Introduction
a good poet,” to initiate the movement. His romantic marriage with his promising pupil Akiko Otori gave the necessary impetus. Between the years 1900 and 1908, headed by the gifted poetess, the New Society was able to count almost all the brilliant young poets among its members and inaugurate a period known as the Age of Myojo or of Akiko.
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Akiko, the third daughter of Soshichi Otori, a proprietor of a confectionery shop, was born on December 7, 1878, at Kaimachi, Sakai City. Once a prosperous seaport, the city lost, after the Restoration of 1868, its shipping industry to the neighboring trade center, Osaka. As a child Akiko remembered a long row of white-washed warehouses, deserted wharves, and musty narrow streets.
Oh, for the sea
Where, in the house of my parents,
I grew up a maiden,
Counting the distant roars of the tides!
This is the only poem which refers to her early environment.
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