“Paris on My Mind: Yosano Akiko and Europe”

From may to October of 1912, Yosano Akiko, the most renowned woman poet of twentieth-century Japan, traveled to Europe for the first and last time in her life. The journey out was made overland by the newly constructed Trans-Siberian Railway, the journey back by boat from Marseilles. Short as Akiko’s stay in Europe was, the experience changed her as a writer in important ways. It also became the seed for some of her most original and moving poems and essays. Like other works of her maturity, these writings were largely overlooked until recently, but they in fact are among the hidden treasures of world travel literature.