Today’s post comes to you from David Jacobson:

This September marks ten years since the publication of Are You an Echo? The Lost Poetry of Misuzu Kaneko edited and translated from the Japanese by David Jacobson, Sally Ito, and Michiko Tsuboi, illustrated  by Toshikado Hajiri (Chin Music Press, 2016).  At the time of the release, we didn’t know what kind of reception we’d get for this children’s poet, beloved in Japan but virtually unknown in the English-speaking world. I had initially approached one of Amazon’s publishing units to publish Are You an Echo, but they turned me down, saying they didn’t touch poetry. Small press publisher Chin Music Press (which I was working for at the time), though, took a chance.

Even though we were confident in the quality of Misuzu’s children’s poetry, Toshikado Hajiri’s gorgeous artwork, the deftness of Sally Ito and Michiko Tsuboi’s translations, and the poignancy of Misuzu’s life story, publishing poetry is always a risky endeavor. What’s more, in creating the book, we broke many publishing conventions: the book was double the length of the average 32-page picture book; it was bilingual English and Japanese; it combined the story of the poet’s life with a substantial poetry anthology; and problematically, the story dealt with suicide in a book intended for children. These aspects made things difficult for bookstores trying to determine where to shelve the book (one bookshop even considered placing it on the bereavement shelf!). Furthermore, because we created the book with a multinational team from the U.S., Canada, and Japan, Are You An Echo was ineligible for the most prominent awards, which are often limited to creators from a single country.

But this unusual book touched something in readers. Are You an Echo? went through four printings, 10,000 copies, and is now, sadly, out of print. The book is held at 496 libraries in eight countries. Most gratifying to us is that it inspired translations of Misuzu’s poems into other languages such as Georgian and Spanish, perhaps others. What’s more, the narrative portion of Are You An Echo has been translated back into Japanese (by me), and this translation is still being reprinted by Misuzu’s Japanese publisher, JULA Publishing / Fureibel-kan. We’ve also cooperated with multiple composers—in Japan, the US, and Britain—who have sought to set Sally and Michiko’s translations of Misuzu’s poetry to music. 

There’s something unique to Misuzu that sustains this interest nearly 100 years after her death.

JULA Publishing credits the uniqueness and universality of the poems themselves, which have reached readers for decades and across continents. The spread of Misuzu’s poetry has also  benefitted from the tireless work of poet Yazaki Setsuo, who labored 16 years to locate her poems, and several more to flesh out her life story which had gone unnoticed for so long. His biography, Doyo Shijin Kaneko Misuzu no Shogai (“The Life of the Children’s Poet Kaneko Misuzu”), provided the source material for Are You an Echo?. Critical, too, have been the efforts of JULA Publishing, which has worked hard to sustain and develop Misuzu’s legacy through lectures and exhibitions and other events centered on Misuzu many years after publication, even supporting individual “Misuzu clubs” across Japan. In a small way, we, too, have become part of this ecosystem enveloping Misuzu, that now extends to translators, publishers, and artists in fifteen countries.

Sally, Michiko, and I are now working on a second volume of Misuzu translations. We like to think of those we’re working with now as nothing less than a “dream team”––one that came together thanks to the book’s editor Leonard Marcus and his long-standing relationships with Claudia Bedrick, the publisher of Enchanted Lion Books, who acquired the book, and the prominent artist Allen Say, who along with his wife Miki Say, has illustrated the book. We expect the book to be released in the spring of 2028, which also marks the 125th anniversary of Misuzu’s birth. 

Below is one of Allen Say’s watercolors for the forthcoming book.

We hope our connection with Misuzu Kaneko won’t end there. This past June, after more than a decade of effort, Sally and Michiko completed translation into English of Misuzu’s entire opus of 512 poems. Maybe one day they’ll all appear on the printed page.

David Jacobson is a writer and Japanese translator. Following a career in print and broadcast media, he joined Seattle-based book publisher Chin Music Press, with whom he published Are You an Echo? The Lost Poetry of Misuzu Kaneko. He is co-translator of a second volume of Misuzu poetry, to be published by Enchanted Lion Books. David is now working on the biographies of Jella Lepman, founder of Germany’s International Youth Library, and Beate Sirota Gordon, who wrote the women’s rights provisions of the postwar Japanese constitution.