Yanagiwara Byakuren — The Woman Who Lied All the Time

The Child Sent to Make Up for It

"I'm thinking of doing something like falling off a cliff."

On October 7, 1921, in a dim, north-facing room of eight tatami mats, in a mansion that had only just been built, a woman said this to her friend.

As she said it, tears were falling softly.

The friend's name was Kubo Yorie. She was a poet who lived in Fukuoka, and she wrote down what happened that day at the end of the same year.

Thirteen days later, the woman did something. Within a few days, the society pages of the newspapers were filled with it.

Her name was Yanagiwara Akiko. When she wrote poems, she used the name Byakuren.

She was thirty-five. She had been married for ten years.

But even before those ten years, other people had usually decided where she would go.

She was born in 1885. Her father was a count, and her birth mother was a geisha, an entertainer. She grew up in a foster home in Shinagawa, and she was loved so much that she believed it was her real home. In the year she was to start school, she was brought back to the Yanagiwara house.

Before many years had passed, she was sent away again. Her father's younger brother had left the family that had adopted him. To fill the hole he left, the girl was handed over as an adopted daughter to a viscount's family, the Kitakōji. When she was old, she said this:

"To make up for that broken duty, I was sent to this viscount's family as an adopted daughter."

At the Peers' School for Girls, a school for the daughters of the nobility, many of her classmates came in patterned silk kimono, riding in carriages or rickshaws.

Akiko walked, both ways, from her adoptive home near Gokokuji temple to the school in Nagatachō. It was about two ri, or eight kilometers (five miles), she says. This was a time before trains and buses ran there.

"Thanks to that, my legs are still strong."

She added this when she was nearing seventy.

Akiko left that school before finishing. In her mid-teens, she married Suketake of the Kitakōji family.

At sixteen, by the old way of counting age, she had a baby boy.

Hasegawa Shigure, a writer, later wrote that the diary Akiko kept that year was the beginning of her "Record of Tears." Akiko herself wrote a poem about being sixteen:

I even put a black flower in my hair on purpose: the tear-filled diary of my sixteenth year

A black flower, worn in her hair on purpose. A sixteen-year-old's diary, full of tears.

Here is another poem.

For all those years I quietly gave myself over to others' wishes, and inside I was a rebel who resented her parents

For years she obeyed quietly, as she was told. And inside that quiet was a rebel, angry at her parents.

In time she left this house too. Her uncle, the reason she had been sent to make up for his wrong, is also said to have left his adopted family at twenty-one.

"I too left this house at twenty-one. My adoptive parents lamented that there was a strange fate in the number twenty-one."

She left the boy behind in the Kitakōji house.

She had been handed over to that house to make up for someone else's wrong. Now, in that same house, she left her own child.

After she went back to her own family, Akiko spent two or three years at a Christian school. Then, in 1911, she married for the second time.

Her husband was Itō Denemon, a coal-mine king of Fukuoka. He was twenty-five years older than Akiko. He had started out digging coal with his own hands, and he had never studied at a school.

She was even called a sacrifice, an offering made for her family's sake, Shigure wrote.

Akiko herself saw it a little differently.

"A woman with a broken soul was no longer in a position to think about romance or anything like that."

Even if the man was much older, even if he had never studied at a school, "I was a woman who could be satisfied if only there was deep affection."

She also had one hope. With the fortune her husband had built, she wanted to do social work for the world, "and become a friend to poor and suffering people." It was a hope the mission school had given her, she says.

All of this was remembered more than forty years later.

In that same recollection, Akiko talked about the household she married into. It had several adopted children, each with a different mother, and her husband felt no affection even for those children.

"It was a cold home that had completely forgotten what affection is."

Akiko would spend ten years in that house.

If I Did Not Lie

Even as the wife of a coal-mine king, she could not use money freely.

All she could spend was a fixed amount of pocket money each month. She did not choose her own kimono and sashes either. Her husband picked them out and handed them to her, and she wore them.

The wife of a university professor, a friend of hers, bought the kimono and sashes she liked, and was much better off. Seeing this, Akiko felt envy, she said later.

When she ran short, she borrowed from her husband. He often lent it to her. But since it was borrowed, she always paid it back afterward. And he took it with a perfectly ordinary face, she said.

There was someone who helped her get her pocket money raised. It was her husband's mistress. The woman her husband kept besides his wife spoke up for Akiko and asked him.

"When I think about it, it was a strange arrangement."

Then Akiko went on.

"That is why I could not get through my days unless I was lying all the time. That was where the pain was."

In the end, she says, it frightened her to the bone. Her heart and her soul only grew dirtier, she also said.

What people saw from the outside was a very different picture.

One Sunday in April or May, soon after she married, Kubo Yorie passed a woman at the ticket gate of Futsukaichi station. A high nose, firm lips, a fine profile: Yorie could not take her eyes off her. On the way home, near a new stone torii gate, a shrine gate, that a coal-mine owner had given to the shrine, she saw a single pair of pale purple sandals in the middle of the geta, wooden clogs, lined up at the door of a restaurant. That was how Yorie realized who the woman had been, she wrote.

That winter the two spoke for the first time. The woman there was not the proud lady she had imagined. "An innocent, radiant princess" was sitting there, Yorie wrote.

Her poems began to be talked about too. In 1915 her first collection, Fumie ("Picture to Trample On"), came out. The binding was blue, like the water of an old marsh. The endpapers were silver.

My feet are fixed to the earth and cannot leave it, yet this very body still longs for the sky

My feet stay on the ground and cannot leave it. In this very body, she still longs for the sky.

People called her the "Queen of Tsukushi." Tsukushi is an old name for northern Kyushu.

But among those close to her, some tilted their heads. One person said they simply could not believe she hated that life. How much of her poetry is art, this person wondered, and how much is her life? So they say. Hasegawa Shigure wrote this down as something she heard from a person she trusted.

In 1920 an editor from the Tokyo magazine Kaihō ("Liberation") visited her villa in Beppu. He was Miyazaki Ryūsuke, a young man seven years younger than she was. He came to talk about a play Akiko had written, which the magazine was going to print.

Ryūsuke stayed at the villa for two nights, and on his way home Akiko is said to have gone with him as far as Kokura to see him off. To this young man she had just met, she reportedly spoke of her life, in which there was no pleasure but writing.

After that, love poems sent by telegram piled up on Miyazaki's desk, and his friends envied him. That is what Shigure heard.

At the end of that year, two hagoita, decorated battledore paddles, arrived at Yorie's house from an acquaintance in Tokyo. A note said: share them nicely with Akiko, and don't cry.

The two drew lots. Akiko got the one of Ojō Kichisa, a kabuki role: a thief disguised as a young girl.

"Oh, good!"

Akiko said it frankly, without holding back, and laughed innocently, Yorie wrote.

At the end of the next year, as she set out the hagoita as decorations, Yorie remembered that day and wrote:

"I thought there were no secrets between the two of us..."

In the autumn of 1921, Akiko bought out Funako, a geisha from Hakata, and brought her to the mansion. She paid money so that the woman could leave her work as a geisha, and took her in. It was to replace a maid from Kyoto who had died, Yorie wrote.

On October 7, it was also Funako who led Yorie to the eight-mat room.

Yorie wrote a poem about that day too. In the new palace, a dim, lonely little room facing north, the one you chose.

Yorie had come about a poem of celebration that the poet Saitō Mokichi had asked her to get. When she held out a piece of silk to write it on, Akiko said:

"By what day? I'd rather not write a celebration poem, though."

And she set it down on the writing desk.

Then, one after another, she began to pour out the troubles of her household. Yorie could not find words of comfort. She just kept looking at the pattern of the colored cards scattered across the sliding doors.

"I'm thinking of doing something like falling off a cliff."

At the tears that fell softly, Yorie's own eyelids grew heavy. She knew Akiko had the temperament to do such a thing. But she had no way of knowing it was right in front of her, Yorie wrote.

Startled by the noon cannon, Yorie quickly said goodbye. Akiko saw her off, saying there was something she wanted to talk about slowly, some other time.

Ten years had cast a worn shadow even on this beautiful woman. Yorie thought so as she went home.

That other time never came. "October 7, which became our last day," Yorie wrote at the end of that year.

Thirteen days later, on the morning of October 20, Akiko saw her husband off at Tokyo Station, on the 9:30 limited express back to Fukuoka.

By her husband's account, she had promised to return to Hakata at the end of the month.

Akiko did not go back to the inn where she had been staying, Shimaya in Nihonbashi.