Called 'the brightest star among all the young writers of poetry for children', Kaneko Misuzu is one of Japan's most famous 20th-century children's poets. Kaneko's 512 poems are a fixture in Japanese schools, and have recently been brought to broader attention in the West thanks to the efforts of Setsuo Yazaki, a Japanese poet who helped to publicize her life and works in Japan, and more recently David Jacobson, the author of Are You an Echo?, the first anthology of Kaneko's poems published in North America, with translations by Sally Ito and Michiko Tsuboi.

A note on the name:

かねこ

金子

(Kaneko) is the surname, and みすゞ (Misuzu) is the given name, so it is more common to see 'Misuzu Kaneko' in English. We are following the Japanese government's recent request to sequence translated Japanese names as they are written in Japanese! For more on that, see Japanese name reversal.