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n February 1996 Professor Fred C. Robinson was generous enough to send me a copy of a portfolio file entitled “Beowulf in the Floating World: The Poem Illustrated with Japanese block Prints from Several Centuries,” edited and compiled by his former student, Professor Marijane osborn. His cover note indicated that as his birthday gift she presented him with two copies of this privately made file, suggesting that one of these should be delivered to anyone who could appreciate her cross-cultural efforts to juxtapose some scenes from Beowulf and their matching pictures selected from among Japanese Ukiyoe prints by such artists as Hokusai, Kuniyoshi, and Yoshitoshi.1 The e of Ukiyoe signifies “picture(s)” and Ukiyo serves as a pun in Japanese meaning “the Floating or Gloomy World”: the latter would surely suit the grim world of Beowulf. In her afterword, she maintains as follows: It comes as a surprise that the Japanese,who have produced more work on Beowulf than any other single nation outside the english-speaking world and Germany,have not,to my knowledge,produced a single picture of the hero or his exploits.The omission is all the more surprising in view of the fact that models for suitable pictures exist ready at hand in Japan’s world-famous art of block prints, which includes imaginings of ancient stories. When I began to put some of these pictures with the poem, the project practically took off by itself because of the art waiting for it.2 Certainly Professor osborn is right in assuming that there has been no modern Japanese artist who has attempted to illustrate Beowulf, mainly because its reputation has remained within the confines of academia.There is a case, however, Kiyoko Nagase and Her “Grendel’s Mother” Toshiyuki Takamiya I 17 of an extraordinary reception of the epic, reflected in a Japanese poem written by Kiyoko nagase as early as April 1929. I find it more than gratifying, therefore, to celebrate Professor bonnie Wheeler’s sixty-fifth birthday by contributing a short essay on the poet and her poem on mothering, because we know that one of bonnie’s books is on medieval mothering.3 v The eldest daughter of an intellectual middle-class family, Kiyoko nagase was born in a small town in okayama Prefecture, situated between Kobe and Hiroshima, on February 17, 1906; she died on the same day in 1995.4 Her parents owned a small piece of farmland, but it had to be abandoned due to the land Reform, which was put into effect immediately after the Second World War. nevertheless, as their eldest daughter, she somehow managed to hold a few acres for her own cultivation.This was partly why she used to be referred to as an “agricultural poet,” but it was only in 1946, when she was forty years old, that she started agriculture. Her father, a graduate of the Imperial university of Kyoto, worked as a chief engineer for an electric company based in Kanazawa, an ancient and cultural city located on the Japan Sea. So from the age of two to sixteen she was brought up in Kanazawa, where she was deeply attached to Japanese gothic novels in her formative years. Then her family moved to nagoya, and when she was seventeen she encountered a best-selling selection of english romantic and French symbolist poems, translated by bin ueda and first published in 1905, which made her determined to be a poet—apparently rather an unusual decision, one might say, because poetry is something that will naturally come out of the poet’s mind rather than something deliberately chosen as a profession. Since childhood, she had not been good at expressing herself with spoken words, which she felt was rather disadvantageous , and so she wanted to make use of poetry writing as her means of communication. She assiduously and repeatedly read these poems at the bedside of her younger sister, who was then confined to a hospital bed. Kiyoko was impressed by the greater intricacy and expansiveness she found in them compared to earlier Japanese poetry. In this period there was virtually no woman poet active in Japan, and even male poets were often ill spoken of by lay people as “bohemian outsiders.” Arising in europe and the united States during the First World War, dadaism found its way into Japan, if belatedly, orchestrating the rebellious and destructive movement against established art and tradition.5 There is no doubt that the popularity and rapid...

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