The Collected Poems of Sagawa Chika

Many consider Sagawa Chika as Japan's first female Modernist poet, and yet those who are aware of her work and her influence also agree that Sagawa has been heretofore underacknowledged. Her work was written in a concentrated span of seven or eight years, before her death in 1936, a few years before WWII disrupted (to put it mildly) most cultural activities in Japan that did not involve war propaganda. The postwar period saw new developments in poetry – along with new means of recovering and canonizing Modernist poetry – but until recently, most studies of Modernist avant-garde poetry have excluded Sagawa. There are various theories as to why this is so, but it is most likely a combination of factors – her early death, the fact that she was a woman, or the fact that she was a woman and yet didn't write about "women's issues." I suspect that if Sagawa had managed to live a bit longer, she would have continued to develop her technique and become even more of an influential poet.

Though Sagawa was female, she never made this the central theme of her poetry. (A contrast here would be Yosano Akiko, who revolutionized traditional poetic forms while espousing a fierce and passionate feminine aesthetic, while also raising 11 children.) There is little emphasis on gender in Sagawa's poetry. By this I do not intend to suggest that gender did not play a role, simply that the uniqueness of her poetry did not depend on it. In other words, there was no tokenism in her acceptance – her poetry was admired entirely on its own terms. On a recent trip to the Museum of Modern Literature in Tokyo, I perused the pages of Shi to Shiron (Poetry and Poetics) to discover that Sagawa was also the first woman (and ultimately, one of only a few) to have published in this influential journal.

Born in Hokkaido (the northernmost island in Japan) about an hours' drive from Sapporo, Sagawa was only 17 years old when she, against her parents' wishes, followed her brother and his friend Ito Sei (who later became a novelist) to Tokyo. With their help, she tumbled into the midst of the most interesting poetic developments of the 1920s and 1930s. It was a time when many Japanese writers were looking outward, avidly translating texts coming out of European Modernism. The young and the fashionable were trading in their kimonos for Western-style clothing (one can see this change through photos of Sagawa herself), jazz cafés were sprouting up everywhere, and even the Japanese language itself was swaying under the many influences of modernization.

Sagawa's work was highly respected by many, including Nishiwaki Junzaburo, and in particular, Kitasono Katue, who became one of her greatest advocates. They, as well as I did many years later, recognized in her work a distinctly Modernist, yet personal style: it combines Modern techniques and ideas (Surrealism, Imagism, Objectivism, collage, parataxis, juxtaposition, to name a few) with an intense emotional register. Her work synthesizes images from her nature-rich upbringing in Hokkaido with those from the chaotic and hyper-dynamic megalopolis that Tokyo was quickly becoming, which also parallels the clash between old and new which figured in the works of many Modernist poets. (This is perhaps more apparent in her earlier poems, rather than the three included here, which were published in the last few years before she died.) No doubt she was also influenced by her translations of James Joyce, Virginia Woolfe, Mina Loy, and Charles Reznikoff, as well as the radical experimentation of many of her Japanese peers.

Sagawa's poetry and translations have only recently been reprinted in Japan. Perhaps it is with good timing, then, that my own translation of her collected poems is forthcoming from Canarium Books – I hope that this, along with increasing scholarship on Sagawa's contribution to Modernist poetry, helps bring her some long overdue credit, in her own as well as in many other languages.