A Journey through Manchuria and Mongolia, with Songs of Manchuria and Mongolia

In the spring of 1928, Yosano Akiko and her husband, the poet Yosano Hiroshi, traveled through Manchuria and part of Mongolia. Their account moves from ships and railway stations to mountain monasteries, markets, gardens, river boats, industrial works, and frontier towns. Conversations, unfamiliar meals, religious images, and the drifting whiteness of willow down become occasions for curiosity, argument, and poetry.

Akiko’s detailed prose stands beside Hiroshi’s opening observations and two separately credited sequences of tanka. His Chinese-style poems close the volume. The travelers encounter hospitality and hostility, colonial institutions and local lives, and the upheaval surrounding Zhang Zuolin’s death. Their differing perceptions, political assumptions, and occasional corrections remain part of the record.

Akiko was a major Japanese poet and essayist whose writing joined lyrical intensity with outspoken intellectual independence. This complete English translation preserves the book’s collaborative authorship, captions, introductory passages, and every supplied poem, with notes on historical names, textual uncertainties, and conflicting reports. AI-assisted translation.