Images of hair in the free verse poetry of Yosano Akiko

Yosano Akiko (1878-1942) is considered to be one of the greatest Japanese female writers, educators, and social critics of the twentieth century. Even today many people continue to be influenced by her and her work, including her first anthology of tanka entitled Tangled Hair (Midaregami, 1901). There has been much scholarship done on Akiko's tanka, including scholarship that focuses on the frequent use of images related to hair, but less on Akiko's free verse poetry. Since Akiko makes frequent use of images in all her works, I will focus on her use of various hair images in a number of her free verse poems, which I have also translated in this thesis.