Three Sea Poems by Kaneko Misuzu (1903-1930)

Kaneko Misuzu was a Japanese poet of the early twentieth century who specialized in children’s poetry, but the kind of children’s poetry that rips out one’s guts when one rereads it as an adult. She has been described as a sort of Japanese Christina Rossetti, but instead of Rossetti’s explicit and orthodox religious sensibility she shows a more characteristically Japanese grounding of religious ideas and religious meaning in the world around her. In particular, since Kaneko was a lifelong resident of a small fishing town until her suicide during a custody battle with her abusive ex-husband, her poetry shows a special love of the sea. I have translated three of her “sea poems” below.