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Paper short abstract

Nyonin Tanka (1949–1997) was a women-led poetic journal in postwar Japan. Drawing on feminist approaches, this paper examines it as a gendered lyric community in which women’s voices emerged collectively through editorial practice, circulatory networks and engagement with the tanka tradition.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines Nyonin Tanka (1949–1997), a women-led tanka journal, as a gendered lyric community that reshaped how women’s voices were articulated within Japan’s modern poetic field. Building on scholarship that has shown how women’s poetry has historically been positioned as joryū (women-stream), structurally separate from the literary mainstream (Kikuchi 2019), the paper situates Nyonin Tanka within a longer genealogy of women’s collective literary practices. Rather than treating this separation as marginal, it argues that women-only poetic spaces functioned as structurally significant sites for producing alternative modes of voice, authorship, and literary participation.

In contrast to earlier women-edited periodicals such as Seitō (1911–1916) and Josei Nihonjin (1920–1923), which framed women’s participation through ideological critique, education, or reformist engagement with nationalism (Talibi 2025), Nyonin Tanka articulated a distinctly literary project. It foregrounded poetry as a shared practice, treating tanka as a collective medium through which women engaged tradition, responded to one another’s work, and sustained a continuous poetic presence within a male-dominated field.

Drawing on the concept of lyric communities (Fantappiè, Giusti, Scuriatti 2024), T. S. Eliot’s notion of the “historical sense” (Eliot 1919), and Julia Kristeva’s theorisation of rhythm and subjectivity in "Revolution in Poetic Language" (1974), the paper analyses how Nyonin Tanka functioned through collective editorial mediation and circulation. Attention to patterns of repetition, resonance, and rhythmic alignment across poems reveals how individual voices were shaped relationally, in dialogue with a shared sense of tradition and contemporaneity. These practices allowed contributors to position themselves simultaneously within and against established tanka lineages.

By reframing Nyonin Tanka as part of a broader history of women’s poetic collectivities, this paper argues that women’s voices in modern Japanese literature are not simply excluded from the mainstream but are continuously reconfigured through alternative institutional forms. In doing so, it foregrounds collective authorship as a fundamental, rather than marginal, mechanism in the formation of modern Japanese poetry.