Misuzu Kaneko
Kaneko has been compared to Christina Rossetti. Her poems have been translated into eleven languages. Biography. Kaneko was raised by her mother and grandmother after her father died when she was three. Kaneko's mother ran a bookstore and felt strongly about reading and education. While most Japanese girls of that time period were only educated up to sixth grade, Kaneko continued her schooling until the age of seventeen, attending the Ōtsu High School for Girls. She was described by others as gentle, cheerful, and an excellent student, as well as a voracious reader with strong curiosity about  nature. In 1923, Kaneko became the manager and sole employee of her uncle's small bookstore in Shimonoseki, a town at the southern tip of Honshu. There, she discovered children's literary magazines such as "Akai tori", which were riding the crest of a boom in children's literature and which solicited stories and verse from their readers. Kaneko first submitted five poems, among them "The Fishes", to four magazines, and was accepted for publication in all of them. Soon, her poems began appearing in magazines all over the country and she became a literary celebrity. Over the next five  years she published fifty-one more verses. Kaneko's private life was not as fortunate, however. In 1926, she entered into a marriage arranged by her uncle, with a clerk in the family bookstore. A daughter, Fusae, was born in November. Her new husband was unfaithful and contracted a venereal disease, which he passed on to Kaneko, causing her lifelong physical pain. He also forced her to stop writing, while putting the family through the strain of four moves within two years to pursue failing business ventures. She finally divorced him in 1930, but this meant also losing custody of  her daughter to her husband. Japanese law at the time automatically granted the father indisputable custody to the child. On March 9, 1930, the day before her husband was due to take custody, Kaneko felt no recourse except to commit suicide in protest. After bathing Fusae and sharing a sakuramochi, Kaneko wrote a letter to her husband asking that he let her mother raise the girl instead, and overdosed on sedatives, dying the next day, only a month before her 27th birthday. Her daughter was ultimately raised by the grandmother. Representative works include "Me and Little Birds and Bells" and  Big Fishing. Section::::"Me and Little Birds and Bells". <poem> Even if I spread my arms I cannot fly in the sky at all. But the bird that can fly  Cannot run on the ground as fast as I. Even if I shake my body, I cannot produce pretty sounds, But the bell that can ring  Doesn’t know as many songs as I. The bell and the bird and I– All are different and all are good. This poem is for education and is also used in elementary school Other than that Shall we go  to Kodama? snow Stars and dandelions Dew mosquito net Dream selling </poem> Rediscovery of Kaneko's poems. Although she received praise for her published poems during her life, Kaneko's work descended into obscurity during the years of World War II In 1966, a 19-year-old Japanese aspiring poet named Setsuo Yazaki discovered her poem "Big Catch" in an old book. Eager to know more about the author, he spent sixteen years trying to track her down. In 1982 he was able to get in touch with Kaneko's younger brother, now 77 years old, who still  had the diaries in which she had copied out her poems, most unpublished during her lifetime. Yazaki now serves as the director of the Kaneko Misuzu Memorial Museum, which was opened in 2003 on the site of Kaneko's childhood home. The entire collection of 512 poems has since been published by JULA Publishing Bureau in a six-volume anthology, and in 2016, an English-language edition of her poetry "Are You an Echo? The Lost Poetry of Misuzu Kaneko" was released by the independent book publisher Chin Music Press. It received an Honorable Mention in the Freeman Awards 2016 . Section::::"Are You an Echo?" and the 2011 tsunami. After the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, television stations played Kaneko's poem “Are You an Echo?” as a public service announcement in order to encourage volunteers.