Shostakovich's Six Japanese Romances for tenor and orchestra, Op. 21, is the first—and one of the very, very few—works in which Shostakovich concerns himself with the subject of romantic love. Although Shostakovich had been in love with a woman when he was eighteen, remaining attached to her until the birth of her first child a decade later, his true love was dark-eyed beauty, Nina Varsar, who was a brilliant scientist. Shostakovich loved her passionately through the severe difficulties of their relationship. To her, Shostakovich dedicated not only his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (1932) but the song cycle of Japanese Romances.

The songs were composed in two groups, the first three in 1928 when he met Nina, the fourth in 1931, and the final two in 1932, the year he married her. The texts are drawn from a book of Japanese poetry in translation published in St. Petersburg in 1912, the same book which furnished Stravinsky with the texts for his Three Japanese Songs (1912 - 1913). The first three songs, "Love," "Before Suicide," and "An Immodest Glance," have the same abrupt expressionist gestures and lean orchestral textures of Shostakovich's contemporaneous opera, The Nose (1927 - 1928). The last three, "For the First and Last Time," "Love Without Hope," and "Death," are more expansive melodically and more luxuriant orchestrally, like Shostakovich's contemporaneous opera, Lady Macbeth (1930 - 1932).

The first song, "Love," is the most passionately physical love song Shostakovich ever composed ("Oh, how I love you! How passionately, how tenderly I love you, my joy!"). That joy, articulated significantly in a minor key, is short-lived, and the second song, "Before Suicide" (one of the two most common subjects for Shostakovich's song settings), breaks off in anguished full cry. The third song, "An Immodest Glance," is a delicately impressionistic, shimmeringly evocative look at the beloved's legs. The fourth song, "For the First and Last Time," opens with dark sonorities in keeping with the despairing tone of the tenor's angular lines ("There remains only pain, only pain. . . ."). The fifth song, "Love Without Hope," exudes the melancholy bitterness of rejected love and sets the stage for the final, abysmal song "Death" (the most common subject of Shostakovich's songs). Shostakovich's setting of the song's last line "I am dying because to live without love is impossible. I am dying. . . ." with its aching fall into the grave suggests that, had Shostakovich lived in a country in which the subject of death from romantic love had not been supplanted by the subject of death from state-sponsored mass murder, he might have written some of the darkest and most despairing love songs ever composed.

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