as well as publishing books in both English and Japanese languages. At the time, he was one of the only Japanese capable of doing so. It recently came to light that the Japan Weekly Mail carried many of Noguchi’s articles before, during, and after his second visit to England, on the invitation of the Poet Laureate Robert Bridges. The topics Noguchi covers in these articles range from English and American literature, to Ukiyoe, Kabuki, Noh-play, Japanese art, his poetry, and his impressions and experiences in England. Drawing on these articles, this paper will shed light on how his visit to England reassured his poet-self.