What It Means to Fall in Love While Doing Laundry

A long time ago, a senior graduate student of mine once insisted,
“I hate food courts. They feel too much like real life. I don’t want to become the kind of person who hangs out there.”
He said this with great conviction.

It was that peculiar fastidiousness intellectuals have toward the “feeling of daily life.”
He probably saw some kid eating udon with a runny nose or something.

Recently, while researching Akiko Yosano, I suddenly remembered that senior.


I teach Japanese at a high school.
In one of our units, there was a critique on tanka poetry, and Akiko Yosano and her poems were cited as one of the first to bring the “self” into the form.

I love it so much🫶

To the “one who preaches of the Way,” she is saying, “No, first, touch me.”
I have a weakness for things where the body triumphs over logic.

I read Yosano’s “Midaregami” (Tangled Hair).
It was a passion that was truly suffocating.
My vague understanding was that Yosano was a “passionate woman who lived for a forbidden love with Tekkan.”

However, as I researched her, I realized, “She wasn’t just a woman who lived for love.”

I think Tekkan and Yosano were two people who resonated strongly on an intellectual level.

I feel like Haruki Murakami once wrote that love is “like a cat slipping and falling into a running washing machine.”
There is that same sense of “having collided” with those two.

It wasn’t logic; it was an irresistible gravitational pull.

The phrase “two people who fell in love” is probably not wrong.
But as I research Yosano, she doesn’t feel like a “woman whose life was ruined by love” at all.

She gave birth to and raised 13 children while continuing to write.
Even when Tekkan’s social standing wavered and she saw him spending all day in the garden crushing ants, she continued to love him.
She spent years writing a new translation of The Tale of Genji, and just as she was finishing, a fire burned all the manuscripts.
Even then, she rewrote it and completed it.

I mean, she was a monster of vitality.
Rather than a “woman whose life was ruined by love,” she looked like someone who used love, life, and work as fuel to keep living.

My senior’s food court remark was rooted in the idea that having an ideology and taking on the responsibilities of daily life are incompatible.
But Yosano didn’t just reconcile them; she mixed them together.

Perhaps someone who keeps writing while doing the laundry is much stronger than an ideology that loathes food courts?

Thinking about that, I wiped my daughter’s nose again today.