Kaneko Misuzu — The Woman Who Kept Copying

The Sample Notebooks

Those three notebooks, it is said, were never meant to be sold.

They were sample notebooks, set out at the front of a bookshop, so the story goes. They were pocket diaries from a publisher called Hakubunkan: one for 1925 and one for 1926.

In 1929, a woman copied the children's songs she had written herself into those old notebooks.

The first was called Beautiful Town. The second was called Mother in the Sky. The third was called The Lonely Princess. She made the same three notebooks twice.

By then her husband had forbidden her to write poems. She was not even allowed to exchange letters with her poet friends. She was ill, and many days she lay in bed.

One set was for her brother in Tokyo. The other was for a famous poet she had met only once.

Why had she been forbidden to write? Why did she make the same notebooks twice?

Her name was Kaneko Teru. The name she used for her children's songs was Misuzu.

The story goes back more than twenty years, to a small fishing town.

Senzaki, in Yamaguchi, faces the Sea of Japan. It was once a port for hunting whales. Teru was born in this town on April 11, 1903.

In 1906, when Teru was two, her father died. He had been sent to China, then ruled by the Qing, to run a branch of a relative's bookshop, and he died there across the sea.

Her mother, Michi, lived with Grandmother Ume, Teru's older brother Kensuke, and Teru. She opened the only bookshop in Senzaki, called Kaneko Bun'eido.

There was one more child in this family.

Her brother Masasuke was two years younger than Teru.

The year after their father died, Masasuke, not yet two, was adopted into his aunt's house in Shimonoseki. The aunt was his mother's younger sister. Her husband ran Ueyama Bun'eido, a bookshop that also had a branch in China. They had no children.

Masasuke grew up without being told. He thought his brother and sister in Senzaki were his cousins.

Teru started school and was class monitor from first grade to sixth. A class monitor leads the class. In six years, the job never went to anyone else.

In 1916 she entered a girls' school that was new for its time and taught English and tennis. Two years later a magazine for children called Red Bird was born, and magazines of children's songs and stories began to appear one after another. Teru, a bookseller's daughter, spent her teens in such a time.

In her third year at the girls' school, the aunt who was Masasuke's adoptive mother died of illness.

The next year, her mother Michi married the aunt's widower, Ueyama Matsuzo, and moved to Shimonoseki.

From Masasuke's side, his dead mother had been replaced by the aunt from Senzaki. In truth, she was the mother who had given birth to him.

Grandmother, her brother, and Teru stayed behind in Senzaki.

From about this time, Masasuke began visiting Senzaki often. Her brother, Teru, and Masasuke became three friends who got along well and talked about books and music.

In 1920, Teru left the girls' school chosen to speak for the graduating class. Her teacher suggested she go on to a women's teacher-training college in Nara and become a teacher, they say.

Teru did not go. She began helping in the family bookshop.

Why she refused, we do not know.

The next summer, when her uncle Matsuzo collapsed, Teru went with him to a university hospital in Kyushu and spent about a month and a half in the sickroom.

That September, Masasuke began to compose music. Teru asked him for one thing: to set the poet Kitahara Hakushu's poem "Unrequited Love" to music.

She asked this of the person she thought was her cousin.

In the autumn of 1922, her brother married. In the spring of 1923, her mother called Teru to Shimonoseki. She was twenty.

Before she left Senzaki, Teru gave a friend from girls' school a songbook she had made by hand. Its title was Broken Piano.

Her work in Shimonoseki was minding a shop. It was not the main store of her uncle's bookshop but a branch inside a building called Shokankan. She minded it alone.

Soon after she arrived, in May, Teru had her photo taken at a studio in town. This picture of her at twenty would later stay in her brother's keeping.

Not long after, Teru began to write children's songs. Her name was Misuzu.

A children's song is a poem written to be sung by children. In those days, famous adult poets were publishing them one after another in magazines. The magazines had columns for reader submissions, and a poet who acted as judge picked the good ones to print.

In June, she sent her work to four magazines: Dowa and Golden Star, for children, and Fujin Club and Fujin Gaho, for women.

If I send to four, perhaps one of them will catch someone's eye.

In September, all four September issues printed Misuzu's work.

In Golden Star's September issue, one of them reads like this.

"Look, Hatoko the pigeon. Three pigeons cooed under the greengrocer's eaves."

The song goes on.

"Eggplant purple, cabbage green, even the red of strawberries, shiny and wet."

The eye moves from the pigeons under the eaves to the colors of the vegetables and fruit in the shop. Perhaps it was a song seen through the eyes of someone minding a shop.

The poet Saijo Yaso, who chose children's songs for the magazine Dowa, praised this newcomer by comparing her to the English poet Rossetti.

It had been just over three months since she began to write children's songs.

Not a Cousin

In Shimonoseki, at Ueyama Bun'eido, Teru came to live in the same house as Masasuke. They say Masasuke read Misuzu's songs, criticized them in detail, and encouraged her. These were the songs of a person he thought was his cousin.

Minding the shop, Misuzu had one habit.

She copied her favorite poems and children's songs into a notebook. The notebook slowly became an anthology of her own.

It is said that she once lifted the cover of an expensive book for sale, and copied the translation of a Rossetti poem inside into her notebook. Rossetti was the very poet Yaso had compared her to. Only a bookseller's daughter could copy this way.

In 1924, Dowa printed Misuzu's "Big Catch."

Her hometown, Senzaki, is a town that lives by catching whales and fish, and never fails to hold memorial services for the whales and fish it has caught. "Big Catch" too is a song that thinks, behind the people rejoicing at a big catch, of the fish that were taken.

It looks at the back side of a lively scene. It would later be called Misuzu's best-known work.

In the same year, 1924, "Funeral," which had been printed in Fujin Gaho the year before, was included in an anthology of poems that Yaso edited.

Dowa went on to print her songs one after another. In this magazine alone there were forty-two, and sixteen of them were ones the judge especially recommended.

In the summer of 1924, on her way back from Senzaki, she rode the same train to Shimonoseki as the girls' school friend who had married.

In May of the next year, 1925, a notice reached Masasuke in Shimonoseki. It was about his military draft examination. There he learned for the first time that he was adopted, and that the man he called father was his foster father. The bookshop he had thought of as home was his foster home.

Still, he had not been told that the brother and sister in Senzaki were his real siblings.

In July, that friend died, the one to whom Teru had given Broken Piano. It is said she had come home to Senzaki from Korea to nurse her sick mother, and fell ill herself.

Later that year, a marriage proposal was brought to Teru.

It was her uncle Matsuzo who brought it. He was her mother's new husband and Masasuke's foster father. He was the uncle she had stayed beside for a month and a half at the hospital in Kyushu four years earlier. The man was a clerk at Ueyama Bun'eido, a head clerk of sorts, named Miyamoto Keiki. A head clerk is the top clerk, the one who leads the others.

Why was the uncle in a hurry over this match? According to a later biography, what the uncle worried about was Masasuke more than Teru. Was Masasuke falling in love with Teru? And though he was the heir, there was still no sign he was ready to take over the shop. So the uncle tried to marry Teru off first, the account says.

Teru accepted this offer. They say she did it thinking of her mother's position and Masasuke's.

The poet Yaso had compared to Rossetti would marry a man her uncle chose. Perhaps she had put her own wishes away somewhere.

In January 1926, Masasuke learned of the match.

He submitted a written protest, a document in which you set down your opinion for someone above you. In February he went to Senzaki and pleaded in tears, it is said.

It was then, they say, that Masasuke learned for the first time.

That Teru was not his cousin, but his real sister.

Teru was twenty-two. Masasuke was about to turn twenty-one.

She was the person he had thought of as a cousin for as long as he could remember. The marriage he was trying to stop in tears was his real sister's. How Masasuke took this, we do not know.

Even so, the marriage did not stop. On February 17, Teru married Miyamoto Keiki and began to live on the second floor of Ueyama Bun'eido. She was twenty-two.

In April of the same spring, Masasuke left home. They say he opposed this marriage strongly to the very end.

That led to a falling out between the uncle and the husband. The husband ended up pushed out of Bun'eido, and Teru followed him out of the shop.

In the same year, 1926, Misuzu was admitted to the Children's Song Poets' Association, a gathering of poets who wrote children's songs. Under the association's name, the collection Japanese Children's Songs came out, and it included "Big Catch" and "Fish." Among the members, along with Yaso, were names like Kitahara Hakushu, Shimazaki Toson, and Noguchi Ujo.

The only women members were Yosano Akiko and Misuzu.

In November, her daughter Fusae was born.

It was less than three years until the day she would make two sets of copies in the sample notebooks.

Two Sets of Notebooks

In the summer of 1927, at Shimonoseki station, Misuzu met Saijo Yaso.

He was the man who had chosen her songs in the magazine Dowa. He had even called her one especially large star among the young poets of children's songs.

It was the day she would meet in person someone she had known only through a magazine. It is said that Misuzu went to the station with Fusae, not yet one year old, on her back. She told Yaso, they say, that she wanted to see him so much that she had come over the mountains.

That was the only time in their lives that the two met face to face.

Yaso later wrote about that day and published it in a magazine, under the title "One Night in Shimonoseki." But it appeared in print only the year after Misuzu died.

In August, Grandmother Ume, who had lived with her in Senzaki, died.

In November of that year, her husband began a business in their home. It was a shop selling food and toys, and its name was Tatsumiya.

After that, Teru became ill. It was an illness she caught from her husband.

Teru was twenty-four. Fusae had just turned one.

Her body did not get better.

In March 1928, the children's song poet Shimada Tadao came to Shokankan in Shimonoseki to visit Misuzu.

Misuzu was in bed with her illness and could not see him.

A fellow writer of children's songs had come to see her on purpose. And she could not even show him her face.

In July of the same year, Masasuke, who had left home, was going to Tokyo.

At that time Teru wrote a letter. It was to a man in Tokyo named Furukawa Roppa, asking him to help her brother find work.

Masasuke joined the editorial staff of the magazine Eiga Jidai, published by Bungei Shunju. Later he also wrote scripts for Roppa's stage shows.

For the brother who had opposed her marriage and left home, Teru had written a letter.

Once Masasuke was gone from Shimonoseki, her husband forbade Teru to write poems. He forbade her to exchange letters with her poet friends too.

Even if they tell me not to write, they cannot take away the songs I remember.

She had been chosen to speak for her class at graduation, had appeared in four magazines at once, and had her name beside Yosano Akiko's in a poets' association. Now, inside her own home, she was forbidden to write.

Until then, if she wrote a song, she could send it to a magazine. If she sent it, Yaso would read it. That road was closed inside her own house. Submitting songs and writing to friends were both ways of sending words outward. Both were stopped.

How Teru answered her husband, we do not know.

About this time her old girls' school asked her to write something for its newsletter, and Teru wrote a reply. It is said she wrote, in words to this effect, that the wings of imagination that once flew high had now been clipped.

Still, she had the songs she had written over the years. Many more of them had never appeared in a magazine than had.

Those songs would soon be copied into the sample notebooks.

In May 1929, the magazine Aisho printed Misuzu's "Moonflower." In it, a star asks the moonflower if it is lonely, and the moonflower answers that it is not.

Of Misuzu's songs printed in magazines in her lifetime, this "Moonflower" is the last one that can be confirmed.

In the six years since her first submission in 1923, about ninety of Misuzu's songs had been printed in magazines.

After her marriage, the family moved house many times. In the summer of 1929 came the fourth move. After it, Teru took to her sickbed.

In September that year, Teru wrote something on a postcard.

That morning she had done a little wiping of the floor with a rag. After that, she had rested for five days again.

There are no big words anywhere in it. A little wiping, and the number of days she rested. Perhaps this is how she counted the days of her illness.

From summer into autumn that year, she opened the sample notebooks.

They were Hakubunkan pocket diaries, said to have been samples for the front of a bookshop. A pocket diary is a small notebook that fits in a jacket pocket. One was for 1925, one for 1926. In 1929, both were long out of date.

Into them she copied the children's songs she had written and saved.

She titled the first Beautiful Town, the second Mother in the Sky, and the third The Lonely Princess. Together they held 512 songs. More than eighty percent of them had never appeared in any magazine.

She had been copying her favorite poems into notebooks since her days minding the shop. She was used to copying other people's poems.

This time, what she was copying was her own.

And one set was not enough. She made the same three notebooks again. Between the days she lay ill, she copied 512 songs, twice.

One set was for Masasuke in Tokyo. He was the brother she had written a letter for, to help him find work, a year before.

The other set was for Saijo Yaso. He was the person she had met only once, at Shimonoseki station.

The set sent to Masasuke still exists. The first and second notebooks are written out neatly. But in the third, The Lonely Princess, traces of rewriting remain, it is said.

Perhaps even as she made her fair copy, she kept finding words she still wanted to change.

Writing poems was still forbidden. And in that situation, Teru entrusted the notebooks of copied songs to other people.

After finishing this fair copy, it is said, Teru wrote no new songs.

In October, Teru began one more new notebook.

Its title was Nankindama. Nankindama are tiny glass beads, strung on thread to make necklaces.

What she wrote down inside were the words of her three-year-old daughter, Fusae.

She picked up the halting words her daughter spoke, one by one, and wrote them down.

After being forbidden to write her own songs, Teru had started to write down her daughter's words.

The girl who had copied other people's poems had become a woman who copied out her own songs, and finally, one who wrote down her child's words.

Four months after she began that notebook. When the new year came, Teru began living apart from her husband.

In Her Brother's Keeping

In February 1930, as her illness grew worse, Teru decided to divorce.

By the end of that month, the divorce was settled. Teru took three-year-old Fusae and went back to Ueyama Bun'eido, where her mother was.

What remained was the problem of Fusae.

By the rules of that time, custody, the right to raise a child and decide things for her, was granted only to the father. Teru asked that she at least be allowed to raise her daughter herself.

Her husband agreed at first, they say. But he soon changed his mind and began to demand strongly that she hand the girl over.

Then a letter came from her husband. It said that on March 10 he would come to take Fusae.

The day before, March 9, Teru went to a photo studio next to Kameyama Hachimangu shrine and had her picture taken. On the way home she bought cherry rice cakes and shared them with Fusae, it is said.

That night Teru gave Fusae a bath and watched until her daughter fell asleep.

Then she wrote three letters: one to her husband, one to Masasuke, and one to her uncle and mother.

The next day, March 10, Teru died at Ueyama Bun'eido. She had taken her own life. She was twenty-six.

In the letter to Masasuke, they say, she called him our champion and sent him off with words telling him to go forth bravely.

The letter to her husband said, in words to this effect: If you are determined to take her, it cannot be helped. But what you can give our daughter is money, not something that grows her heart. I want to raise her to be rich in heart. So please leave her with my mother, Michi.

Afterward, Fusae was raised by Teru's mother, Michi.

Teru was buried at Henjoji temple in Senzaki. It was the same grave as her father, whom she had lost at two.

Two months after Misuzu died, two of her songs were printed in Wax Doll, a new magazine Saijo Yaso had started: "Elephant" and "Crossroads." The next year, Yaso wrote of the day they met at Shimonoseki station, to mourn her. It was the piece called "One Night in Shimonoseki."

In the same year, 1931, Masasuke had come to think, they say, that children's songs had been left behind by the world of magazines, and that making them into a book would be hard.

In 1935, Yaso picked songs from the collection of children's songs Misuzu had sent him and printed them in a magazine for girls, adding his memory of the day they met in Shimonoseki. The second set of notebooks had indeed reached Yaso.

But no book of poems came out.

Masasuke later wrote plays under the name Ueyama Gasuke and founded a theater company for children. All that time, he kept the three notebooks that had come from his sister.

Misuzu's name was slowly forgotten.

After the war, a few of her songs were included in children's anthologies and collected works. Even so, she did not become widely known.

In 1957, the Iwanami Bunko edition of Japanese Children's Songs included just one of Misuzu's songs: "Big Catch."

In 1966, a first-year university student read that single song and was deeply moved. He was Yazaki Setsuo, who would later become a children's song poet. Yazaki began to search for what Misuzu had left behind.

In 1970, one of the poets who had submitted work at the same time as Misuzu gathered her songs from the magazines and made them into a book at his own expense.

Yazaki reached Misuzu's brother in the sixteenth year of his search. It was June 20, 1982. In Tokyo, Ueyama Gasuke, seventy-seven, handed the visiting Yazaki the three notebooks and his sister's photographs.

There were four photographs, they say. One was taken at twenty, in the spring, at a studio in Shimonoseki. One was of sister and brother side by side. One was a wedding keepsake. And one was taken the day before she died.

They were the old notebooks, said to have been a bookshop's samples. Inside them, 512 songs were copied out.

At the end of 1983, a newspaper reported that the notebooks of her songs had been found.

Even so, a company willing to publish them was slow to appear. An editor at JULA Publishing came up with a plan: collect advance orders first, then print. In 1984, the three notebooks became a complete collection.

Three years later, in 1987, Gasuke staged a show with his own theater company in which Misuzu's songs were read aloud and acted out in a play without words.

The one who raised her daughter was her mother, Michi. The one who put her songs into print was Yaso, whom she had met only once. The one who kept the notebooks for over half a century was her brother, who grew up thinking she was his cousin. The one who found that brother was Yazaki, who searched for sixteen years.

Gasuke died on April 11, 1989, it is said.

It was his sister's birthday.