Yone Noguchi’s lyric begins with a paradox: “Her weapons are a smile and a little fan.” The line suggests battle, then replaces it with two objects of social grace. The woman in the poem never shouts, argues, or explains; her power lives in a smile, a lowered neck, a robe in motion, and the beat of wooden clogs. Each of the three stanzas builds a portrait from such fleeting details, and the repeated “Sayonara, sayonara” turns the poem into a farewell that feels less like an ending than like a performance.
The first stanza moves from the fan to the speaker’s gaze at the woman’s “bent neck like that of a stork / Seeking a jewel of heart in the ground!” The simile is strange enough to keep the woman from becoming merely pretty. A stork’s neck is long, deliberate, poised; the bending suggests a bow or a moment of modesty, yet the search for “a jewel of heart” gives it purpose. The heart-jewel remains hidden, so the image keeps some of her private value unseen in the earth. Her apparent softness is also a kind of seeking, even a kind of quiet hunger.
The second stanza deepens that sense of concealment. “Her wisdom is folded sweet in her bosom.” The verb “folded” matters. It links her mind to fabric and to the fan’s hidden pleats: wisdom is stored, not displayed. Then the robe becomes “a cloud / That follows a lyric of butterfly!” This is not prettiness for its own sake. A cloud is large, airy, changeable; a butterfly’s “lyric” is a song that is really movement. Noguchi mixes senses—butterflies do not sing—so that her robe seems to translate music into visible motion. The woman’s body is partly weather, partly music, and partly still unknown.
The third stanza completes the shift from visible charm to invisible effect. “Her song is on her tips of naked feet.” The song has moved away from the mouth entirely and lives in barefoot balance, in the contact between skin and wooden clogs. The “Beat of her wooden clogs” becomes percussion, “Playing the unseen strings of love!” Love here is an instrument the speaker can hear but not see. The poem ends by affirming feeling without claiming to possess its source.
The structure supports this gradual revelation. Each stanza opens with a short, almost proverbial statement: weapons, wisdom, song. Then comes the farewell refrain, followed by a longer image that expands into an exclamation. The punctuation of the refrain changes slightly from stanza to stanza—the first ending with a full stop, the later ones trailing into ellipses—as if the goodbye becomes more suspended each time. There is no regular rhyme, but the language is held together by soft sibilance and repeated sounds: “smile,” “sayonara,” “stork,” “seeking,” “sweet,” “song,” “unseen strings.” The effect is hushing, rhythmic, and close to the click of clogs.
What makes the poem significant is its refusal to explain the woman. It observes her as a moving figure among Japanese details—fan, robe, wooden clogs, sayonara—but it does not turn her into a lesson. Her charm depends on what is folded, hidden, and departing. The farewell refrain is not a sad interruption; it is part of her art. In three small stanzas, Noguchi suggests that grace can be a form of power, and that the strongest music may be played on strings nobody sees.