Yoimachigusa (Evening Primrose)

• The song’s text is based on a love poem by Japanese artist and poet Takehisa Yumeji (1884-1934).¹ Yumeji’s poem “Yoimachigusa” was first published in 1912 in the Japanese magazine Shōjo (Girls).²
• Ōno adapted the poem as lyrics for his song “Yoimachigusa” in 1917. The song is the lament of one who waits all night for a lover who never arrives.³
• The song was published in 1918 by Senow Music Publishers, with this print by Yumeji on the cover of the score.⁴

The despair of the evening primrose 
Tonight it seems that even the moon will not appear.

Excerpt from the lyrics to “Yoimachigusa,” quoted and translated in Nozomi Naoi, Yumeji Modern: Designing the Everyday in Twentieth-Century Japan, 3. 

1. “Yoimachigusa (Ōno, Tadasuke),” IMSLP, accessed November 16, 2021, https://imslp.org/wiki/Category:%C5%8Cno,_Tadasuke. 
2. Nozomi Naoi, Yumeji Modern: Designing the Everyday in Twentieth-Century Japan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020), 3.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.