The Factory Girls’ Song and Other Writings

Silk workers reel cocoons in suffocating heat, their earnings swallowed by fines. Their bitter factory song imagines the day its refrain will become a song of revolution. In another poem, a lover discovers that learning offers little protection against the grief of parting.

Around these poems, a varied Japanese anthology opens windows onto public and private life. Girls climb Kirigamine through rain and mist; a traveler finds noisy companionship at remote mountain hot springs; a kabuki actor recounts eerie incidents surrounding a ghost play.

Essays probe the relation between consciousness and time, challenge the outward display of temple abstinence, and ask how learning can become independent. Ono Azusa’s school-opening speech argues for scholarship and freedom from political interference. Prefaces celebrate a storyteller’s art and the warmth, wit, and scientific curiosity of Edward Morse.