To begin the process of thinking through Sagawa’s poetry and poetics, it can be helpful to begin with one small line from her essay, “Walking Between Trees” [Jukan o yuku toki]1:

Sagawa introduces us to a world where the orders of perception are made complex, where seeing and not seeing are overlapping realms of perception, where neither sight nor things should be taken at face value. She emphasizes the world of things, of objects (“to see things more clearly”) but also the modalities of seeing. There are glasses, lenses, windows, and mirrors. (Sagawa herself did wear glasses, as we see in pictures of her). Yet the realm of literal vision is, perhaps, of less interest than some other kinds of fields: the conceptual image, the imagined thought, the poetic possibility, the multiple modalities of the real. What was it that Sagawa was searching for in the interstices of the lines of her poetry, in her non-literal modality of perception and thought?

This essay explores the questions of perception, reality (realisms, plural) and poetics in Sagawa’s work, taking up only a small fragment of the essays and poems which give us, each in its own way, windows into how these issues unfold for Sagawa Chika. We begin with the complex web that is her poetic essay, “Walking Between Trees,” and then take up Sagawa’s translation of Virginia Woolf’s “A Haunted House,” and her own poem, “A Haunted City,” in order to understand both her theorizations of perception and thought and the workings of poetic language in her vision. Finally, we return to her complex essay, “If They Were the Eyes of Fish,” where the nuances of the question of “not seeing clearly,” and the poet’s role, come into fuller expression. In these works, Sagawa expresses the alternatives to simply “seeing clearly” and the advantages of such alternative perception accessible through poetic thought.

Sagawa is interested in blur; she is intrigued by fog, by indistinction, by multiple ways and facets of sight. She tries taking off her glasses; she puts them on. She sees how there is blurring, lack of lucidity even within apparently well-focused vision with one’s glasses on. Sagawa observes, instead, another kind of oddly lucid beauty in the bonyari, the foggy view of a nearsighted poet with her glasses off. Yet she indicates that this interest in the unclear pertains not only to visual perception—light falling on a field of grain (mugi: barley, wheat, oats, or rye), or the green of the young leaves she is passing, but it also figures, for her, the way that language might engage (philosophical, conceptual) thought, as well as the modalities in which artistic works relate to beauty. Further, of course, she makes direct comments on—and criticizes—the ways in which modernist Japanese poets around her, and likely including herself, relate or fail to relate to the French culture (and light, and air) they are absorbing. She comments on this importation in terms of technologies of photographic reproduction—“the world of Leica,” she calls it. Instead, or in contrast, Sagawa asserts:

Blurring is also beautiful and has its own clarity. Take a look with glasses off, she recommends. Realize that when one has one’s glasses on—not only because the field of vision is limited to the width of the face, as she writes earlier in the essay—there is a core or an inside or a gap within which one can still find blur, haziness even within a focused look—a hazy clarity, with its own specific goodness. Another way of translating that last line might be that it is not actually necessary for everyone to gaze at the world in a “single mirror.” (“The thought that everyone needs to peek into a single narrow mirror and determine clearly what’s black and what’s white is a foolish thought,” she tells us, in this alternative reading/translation: it’s an unwise thought, a thought that lacks clarity—a blurry thought, so to speak. Though blur still has its upside.)

We thus don’t need to keep working so hard to decide all the time about the difference between black and white, between dark (like the earth) and light (like the grains growing in the field around her). Nor do we even always need to distinguish between light and dark. Sagawa posits here a series of contrasts: the too-strong light and air of the French, against the dreams and phantoms of Japanese poetics (the word for phantoms is gen-ei, which contains in its second character kage, the image of shadow). In another essay, she draws out the brightness of her friend and poet Ema Shōko, whom she always describes in terms of light and cheer, in contrast to what Sagawa describes as her own darkness, obscurity. Sagawa posits such contrasts at times, but here she also challenges them with her poetic vision, in which reflectiveness and mediation of all kinds remain in question—whether by means of the lenses of her glasses, or the reflection of a (single or multiple) mirror, or in many of her poems and essays—a world viewed through very specific kinds of windows, or in relation to a distant Leica camera’s lens.

At this point in “Walking Between Trees,” just after making this assertion about the lack of necessity of clearly distinguishing black from white, she embarks on one of her most illuminating, but also challenging, formulations of her own poetics:

「境界線を探すことではなく、その一本の線の両側の無数の伏線を、飛躍した視野の切断面にぴしりぴしりと、あはせてゆくことにあるのではないだらうか。」
“It’s not about looking for the borderlines. Rather, isn’t it more likely a matter of taking the infinite number of foreshadowings [undersketchings] that can be found on both sides of that single boundary line and gradually, very precisely adjusting them to the cut surface of a visual field that has taken its own leap?”

If the prior phrases denied the clear distinction of black and white—if they were a sort of manifesto in favor of greyness, blur, complexity—this part of the essay extends that line of thought, to define an aim that is not about searching for borderlines and boundaries. The quest should not be for the line between black and white because, in this universe she evokes, on either side of that single line there is an infinite number of fukusen—a term that, taken for its separate characters, is also about lines (sen): “under” or “bent” lines, like the lines of refracted light. Here, the character combination normally denotes either precautionary measures or semi-secret underplots. It could also mean foreshadowings, to use a figure that is both visual and conceptual: in any case, it denotes the lines of a story that are not the main arc and that might be partially hidden. These fukusen are found, for Sagawa, on both sides of the single boundary demarcating black from white, recalling the lines of trees she describes earlier in the essay, on the “other side” of where she’s walking. What we translate here as foreshadowings or underplots could come before, after, or off to the side. In any case, they multiply a main line, just as in a blurry or out-of-focus photograph, like the modernist photographic experiments taking place around the same time where the objects’ outlines blur and multiply in repeated exposure.

Take that blur: it requires working little by little, but precisely. Within a field of vision which, she tells us, has already taken some kind of abstract “leap,” Sagawa suggests that one adjust and match the lines and sidelines, the foreshadowings and undershadowings, to make them match and mix and compound together. Her rather enigmatic sentence could even be an image of a better way of creating balance among cultural forms: rather than the (for Sagawa) inadequately adjusted way in which Japanese modernist poets were trying to work, her proposal could involve an awareness of all the grey zones, the multiplicity of lines, a visual field that has a cut like a lens (perhaps the edge of the glasses) to open up all kinds of possibilities around the edges. Precision is needed for this poetics of blur.

In the following sentences, Sagawa goes on to describe such a poetics directly: “I think that poetry is research into words.” Further, she says, “I think that [poetry is] filling space [or filling the air] with words selected from within the realm of thought (shii).” Shii here is a distinct term that brings out the importance, for her, of a field we will see again, the field of “thought” itself—philosophical, conceptual—composed not only of words but also implicating perception. Shii is a field that draws out the invisible other side of things, like the underplots and foreshadowings mentioned above. Poetry, she goes on, might emerge suddenly as a single word from among lots of talking, “or else, it might come and approach you from behind” when you are not expecting it. What is the attitude needed to catch, or be ready for, such an approach?

When the poet takes off her glasses, or even when they are on, the various hazes that come to inhabit this (leaping) visual field offer the possibility of a certain beauty—but then what? Poetry offers a space for active thought, a space of research; but it also can come upon you like a surprise, or even chase you from behind when you are least expecting it. Thus, for Sagawa, there is an intimate relation between perception, “thought,” and the acts one does with words (including the words of her very essay). If poetic language is a form of research, it is one that brings sight and perception into question, and that implicates a “leap” both for the visual field and for thought itself. Perhaps the term shii (thought, speculation) also alludes to the title of the journal where this essay was published, Shii no ki (Chinquapin or sweet acorn tree), since her essay limns the line between writing about trees and writing about poetic vision. The counter for trees, ippon, is the same as the counter for any long, straight thing, like the single borderline she describes (ippon no sen) in “Walking Between Trees”: here, in the blur, the trees multiply, as do the shadow-lines. Perhaps that is the way in which , with both strict precision and deliberate appreciation of unclarity—or rather, what we might call with Sagawa a “lucid blur”—the boundaries between cultural forms can be redrawn, and useful discoveries made, both by Sagawa and her fellow poets.

For a time after Sagawa moved to Tokyo from Hokkaido, she frequented modernist poet, novelist, and translator Itō Sei, her brother’s best friend, and in that period while he was translating Joyce and writing about Woolf, she also translated short works by Joyce and Woolf, as well as, throughout her career, engaging in a practice of translation of works by Mina Loy, Charles Reznikoff, and others. The only book published during her lifetime was, in fact, her translation of Joyce’s series of rhyming poems called “Chamber Music.”3 She translated the short piece “A Haunted House” from Woolf’s collection Monday or Tuesday, a piece that for Woolf became a foundational study or precursor of the middle section of To the Lighthouse, where Lily Briscoe searches the empty house after Mrs. Ramsey has died and all the other Ramseys are no longer there.4 It is the section of To the Lighthouse in which we learn, after the fact, that Mrs. Ramsey has died: we learn of it through a description of Mr. Ramsey’s arms in the night that embrace nothing because she is gone. It is a section of the novel focused on emptiness, and in which textiles come to the forefront: we see the shawl that Mrs. Ramsey wore as if it still contains her. The winds blow through the house as if they are looking for her. This level of specificity and storyline has not yet taken shape in “A Haunted House,” but some of its lineaments (foreshadowings) are already present: the sense of a search for something, in an empty house, that cannot be found—only with difficulty can one even determine what exactly one was seeking.

What can we learn from looking at Sagawa’s (rather literal) translations of Joyce and her translations of Woolf’s work? This section of the essay brings together Sagawa’s translation of “A Haunted House,” Tsukareta ie (憑かれた家) with her poem whose title echoes the former, “A Haunted City,” Tsukareta machi (憑かれた街), to take the next step in understanding how she conducted her “research” into words more concretely, including how she drew on imagery from her translations to build her poetics.5 Further, we can see how she transformed those images and fragments into new frames, making them not just mirrors or mediations of works in other languages but a more complex architectural/architectonic reworking of the “things” and words found there.6 This process involves a very challenging search, like that of the figures in Woolf’s Haunted House—a hunt for something that perhaps cannot or can only barely be found, and not by will alone.

The term “tsukareta” (憑かれた) works only marginally as a Japanese adjective to describe a house—the usual and more classically resonant term, used later also in the more accepted translation of Woolf’s short piece, is “yūrei yashiki,” (幽霊屋敷). While a yashiki might imply a rather fancy house—a residence, a mansion—and the yūrei (ghost, apparition, specter, phantom) seems palpably present in the term yūrei yashiki, the idea of tsukareta, usually used for a (possessed) person, does not as clearly put forward the sense that there are definitely ghostly beings present. Instead, one might even claim it seems to emphasize absence, as well as providing the linguistic strangeness of using a term normally applied to persons to describe a space, a built structure. (The term tsukareta—the homophonic idea of fleshly exhaustion, tiredness—echoes throughout Sagawa’s work with differing meanings.) Perhaps this strangeness of expression, if we were to call it that, could itself induce a kind of blur, a kind of oddly lucid unclarity or liminal space that has the “goodness” Sagawa attributed to unclear vision. However, the most evident thematic in her way of looking at Woolf’s work has to do with the question of absence which is the work’s central storyline, and the active search for something that, it seems, cannot easily be found.

Returning for a moment to “Walking Between Trees,” in a passage intertwined with those we cited above, Sagawa describes the poetic process of searching for language:

Like the search within the haunted house for something that eludes the speaker, the poetic process, too, is a search for “words of the heart,” something very faint and difficult to find that requires rigor. The poetic search does have to do with objects and spoken words out in the world (the thing said, the thing described), but also with “thought.” The relation between words and thought here requires this very specific, exact skill, and yet remains difficult to grasp, faint (wazuka), working like a little flame that nonetheless can make a precise cut or can burn out everything, including, in its last faint moment, itself (yakikiru, which means both burning off and burning out). The imagery of this passage very much resonates with those in Sagawa’s translation of Woolf’s “A Haunted House”: there is something invisible on the surface, and the presence of a flame, and, most importantly, something that must be sought with intense attention.

In Woolf’s original, we find the sentences: “‘What did I come in here for? What did I want to find?’ My hands were empty.” In the next paragraph, Woolf repeats: “…what? My hands were empty.”7 When Sagawa translates this, in the first instance the specific emphasis on hands disappears, as well as the passive voice. Instead, Sagawa writes for the first instance: “I didn’t find anything [did not discover anything,].” (「私は何も見出ださなかつた。」). The word for finding here has a visual nuance, a looking for that implicates sight. In the second instance of the same phrase, “my hands were empty,” Sagawa translates: “My hands don’t grasp/hold anything” (「私の手には何も掴まらない。」)8 Here we have the hands again but the term grasping (tsukamaranai), like the word discovering/finding (miidasu), has a much more active nuance than simply being “empty.” What one notes in these moments is precisely the active rigor of Sagawa’s idea of a “search,” along with the slightness, the faintness, of the possibility of arriving at the desired result.

At the close of Woolf’s piece, where the speaker realizes the “buried treasure” that the ghostly couple seeks is “the light in the heart,” Sagawa does not use the word kokoro (heart) as she did in “Walking Between Trees,” to describe that modality of language that is not apparent on the surface (hyōmen kara mienai kokoro no kotoba: “words of the heart that can’t be seen on the surface”).9 She translates it instead as “seishin-nai no hikari” (the light within the mind/spirit/soul), where the more stiff term seishin would be a Japanese version of the very much favored word “esprit” that encompasses both mind and heart, which would be an echo of the title of the journal Esprit Nouveau, which Sagawa worked on with Kitasono Katsue and others.10 The light of esprit, the very poetics that Sagawa and those around her aimed toward, is a light not obvious or overt but requiring a careful investigation to be found. Yet, unlike the speaker in Woolf’s “A Haunted House,” who ends with the discovery, here an active search may often be frustrated, or end in one’s not having discovered or grasped anything at all:empty hands.

Woolf’s text describes a space of loss, the space of a house after death: “So fine, so rare, coolly sunk beneath the surface the beam I sought always burnt behind the glass. Death was the glass; death was between us.” Any frequent reader of Sagawa (along with many other modernist poets) will recognize the omnipresence of glass, as well as the frequent presence of some kind of beam, flame or light underneath it. In Woolf’s text, the fine, rare beam gleams beneath a surface, just as, for Sagawa, the words she is seeking for poetry exist underneath a surface, in a strata below or behind the obviously visible, somewhere at the refracted edges of things. Here, for Woolf, “death was the glass”: the house in which the ghostly couple and the protagonist search contains resonances of loss specifically named as death. The house is a building that frames a loss, while inviting the company and voices of ghosts. Though we don’t hear or see so many ghosts in Sagawa’s own writing, we do see and hear absences, as well as many currents of air; as in Woolf’s piece, the wind blows through the house, marking the space of loss as well as revisiting memories of the past. In Sagawa we might see the manmade “ventilator,” as well as natural wind, blowing through the spaces of her poems.

Another architectural space of loss, ruin, and exhaustion can be found in Sagawa’s poem with the title that mirrors Woolf’s piece, “Tsukareta machi” (“A Haunted City” [or, a city possessed]).11

過去の壮大な建物を
あらゆる他の滅びたもののうへに
喚び起し　待ちもうけ　希望するために
我々の想念をむなしくきづいてゐる美は
時の限界の中で
彼らの悲しみはけつして
語られることはないだらう
(1934)

IMAGE INSERT, see monograph

In order to awaken, to anticipate, to hope for
The grand edifices of the past [of memory]
Beyond any other ruined thing

The poem begins with a paradox. The opening line has two versions, one from the first (punctuated) 1933 version published in Shii no ki and reprinted in Sagawa Chika shishū (in the box at right), the second printed in Shihō in 1934. Our translation is of the later version, with shifts from the earlier version in the English translation in brackets. Woolf’s earlier work, Jacob’s Room, is full of the contrasts and theoretical meditations on the place of the grand edifices of the past, like the Acropolis, in relation to the work of writing. In Sagawa’s lines, the paradox takes the form of a contrast between what takes place in the past and awaiting, expecting, hoping for an arrival. What has to do with memory or is over (what is ruined, perished, and pertains to “memory,” in one version, or more directly to “the past,” in the later version) creates a tension with the evident futurity, expecting and calling forth in the third line. To awaken could evoke the awakening of a spirit, but it also recalls the way the two spirits in Woolf’s “A Haunted House” caution one another precisely not to awaken the living. That kind of awakening or calling forth, “yobi-okosu,” could also connote the calling to mind of a memory, the bringing forth of a remembrance into present consciousness. The second verb—waiting, expecting, anticipating (machi-mōke)—makes us ask how that which is to be called forth should be anticipated, looked out for. What modalities of awaiting a future are most useful? How does one hold oneself open to a surprise that nonetheless pertains to the past?12 Pastness, the present moment of hoping/remembering, and futurity all meet in these lines.

One might note that in the 1934 version the punctuation disappears, so this phrase about the possibility of awakening (something) there modifies the noun phrase that follows in both versions:

The beauty that vainly constructs our conceptions
Within the limits of time
Will never be able to tell the story
Of [all of] their sadness

The idea of vanity here is written with (or without, in 1934) the character for emptiness—a void, something futile or without purpose. Our conceptions (thought, as it were) are built emptily out of beauty—or perhaps beauty itself emptily notices our thoughts, in a less probable interpretation of kizuku (here, given that we began with a building, the idea of construction seems warranted). The poem raises, awakens, stands at the limits of the temporal field (“limits of time”)—as with the limits of vision, Sagawa attends to edges, to uncertain boundaries, with a limit to the capacity of beauty to fully express a loss. The grand edifices of the past are to be anticipated, but they never fully come. Awakening those edifices of memory or the past—unable to tell of “their” many sadnesses—recall the losses and memories which, like living beings, inhabit the house in Woolf’s “A Haunted House.” Yet in Woolf, something is found, discovered; yet here in this city that is haunted/possessed, where things exist in a state of decay, such ruins link to the sadness of what can never be fully discovered or told.

And yet—at the same time (併し that follows in the following line, implying coexistence)—the space that is empty of such grand edifices, and destined to remain so, suddenly becomes simultaneously full with a new, unexpected image. A flock of sheep munches along the edges of a field of trees, steady but somewhat faltering, while flowers bloom on the linoleum ground. Just after the lines quoted above about beauty, Sagawa writes: “And yet, the linoleum in full bloom on the ground.” Her words often contain a slight grammatical excess, a noun phrase floating without a verb. Instead of the vain or futile work of conception, the land of ideas, we find the strange image of linoleum in full bloom on the earth. Conceptions may be like the artificial beauty of linoleum with flowers drawn on it. Or else the linoleum—the word linoleum itself with its strange bloom—interrupts the meditation on past and future, comes upon us with a sonic and rhythmic surprise. And then the sheep, eating wordlessly, perhaps even block the building of such edifices of thought/conception: “A flock of sheep devours the edges of the fields and boughs of trees / as they move forward sluggishly / They get pushed up onto the road, tottering / They continue their movement.” Instead of thoughts, we have this continuous, uninterrupted eating, a steady but faltering forward movement. Do the flock of words, too, munch their way forward in a tottering rhythm, getting pushed up onto the city’s street? Just as likely, we can feel the sheep as living (non-human) beings, presences that arrive to interpose themselves on the ceaseless thinking and conceptualizing that, in any case, cannot hope to grasp the full story. Those sheep are not satisfied: they keep wanting, getting pushed into the city street, walking forward in an ambiguous space between countryside and city.

The final lines of the poem give an abrupt shift of seasons (from the munching sheep and the blooming flowers of a possible spring, into plain winter). They return us to the realm of projections, spirits, and entanglements:

冬時にすべてのものは
魂の投影にすぎない
魂の抱擁
湿つた毛絲のやうにもつれながら

In winter every thing
Is no more than a shadow cast by a soul [or spirit]
An embrace of souls [spirits]
Tangled like threads of wet wool yarn

Here we could note the ambiguous status of all the things that have appeared up to now in the poem. A carefully structured poetic contrast—between the merely anticipated edifices above and the munching sheep on the linoleum ground on the boundary of streets and fields/trees below—turns out to be nothing but a wintery shadow in the end. The sheep and the blooming linoleum, the architectural edifices that are so much hoped for and called forth in an effort to tell the sadnesses and their stories—all are nothing but the shadow cast by a soul (or spirit) who seem to haunt the space of the city. All things have become projections, reflections, cast shadows (tō-ei), cinematic. The substance of all these things we have read about becomes elusive, ungraspable, like the grasp of the narrator in Sagawa’s translation of Woolf, where—try as she might—she cannot see, find, or discover/grasp anything of what she seeks.

Nonetheless, here appears an embrace, an intimacy even within this set of projections: perhaps more than one soul casts those imagistic shadows, souls who are living in plain winter but anticipating a spring. Like the ghostly couple in Woolf’s “A Haunted House,” who see the past of their own embrace (“kisses without number”), here too the souls/spirits intertwine. Woolf’s ghostly embrace happens in the space of the house; here in the winter city, Sagawa sees everything dissolve into a projection, but it happens in company. The souls resonate with hidden things, with all that is not immediately apparent—the province of poetry as well as the realm of loss. The souls’ embrace echoes between Woolf and Sagawa, as if Sagawa is accompanied by Woolf in her poetic process. However, the embrace is not of clear, separate entities—the projection/soul-embrace (tamashii no hōyō) involves a tangle like that of hair. Sagawa chooses in the later, 1934 version to use the character 絲 rather than the more usual 糸 (毛絲, ke-ito), two threads rather than one, tangled together perhaps rather unpleasantly—matted, knotted together even, perhaps wool coming from the very sheep who were eating forward so placidly in the prior lines.

Yet if there was a hope of spring, now we are surely in winter: the embrace is not warm but instead the threads are damp (shimetta), cold. The homophonous shimetsu (perishing, annihilation, extinction) may even resonate from behind the wetness. There is company, but there is also disappearance. The non-concrete, the thing that cannot be grasped, emptiness, pushes up against the hope of building up something, anticipating something. The past here appears with the concreteness of company (also in “their” sadnesses), but without necessarily anticipating anything in the end. The poem ends in winter, with the smell of wet tangled wool.

If we think back on the brightness, the light of the heart that concludes Woolf’s search in Sagawa’s translation of “A Haunted House,” we see in the poem “A Haunted City” how Sagawa evokes, by contrast, a certain darkness, obscurity, and chill in her own poetic search. Yet each of the word-objects her poetic architecture offers—ranging from conceptual thought/memory to blooming linoleum/grazing sheep—presses against pre-given or already-known worlds into unexpected terrains between the realms of thought, language, and perception. The objects and realities her works evoke tangle into plural “realism(s)”, while releasing unforeseen visual projections and conceptual scents.

As part of her ongoing poetic search, Sagawa deepens her explanations of her poetics and the relation between thought, perception, and language in the essay “If They Were the Eyes of Fish” (1934). She writes:

She points out that an apple can have so many other aspects that it is “meaningless” to force the concepts of a roundness and redness on it or to imagine some “single circle called an apple” via “arbitrary fixed common ideas” of color and shape. In fact there might be green, or one side might be partly rotten—there might even be wrinkles on the “cut surface,” she says, using the same term we saw in “Walking Between Trees” (“gradually, very precisely adjusting them to the cut surface of a visual field that has taken a leap”). Following common sense, assuming a single, round, red circle would miss all the complexities and material specificity of the apple. (“A Haunted House” is also inhabited by many apples that the speaker and the ghostly couple discover: “‘What did I come in here for? What did I want to find?’ My hands were empty. ‘Perhaps it’s upstairs then?’ The apples were in the loft,” writes Woolf.)

In “If They Were the Eyes of Fish,” an essay on the relation between painting and poetry, Sagawa provides a brief statement on how the relation between concept and matter relates to poetry:

Like the apple with its complex materiality, its potentially wrinkled cut surface, its multiple colors, there is a “materiality” (busshitsu) that is already mediated in some way—“reflected”—via or in or into some kind of “reality” (genjitsu). In other words, for Sagawa, it’s not that there is a single material reality that can be imagined to be fully prior to or separate from mediation, or that poetry can take as a given. There are no givens in Sagawa’s world of poetry; yet, even within a mediated materiality that gets called “reality” (or realities), poetry involves a gradual process of returning matter to “thought” (shii). Like the gradual, precise aligning of the infinite semi-blurred lines to the surface of the transformed visual field, the world of poetry gradually opens “thought.” That, for Sagawa, should be its angle of approach—not just reproducing the pretty apple of the already known.

In “Walking Between Trees,” we saw that the visual field was described as having “taken a leap” of some kind. Thus it is not just a matter of some kind of raw perception or assumed notions of perception: already, the visual stands for or entails something that transcends the visual (perhaps we could call it the “meta-visual”). The intertwining of phenomenological experience—the material world and its absorption by the limited perceptive capacity of the senses—intertwines with this realm of thought (shii) and also language.14 Thus in “If They Were the Eyes of Fish,” Sagawa gives us a (perhaps fish-related?) eco-deconstructive moment when she talks about the “eyes of a net.”15 Those eyes of a net (that is, holes in a net)—otherwise translatable as “a mesh”—might evoke what Paul Klee, around the same time period in his notebook was calling the realm of “greyness,” writing: “The greys need watching!”16

Sagawa writes of the hazy grey mesh:

With chisel-like (or flame-like) precision and a certain specific force, Sagawa describes the zone of the bonyari: the indistinct, unclear, faint, or nebulous. Her interest in it, her joy in it, transmits through her prose, as she envisions the window of a room (a complex room, or a complex window) that would also be the “eyes of a net” (mesh). How do fish see? How do we catch that sight in the net of our words? We saw Sagawa describe the wonders of looking without glasses on, her preference for blur, as she wrote how foolish it would be to think everyone needs to look into a “single mirror” and to clearly distinguish black from white—to make clear boundaries for everything. No apple is like a single red circle here. Instead, Sagawa proposes an important place for the “bokashita”: the faded, dim, discolored; that which is neither light nor dark but a complex grey, a mist opening like the eyes of a fishnet out on the world.

Whether such a vision is near or far, Sagawa tells us in “Walking Between Trees,” depends on “art’s rhythm”—like the sound of her own prose, the precise pishiri pishiri (precision) of her onomatopoeic phrases, the “nossori to” (clumsily slow) movement of the sheep as they eat their way around and blur the clarity of a field’s edges. Sagawa’s rigor requires a certain power, like “wrenching open a window”: then again, the right word might approach from behind at the moment one least expects it. One might not find what one is looking for (“death is a glass surface”). Yet there is the joy of grey, the joy of mesh, the joy of an open window.

Through the precisely enigmatic articulations of her poetics—on the hazy borderline between the world of concrete materiality, language, and thought—Sagawa constructs a unique world that allows a fresh perspective on the process of searching for the unseen. At times, the search ends in winter, with shadows of souls in a cold embrace. At other times, the poetic search yields to a joyous kind of blur. While her work shares much in common with the poets around her, as she is critically aware, taking time to lend close attention to the specificity of her poetics allows a deeper understanding of the terrain she opened for poetry. Here, meta-vision and imperfect perception—with reflective technologies like glasses, lenses, and mirrors—combine with the workings of language to open an altered relation between the realms of materiality and thought.