Major Japanese author Natsume Soseki (1867-1916) is famous for, among other things, supposedly telling his students not to translate the English “I love you” directly into Japanese, and use something more oblique, like “the moon is beautiful.” Japanese is generally a pretty indirect language, and especially in those years open displays of such emotion were not common, hence the more roundabout phrasing would sound more natural.
Also relevant is that most standard direction translation would typically be 愛してる(aishiteru), which is used with far lower frequency than its English equivalent. As a reader of Japanese media you may be more familiar with 好き (suki), a word more popularly used, which can be more vague and covers both “like” and “love”—so much so that even in Japanese conversations you might hear/see someone specify which one they mean by literally just using the English: “I love 好き her, not like 好き her.”
