was a Japanese poet and nonfiction writer. She is best known for her 1976 book .

Early life and education

Morisaki was born in what is now

Daegu Daegu (, , literally 'large hill', 대구광역시), formerly spelled Taegu and officially known as the Daegu Metropolitan City, is a city in South Korea. It is the third-largest urban agglomeration in South Korea after Seoul and Busan; it is ...

, Korea on April 20, 1927. Her father was a teacher. The family also had a Korean nanny for their three children, of which Morisaki was the oldest. Morisaki's mother died of cancer when she was in high school. Her family moved back to

Fukuoka is the sixth-largest city in Japan, the second-largest port city after Yokohama, and the capital city of Fukuoka Prefecture, Japan. The city is built along the shores of Hakata Bay, and has been a center of international commerce since ancie ...

, Japan when

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

broke out. She graduated from what is now

Fukuoka Women's University is a public university in Fukuoka, Fukuoka Prefecture, Japan. Established in 1923, it was chartered as a university in 1950. Alongside Gunma Prefectural Women's University, it is one of the two public women's universities in Japan. Its abbreviat ...

in 1947. Her essay "Two Languages, Two Souls" is about her complex emotions regarding leaving Korea, including her attempts to erase her Korean past and her acknowledgement of her former position as a

colonizer Colonization, or colonisation, constitutes large-scale population movements wherein migrants maintain strong links with their, or their ancestors', former country – by such links, gain advantage over other inhabitants of the territory. When ...

Career

In 1950 she began writing for a poetry magazine headed by . She also started a family and had a daughter. In 1956 she began working at the Fukuoka NHK, where she wrote essays and scripts for radio dramas. In 1957 she moved to a mining town in Chikuhō with

Gan Tanigawa Gan Tanigawa was a Japanese poet, critic, and social activist. He is best known for his work with the poetry group. Early life and education Tanigawa was born Iwao Tanigawa on December 25, 1923 in Minamata, Kumamoto. He was born the second o ...

and and founded a journal called . She also published a journal for women called from 1959 to 1960. Even after the mine closed and Tanigawa left for Tokyo, Morisaki continued writing. Morisaki published one of her best-known works, , in 1976. It was about Japanese women who moved overseas to be sex workers. Throughout her career she wrote more than fifty books and earned many awards, such as the Yutaka Maruyama Prize for poetry. Her works were typically about women, the working class, and their struggles. She was particularly interested in the "underground" culture of the miners and how it differed from "aboveground" Japanese culture.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Morisaki, Kazue 1927 births 2022 deaths 20th-century Japanese poets 21st-century Japanese poets 20th-century Japanese writers 21st-century Japanese non-fiction writers People from Daegu 21st-century Japanese women writers