Japanese poet’s legacy beautifully captured
Every so often a book comes along that is aimed at children, but speaks volumes to all ages and is, in essence, a gift to literature. Are You An Echo? is such a book.
On the surface, it seems an unlikely publication. It introduces an English-speaking audience to the poetry of a young Japanese woman born in 1903 who, against all odds, rose to prominence in her homeland after publishing some poems in magazines when she was barely 20 years old.
Focusing on ordinary, everyday things like flowers, snow, a stone in the road, the fish in the sea and a lost woollen hat, she imbued her subjects with empathy and deep kindness and “quickly became a star children’s writer,” author David Jacobson tells us in recounting her all-too-brief life.
Married to a man who was unfaithful and who passed on to her a disease that caused her great suffering, Misuzu Kaneko decided to leave him after four years of marriage. But when he refused to let her take their young daughter, and the law in Japan at the time sided with him, Kaneko ended her life. She was 26.
Her mother eventually took over the care of the child and ensured Kaneko’s memory was kept alive in the poet’s daughter; nevertheless, over the years Kaneko’s poetry largely disappeared from view. Her mother’s bookstore, in which she had done much of her writing, was gone by the time another poet, Setsuo Yazaki, read her poem Big Catch and set about trying to find its author. At sunrise, glorious sunrise it’s a big catch! A big catch of sardines! On the beach, it’s like a festival but in the sea, they will hold funerals for the tens of thousands dead When Tokyo was firebombed during the Second World War, “the only copy of her poems anyone knew about was destroyed,” Jacobson writes, adding that Yazaki spent 16 years searching for the source of those poems.
In 1982, he tracked down Misuzu’s younger brother, then 77, who told the poet about his sister’s life and passed along three battered pocket diaries that “contained the only other set of the 512 poems Misuzu had written in her lifetime.”
Yazaki went on to publish all of them and they have since been translated into 10 other languages, including Farsi and Hindi — but, until now, never English.
With the help of Yazaki, who wrote the foreword to this book, Jacobson and Seattle-based publisher Bruce Rutledge have created a truly beautiful volume that comprises a brief biography of Kaneko and a selection of her poems, presented both in Japanese and in the English translations by Japan’s Michiko Tsuboi and Winnipeg poet/translator Sally Ito — all appealingly illustrated
by Toshikado Hajiri.
The book takes its title from a Kaneko poem that achieved fame in Japan five years ago when it was used in a televised public service announcement rallying people to come to the aid of those in Tohoku who were victimized by the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami.