Yosano Akiko was born in December 7, 1878, in Sakai, Japan, one of eight children of the owner of a confectionery shop in a suburb of Osaka. When she died sixty-three years later in May 1942, she was the most famous and controversial female writer in Japan, having published seventy-five books, of which twenty volumes were original poetry including seventeen thousand tanka and five hundred poems in free verse, as well as the definitive translation into modern Japanese of The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu. She has been called a princess, a queen, and a "goddess of poetry", the very embodiment of early-twentieth-century Japanese Romanticism, feminism, pacifism and social reform. She denominates her epoch to such a degree that it is commonly referred to as the Age of Akiko.

Mountain Moving Day¹

"Mountain moving day has come".

is what I say. But no one believes it.

Mountains were just sleeping for a while.

Earlier they had moved with fire.

But you do not have to believe it.

O people! You’d better believe it!

All the sleeping women move

Now that they awaken.