1929 On April 22, born in Yūki County, Ibaragi Prefecture. Father: Saitō Mohei, mother: Teru. Three step-siblings. One uterine older sister, three uterine younger siblings. The genius loci of the village, which the official history of the village describes as "the place where the Yūki silk fabric originated," is Onga-sama, the Great Mulberry Deity. In the shrine precincts there was a giant mulberry tree which even adults could climb; in the fall it put on purple berries.

My family's business was cultivation of mulberry saplings. We were busy during the shipping season and I remember sitting in the accounting room and helping in the work of stamping on shipping labels the characters for Ken'yu-en, Silk Weaving Garden. Since the Japan-China War began, the business seemed to have been doing poorly, and Father idled his time away, going out to fish every day. This was nothing as elegant as angling; he caught fish by casting a net to "gain a thousand coins in a single stroke." He would put me on the skiff he owned and row it downriver as far as the neighboring village. My role was to put still-leaping fish in a small basket and give them to our neighbors. The names of the fish I remember are koi, aiso, funa, haya, tanago; the river maidens ayu held their bodies arched in a cup on the tray for Father's evening cocktail.

I grew up with the river but often fell into it. Even slipping and falling in the shallows, I'd be pushed away. Once I was blocked by something like a pile so opened my eyes and was alarmed to find it to be a hind leg of a large amber-colored cow....

The first verse that became part of me was Mother's lullaby, which appeared to be not a lullaby of the region but one that only Mother sang:

Hulling barley, hulling wheat,
nine calluses on your lovely hands;
when you look at those nine calluses,
you miss your parents' residence.
If you miss it, come visit it
in Shinoda Woods, beyond kudzu leaves.

Whenever I saw her purse her lips and pretend to hold a brush in her mouth, saying that was the way a fox wrote her song of farewell on the paper sliding door, I'd wonder, Is my mother actually a fox? Is she leaving this house some day? and fear and sadness would rise in me....

The babysitter of my sister Yōko, who was four years younger than I, was a gentle-hearted boy named Bun'ichi. He had a book of popular songs which seemed to have come as a supplement to King or some such magazine and he treasured it as if it were the Bible. I followed him around, so he made an exception and would show it to me. As I turned the pages and heard him sing

Even the bells of a sled sound sadly....
or
Shall I go beneath the aurora or go away....

I memorized a considerable number of Chinese characters before starting school....

1936 In April, I entered the village primary school. The first page of the government-designated Japanese textbook had "They bloomed; they bloomed; cherry blossoms bloomed.” To my eyes and ears that had grown used to such writings as "Even the bells of a sled sound sadly," the characters set in large, scattered katakana syllabary were inexplicably naÏve and wanting. At home I read the Complete Works for Primary School. Who was their publisher? The characters lined up on each cover saying, "Favored Reading of His Highness the Imperial Prince Y," remain oddly, brilliantly in my memory. One volume which had children's songs by Kitahara Hakushū, Miki Rofū, Noguchi Ujō, Saijō Yaso, and others, in particular, gave me happiness….

About this time I went up all by myself to the second floor of the clay-walled storehouse for mulberry saplings, where among the dusty bundles of printed matter I found the following lines. I was then beginning to look for lineated writings without being conscious that they were "poems":

We are born, suffer,
And, suffering, end up dying.
Ah, our life—
Is it a pot that tears fill?.

Verily, I must say, "Ah." A tuberculosis-afflicted, literature-infatuated young man someplace must have written this terrible lyric—yes, in an innermost living room that was as gloomy as this storehouse—and secretly submitted it to a magazine, and I, barely ten years old, was violated by it! Girls, don't go up to the second floor of a storehouse, would be my advice now. There, in addition to wooden trunks and wicker baskets packed with all sorts of ghosts and ghouls, there's a pale-faced, wicked older brother.... I managed to come down the staircase, but as if I'd come down with a cold, I had a fever and was taken to bed....

1942 In April, I entered the prefectural Yūki Girls' Junior High School....

I did enter junior high school, but we had normal classes for only a brief time. Soon our entire school life became one of various kinds of labor, such as tilling the schoolyard, growing sugar cane, providing "labor service" to the farmhouses, and digging air-raid shelters [Shinkawa’s school helped to make parts for kamikaze aircraft]. The Pacific War had started in December of the previous year, and with a single red draft notice the young men, the prime workers, were driven out one after another to the battlefields. The role of us women students was to go to the train station to send off the soldiers.

One day, on my way home from school, I dropped by a bookstore in town. Mr. Urata, the painting teacher, who happened to be there, pulled a book off a shelf and handed it to me without saying anything. The book, entitled The Thuds of Army Boots, was not so much a collection of poems; rather, as the title suggested, it was a collection of military songs, and the author was, surprisingly enough, a young woman named Chiba Yasuko. A photograph of a plump, lovely face adorned its cover. Earlier, as part of my summer-vacation homework, I had submitted to the exhibition of "free works" a composition in which I had rearranged excerpts from Essays in Idleness [an early 14th century work] in 7-5, 5,5, and other syllabic patterns. The prefectural superintendent of education thought it was an interesting attempt and took it home. Mr. Urata must have remembered that and decided to have a verse-loving student read a book he happened to find in a bookstore.

All the poems in The Thuds of Army Boots used the everyday lives of soldiers in the battlefields for material and they were so expertly done in content and technique that it was hard to believe that their author was a young woman as shown in the photograph. I took the book home and perused it. My impression was that I could write such things myself.

Why didn't I take an interest in tanka and haiku? Next to her lullaby, the One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets [13th century anthology] that Mother recited every New Year must have become part of me, but I have no memory of working hard to master the 31-syllable form. One of the few practice pieces that I'd written in my notebook reads:

Netsu yamite moeshi waga to ni taionkei no hiyayaka narishi suigin no iro
Down with a fever my burning hand cold to it the thermometer the color of its mercury.

I often had a fever.

1943 In January, one morning a newspaper reported, with a photograph, that the poet Saijō Yaso had been evacuated from Tokyo to Shimodate in our prefecture. Shimodate was a town right next to ours. After spending several restless days, I decided to take the plunge and wrote him a letter. I composed a welcome poem of three quatrains, each line consisting of 5-7 syllables, such as

In the midst of war, on a new spring day,
You, the poet 1 have admired,
Are welcomed in a town not far.
I am one of many excited in their hearts.

and sent it, along with a cover letter, to the address given in the newspaper. The response came at once. The picture postcard said something like, Please come visit me with your notebook of poems.

I got off the train at Shimodate on the Mito Line, climbed the road in front of the station toward the sun that was setting at its top, and passed several alleys before turning left. There the third building on the right was a two-story house the poet had taken as his temporary abode. A small maid about my age led me up the staircase. In the inner, eight-mat side of the two-room space with the partitions taken off, on the other side of a foot-warmer cover with a florid Yuzen design sat the poet, leaning against an alcove post. "He looks like a princess," I thought, perhaps because of the elegant colors and design of the foot-warmer cover. I didn't know what its name was, but a winged thing was hopping from one branch to another of a scarlet plum. It was like a dream that such a place, so totally different from the weapons factory where I was mobilized, existed.

"She hasn't received any bad influence of gendaishi [modern literature], and that's good. She has a fabulous vocabulary," said Mr. Saijō after perusing the notebook I'd hesitantly handed over—not to me, but to the poet Ōshima Hakko, who happened to be visiting from Tokyo. He must have judged that I wouldn't understand technical terms. In fact, it was a word I heard for the first time. I was at a loss. Gendaishi. So there was such a thing.

Mr. Saijō went to a bookcase, pulled out a gorgeous book with Saijō Yaso's Poetry: A Reader (edited by Yokoyama Seiga) written in gold on its spine, autographed it, and gave it to me. I was further at a loss to see the groups of resplendent poems selected there. His poems that I had known were a few children's songs I'd read as a small child and the sweet lyrics in girls' magazines. Titles such as Placer Gold [Saijō’s first published anthology, 1919] and The Unknown Lover [his third, 1922], I hadn't even heard of them.

With a growing frequency I carried my notebook in the direction opposite to that of the school. By then it had become difficult to buy Mito Line tickets for personal use, so I hurried the distance of six kilometers by bicycle. My teacher would look through the notebook and on very rare occasions draw, with a carefully sharpened pencil, a circle the size of a sparrow's egg at the top right of a poem. He was tough in correcting wrong characters. He wouldn't do anything like guiding my poetry writing step by step. When the work was done, he would take me out for a walk along the Gogyō River or, on cold days, take out, as if by magic, a chestnut from the ash of the hand-warming hibachi in his study, peel it, and put it on my palm. For him, those must have been months and days of monotony and boredom.

1945 One night in March, the burning sky of Tokyo under a great air raid [a reference to the first massive B-29 fire bomb raid] was visible, red and suppurating, even from my village about one hundred kilometers to the north. My teacher, in view of a possible loss to fire of his enormous manuscript on Rimbaud, asked me to copy it. This academic study quoted a quantity of original poems, and I, a young woman, wasn't able to comprehend even one-tenth of it; but in the scant light under a blackout I methodically copied it every night. It was during that time I came to know the poems of Verlaine, Valéry, Supervielle, Goll, Alliete Aurdra, and Mme de Noailles through Mr. Horiguchi Daigaku's masterly translations. I was particularly taken by the poems of Alliete Aurdra, who is said to have been a sister of a friend of Rilke's. I also read intently big novels of Tolstoy and Dostoyevski, but I felt closer to the contes of George Sand and the novels of Margueritte Audoux, a blind young seamstress in Paris.

In August, Japan was defeated....

As if nothing had happened, the sky was simply blue. The sky where no more enemy planes were seen was eerie even. The radio that had repeated only "Reports from the General Headquarters" until the “Imperial Broadcast” was now airing unfamiliar jazz as if to announce the arrival of a new era; jarring my sensibility.

I was glad that classes reopened in September, but was disheartened that math classes resumed. On the days there was a math class, my legs automatically took me to Shimodate. On holidays, too, I began to leave a note and get out of the house. As such things became frequent, Mother, who had initially taken a benign view of the matter, began to be alarmed and became desperate to pull her daughter away—not so much from poetry as from the poet. Once she even had me sit in front of her all night, scolding me until daybreak.

1946 In April, I married Tadashi, the first son of the Shinkawa family, whom I had called "Mr. Doctor's Tadashisan" since my childhood. The stipulation for the marriage was what he had repeatedly told me since his repatriation from Central China late in the previous year: Go to school, if you want to; you should do whatever you want to do.

"I present Shinkawa Kazue with this to mark our severance. She has superior talent but is unaware of it. She will end up being buried under an unknown shrub"—such were the words coldly written on the cover of Mr. Saijō's new book, Selected Lyrics (published by Seikatsusha), which he sent to me. I was unspeakably sad, wondering, Why should a marriage spell an end?

1948 Tadashi decided to headquarter his business in Tokyo and we moved to Mukōyama, Shibuya. After Wax Doll was discontinued, I joined the members' magazine Pleiades, which had Mr. Kadota Yutaka as the central figure, and began to publish poems in it, one or two at a time. Word must have reached Mr. Saijō; after a long interval he wrote me a letter, and I went to see him for the first time in two years.

My husband had told me to live my life in whatever way I pleased, but I couldn't imagine a woman could have freedom without economic independence. If she did, wouldn't she be selfish? In order to continue to write poems, I needed to write manuscripts that earned money. Through Mr. Saijō's introduction, I started to serialize "Flower Story" in Girls' Romance and, while I was doing that, requests for contributions started to come to me from girls' magazines and educational magazines such as Girl Students' Friend, Girls' Friend, Sunflower, and Girls' Club. About the same time, Miss Setouchi Harumi, who had come to Tokyo to become a novelist, had also begun writing girls' stories to make a living, and we often bumped into each other at such publishers as Shōgakukan and would eat "honeyed beans" at a nearby restaurant.

I was urged to study novel-writing seriously and was sent—(half-forcibly) with Mr. Saijō's letter of introduction—to a Waseda-related literary group, the Fifteenth-Day Society. On the fifteenth day of every month, I went to the "Ritz," in Yūrakuchō, where a criticism session was held. Miss Setouchi was there, too, and, when asked, would rise to her feet as cheerfully as a schoolgirl and give her impressions in an utterly innocent manner. Miss Kōno Taeko soon joined us. Her work hadn't seen print yet, but I felt respect and awe for her as someone irrepressible. As for myself, I was very skeptical about my talent. I wrote a couple of novels, which of course didn't see print. Whenever I contributed a poem they took it, but even though it might receive compliments, I never heard a criticism sharply pointing to shortcomings. Because the group's magazine, The Man of Letters, was a forum where would-be novelists engaged in fierce competition, reading and complimenting a single poem must have provided the members with a respite. I felt comfortable with them, but I thought that staying with them would spoil me and decided to quit. Mr. Saijō expressed his regrets, saying, "If you were in the same circumstances as Hayashi Fumiko, you'd become a good novelist." If I had become one, it would have been horrible: I'd have been forced to write many, many novels as Hayashi did. I preferred poems that could be written with fewer words. I wanted to live with poems alone. By then girls' magazines and educational magazines, too, were allowing me to write poems.

1953 I made a selection of fifty-one from the poems I'd written and had it published by Pleiades, at my own expense, under the title of The Sleeping Chair [Nemuri isu]. The preface was by Saijō Yaso; the cover design by Yamamoto Ranson.

Hiroaki Sato (translator). From "Up to the Starting Line," Not a Metaphor: Poems of Kazue Shinkawa. Middletown Springs, VT: P.S. A Press, 1999. See original for translator’s endnotes.