Misuzu Kaneko

Teru Kaneko, known as Misuzu Kaneko, was a Japanese poet of the first half of the twentieth century, best known for her poems for children. Her work matters for the view it offers of life in a fishing village, and for having been nearly forgotten for decades before it was recovered.

She was born in Senzaki, a fishing town in Yamaguchi prefecture, now part of Nagato. After her father died when she was three, she was raised by her mother and grandmother. She kept studying until the age of seventeen, unusual for girls of her time. In 1923 she took charge of a small bookshop belonging to her uncle in Shimonoseki, at the southern tip of Honshu. There she came across children's magazines that asked readers for verse. She sent five poems, among them 'The Fishes', and all were accepted. Over the next five years she published more than fifty more, and she became a well-known writer.

Her private life was far less fortunate. She married a clerk from the family bookshop in 1926. Her husband was unfaithful and passed on a venereal disease that caused her lasting pain and forced her to stop writing. After their divorce in 1930, the law of the time gave the father custody of the daughter. Kaneko took her own life that same year, shortly before her twenty-seventh birthday, after writing a letter asking that her mother be allowed to raise the girl.

Her poetry, simple and attentive to the sea and to nature, has been compared to that of the English poet Christina Rossetti. After the war her work fell into obscurity until 1966, when a nineteen-year-old aspiring poet, Setsuo Yazaki, found one of her poems in an old book. After years of searching, he located notebooks containing around five hundred poems she had copied by hand. Her complete work is now published in a six-volume anthology and remains beloved in Japanese children's literature.