fic: aspirations

[underanothername]

Title: Aspirations
Rating & Warnings: G
Summary: For their second creative writing class, the professor asked them to bring a literary work that had inspired them to write.
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For their second creative writing class, the professor asked them to bring a literary work that had inspired them to write. The class was diverse, literarily, some brought poetry, some brought prose, the author’s names were plenty, too - Tanikawa, Murakami, as well as Lady Murasaki and Mishima counted among the Japanese contributors, then came the foreign names, Andersen, Hemingway, Woolf, Plath, they were 53 students and no one had brought the same book, although certain authors did recur, yet Yuuka was the only one to have brought Salad Anniversary and she was the only one to have picked Machi Tawara, when she presented her book, she felt starkly how she had been born a decade too late to enjoy the peak of Tawara’s popularity, how in this day and century and millenium, tanka poetry had been reduced to a hobby of housewifes and soccer moms. However, as she recounted the way in which she had discovered this particular book among dozens in the basement of her parents’ house, an heirloom of her mother’s from when she was new to the feeling of a baby's weight in her arms, new to baking for a husband rather than for a bakery, how Yuuka had then opened it at a random page (p. 144) and the words had lit up like little galaxies, black holes on white paper, the endless possibilities of portrayal and language, people’s superior smiles faded into softer expressions and she was surrounded by true understanding - the experience of one reader resonating with that of another reader, the experience of one writer resonating with that of another writer.

In this way, Yuuka cemented herself as the tanka writer of the group, her peers always recognised her style, as did her professor and as she produced an increasing number of works, expanded her portfolio with ever more poems, it became evident within the literary circles she frequented that tanka could be more than the outlet of married women and everyone’s journal-recording mother. Obviously.

Until, of course, Yuuka married, became a Watanabe instead of a Minami and found herself having to embrace the stereotype. Until she became, finally, the housewife poet writing tanka as a pastime, not as a passion.

Until she became someone else than who she had been supposed to be.