[2] In 1923, Kaneko became the manager and sole employee of her uncle's small bookstore in Shimonoseki, a town at the southern tip of Honshu.

Her new husband was unfaithful and contracted a venereal disease, which he passed on to Kaneko, causing her lifelong physical pain.

He also forced her to stop writing, while putting the family through the strain of four moves within two years to pursue failing business ventures.

[4] On March 9, 1930, the day before her husband was due to take custody, Kaneko felt no recourse except to commit suicide in protest.

After bathing Fusae and sharing a sakuramochi, Kaneko wrote a letter to her husband asking that he let her mother raise the girl instead, and overdosed on sedatives, dying the next day, only a month before her 27th birthday.

Although she received praise for her published poems during her life, Kaneko's work descended into obscurity during the years of World War II[2] In 1966, a 19-year-old Japanese aspiring poet named Setsuo Yazaki discovered her poem "Big Catch" in an old book.

In 1982 he was able to get in touch with Kaneko's younger brother, now 77 years old, who still had the diaries in which she had copied out her poems, most unpublished during her lifetime.

The Lost Poetry of Misuzu Kaneko was released by the independent book publisher Chin Music Press.