The history of modern Japanese poetry has included the names of remarkably few women. This stands in stark contrast even to other genres of poetry. For example, women feature prominently in the history of modern tanka, and in the realm of postwar poetry—or what is referred to as contemporary poetry—, the contributions of women who broadened the horizons of the Japanese poetic language are widely known. Yet, though many women wrote poetry over the Meiji and Shōwa eras, their work has been read through the “women poets” label, their gender emphasized above all other aspects of their work. In research, we have only just begun to broach these issues surrounding “women’s poetry” in a comprehensive, systematic manner. Mizuta Noriko has written on the question of the speaker, or “I” [watashi], from the perspective of feminist critique.1 Meanwhile, Fujimoto Toshihiko has developed a theory of prewar “women’s poetry” not simply as “poetry written by women” but rather as a “productive and creative force of femininity” that attempted to expose the masculine paradigm.2 Arai Toyomi, a poet herself, has examined the development of “women’s poetry” in Japan through a historical lens, demonstrating with specific examples the context within which “women’s poetry” came to occupy its unique position. Arai argues that “women’s poetry” has been marginalized within a broader literary history because of the problem of “the ‘content’ and ‘form’ of being a woman,” explaining that it was because of their tendency to write about real-life problems faced as the “birthing sex” that women poets have been largely sidelined. Arai also contends that the work of many of these “women poets,” whose poetic energies were focused on bringing these topics to the forefront, lacked literary strength from a formal perspective.3

As demonstrated by feminist scholarship in recent years, attempting to categorize poetry in terms of men and women is, from the very outset, fraught with problems. In this essay, however, I want to turn my attention to the words of Sagawa Chika, a poet who achieved a singular form within the Japanese modernist movement and left an undeniable mark on the history of Japanese poetry, all while fully accepting the fact of being a “woman.” The voice that speaks through Sagawa’s poetry is not that of a “woman” but of a human being. Her words are the record of a life, one that could only have taken shape through poetry, and a linguistic practice of such originality as to prompt a reconsideration of the possibilities of Japanese modernist poetry as a whole. For these reasons, Sagawa’s words demand to be read beyond the confines of “women’s poetry.”4

Sagawa Chika was born in February 1911 as Kawasaki Chika in Yoichi, Hokkaido. She died of stomach cancer in January 1936, at the age of 24 years and eleven months. Later that same year, Shōshinsha published a poetry collection titled Sagawa Chika Shishū [Sagawa Chika Poetry Collection]. Sagawa wrote poetry for just five years, from 1930 to 1935. During that brief period, however, she published regularly in the modernist magazines of the moment, including Shi to Shiron [Poetry and Poetics], Bungaku [Literature], Hakushi [Blank Paper], MADAME BLANCHE, and Shii no Ki [Sweet Acorn Tree]. Including her later-discovered poems, her oeuvre amounts to some eighty works. Sagawa was also a translator of English poetry—in addition to her translation of Chamber Music by James Joyce, she translated a wide range of works, including those by Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, and Mina Loy. She wrote essays on poetics and poetry reviews of her peers too, though these are limited in number. It is well known that Sagawa came to Tokyo at the age of 17 with the support of her brother, Kawasaki Noboru, who was working in the capital as an editor, and that her early English translations were created under the guidance of her brother’s hometown friend and writer, Itō Sei. She was also a member of a group of poets called the Arcueil Club, and assisted its central figure, Kitasono Katue, with editorial work.

Writings on Sagawa include reviews in poetry magazines by her contemporaries and a series of thirteen eulogies published in Shii no Ki two months after her passing, as well as a short critical biography by Komatsu Eiko.5 In recent years, a wave of new scholarship, beginning with the aforementioned work of Mizuta, Fujimoto, and Arai, has reexamined Sagawa’s achievements amidst a broader reconsideration of the history of modern Japanese poetry. The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa, an English translation by Sawako Nakayasu published in 2015, includes an introduction that illuminates the unique character of Sagawa’s poetry within this context.6 Shimada Ryū’s meticulous research into materials relating to Sagawa has recently resulted in a near-exhaustive bibliography of published collections, anthologies, and writings on the poet. Shimada is also pursuing research into the relationship between Sagawa and Itō based on these materials.7 The Sagawa Chika Shiryō Shūsei [Collection of Materials by Sagawa Chika], published in 2017 with Shimada among its contributors, brings together all available variants (as they first appeared in print) of poetry, prose, and translations published under Sagawa’s name.8 Through this research, the groundwork has been laid for further research. Still, there has yet to be a monographic study of Sagawa, and the task of facing her texts and reading them with care remains one for the future.

In this essay, as much as space allows, I will read Sagawa’s poems with an eye to the movement of her words on the page and an ear to the voice that calls out from the text. What kind of readings can be drawn out by doing so? What will we, as readers, become able to see? How did these poems shake up the world of modern Japanese poetry, and what is their connection to the issue of “femininity”? These are the questions I ask through the text of Sagawa’s poetry itself. There are many other topics that warrant further research, concerning Sagawa’s engagement with foreign literature and with the period in which she lived. These include the impact that her experiences translating Joyce and others is certain to have had on the development of her own poetry, and the influence of work by her peers, domestic and foreign, published in the same modernist magazines. But before considering Sagawa’s work from the perspective of poetics, or trying to retrace her process and influences, I would like to first simply face the text of her poetry itself, as one reader.

Nature moves boldly and violently in Sagawa’s poetic universe. In “Black Air,” “In the distance, dusk cuts the tongue of the sun,” is the coming of night, while “Night’s mouth opens, forests and clock towers are spit out,” the arrival of a new day.9 “Blue Road” begins, “Dawn stains the skin a rose color./A flower bouquet atop the cobalt manteau./Violet eyes sparkle in the dusk,” a string of beautiful images that evoke an impressionistic luminosity, only to fall into abrupt cacophony with, “Crows in mourning attire gather round,” before collapsing violently: “O, when touched, the wall of night crumbles apart.”10 “Pale blue dusk scales the window,” describes a sunset full of malice.11 Nature possesses emotion and roams freely in lines like, “The air roared with laughter outside my window,” and, “The grass opens its bright green mouth and laughs hysterically.”12 The plurality of these elements of the natural world is expressed rather strangely with the -ra ending, as in kusara (“the grass”), which is generally used to indicate plural people.13

Nature appears consistently throughout Sagawa’s work as an autonomous creature, even where its behavior is more subdued. In “Opal,” nature is hesitant:

In “The Day the Bell Tolls,” it moans in suffering: “All day/I hear the fallen, trampled leaves groaning.”15

These are not examples of anthropomorphism in the typical sense. Sagawa does not employ metaphor to humanize nature but rather writes a state of nature alive in its own right. In fact, Sagawa’s skepticism of the personification of nature, or perhaps more broadly, of drawing nature into the realm of human emotion, can be seen in her critique of poems by Kashiwagi Shunzō, who also contributed to Shii no Ki.

I will explore the relationship between nature and the speaker in Sagawa’s poetry in further depth later, but first I’d like to look more closely at the way she expressed the natural environment.

Several images appear with such frequency in Sagawa’s work they could almost be described as obsessive. One such example is the sun.

The sun stands up and runs down the street of blue grass./…/Even there the sun multiplies in blue.17

The sun multiplies and runs up and across; it falls and is crushed and dies. In each case, the sun is unaccompanied by any modifiers, existing only as itself as it tears through the world. Meanwhile, an implied “I,” the speaker, watches.

The images constructing Sagawa’s poetic space are rarely brought together by chance. The speaker in her poetry is driven by a consuming desire to weave together specific images and to represent them in a particular way and direction. Like the sun, the ocean and wildflowers are vital recurring images, but as will become evident to any reader, it is “green” that is by far the most significant. The word appears in the title of “Green Flames,” one of her best-known works, and others, such as “Visibility Through Green” and “Green.” Her work overflows with images of trees and plants, and the speaker’s relationship to “green” is depicted in the prose poems, “Dark Summer” and “Prelude.” In what follows, I will show that “green” is not simply a poetic image of which Sagawa was fond, but is in fact implicated at the very root in the existence of her poetic “I,” connected to the question of life and death, and tying directly to the speaker’s voice—to what we might call the speaker’s cries. Further, it is precisely this which gives Sagawa’s work a different kind of strength than can be found in most other modernist poetry. I will begin with “Green Flames,” reproduced below in its entirety.

“Green Flames” first appeared in the third volume of Shinkeishiki in June 1936 and again in December of the same year in the fourteenth volume of Shi to Shiron. In the poem’s initial publication in Shinkeishiki, periods and commas are absent in lieu of spaces. It is unknown whether it was Sagawa’s own decision to introduce punctuation marks to the poem when it appeared in Shi to Shiron. There are no punctuation marks in the variant included in Sagawa Chika Zenshishū [Complete Collection of Poems by Sagawa Chika]. There are other minor differences between the Shinkeishiki and Shi to Shiron variants as well, such as 髪毛 to 髪の毛, which are both read as kaminoke [hair], and 穴の中へ becoming 穴へ [lit. from “into the pit” to “to the pit”]. Other changes include the shortening of the phrases, “paints carefully,” and, “eyes are dyed green to believe.” It is certain Sagawa edited the poem herself between publications, but these changes do not seem to affect a reading of the work significantly.27

The “them” that appears suddenly in the first line refers to “green,” and, “descending numerous green stairs,” likely to the foliage of overlapping trees as they draw in from the distant mountains. An image of trees growing densely together is evoked by the phrases, “cram into a small space,” and, “a thick overflowing fluid makes it impossible to stir the woodlands.” The shift from the trees to the “thick overflowing fluid” suggests that the approaching “green” has the power to swell like water. The “thick overflowing fluid” that is “impossible to stir” is recalled in a later description of insects releasing fluid as they reproduce in the grass and trees. This focus on moisture continues with the introduction of a microscopic gaze that observes a snail secrete liquid as it crawls, and a spider spinning a web of fine lines. Then, once again, the perspective scales back to encompass the entirety of “green,” with the line, “everything rotates from green to deeper green,” as though to acknowledge the growing intensity of its approach. In the next line, however, “they are inside the milk bottle on the kitchen table.” The green that flooded the landscape has now infiltrated the room and is reflected in the milk bottle on the table. “They” are living creatures, “crouching with their faces flattened.” “Sliding around an apple,” may be a reference to the orchard near Sagawa’s home in Hokkaido28, or simply to an apple on the table. By now, the moving body of “green” has intersected light so forcefully as to overtake it and begins to close in on the speaker. The following line suddenly introduces “a blind girl”: “in the street a blind girl plays by ducking under the shadows of the sun’s rings.” Is “the shadows of the sun’s rings” a place that lies beyond the reach of light? Its relationship to green is ambiguous, but nonetheless, it is precisely in this moment, when the tremendous force of “green” has become overpowering, that the reader is presented with the figure of a young girl standing in shadow, unable to see.

The speaker appears for the first time following a stanza break. Feeling danger nearby, “I hurry to shut the window,” but outside, a “fire” of “green” is blazing. The “green flames” are burning “beautifully.” The speaker watches the flames spread to “the outskirts of the earth,” but “in the end they dwindle, disappear as a single thin line of the horizon.” Arai reads the waning of the vigorous momentum of “green” into a single fading line as a representation of “the frailty of life heading towards premature death.”29 Indeed, a premonition of death, accompanied by fear and frustration, pervades the following stanza. For “my weight” to leave “me” must feel like beginning to disappear, adrift in space. At this moment, the speaker is plunged into “the depths of oblivion.” “Here” is likely the room the speaker is inside, but this is no ordinary reality, for the “eyes” belonging to “I” have been dyed “green.”30 Immediately after the speaker voices the difficulty of believing in anything, someone comes from behind and “blindfolds me,” and the world goes black. “Shove me into sleep,” hints at the conviction behind this leap into the void.

Sagawa died in January 1936, four and a half years after the publication of this poem. She debuted with the poem “Insects,” published in August 1930 in Variétés, the magazine edited by her brother. “Green Flames,” published in June of the following year, thus falls in the early period of her brief career. Sagawa was weak from early childhood, and in adolescence struggled with vision problems that required frequent doctor visits.31 Still, it must be noted that this poem was written two years after Sagawa’s arrival to Tokyo, around the time she was beginning to receive attention for her translations in Shi to Shiron. Though records indicate that she was taking medication for intestinal mucositis at the time32, this was also the very moment she was introduced to Tokyo’s poetry circles and had begun to actively write poetry herself. She only learned of her stomach cancer a few months before her death, when abdominal pains forced her to the hospital. Until those final months when her strength finally gave out, Sagawa continued to write.

It is not surprising that the topic of Sagawa’s death is often raised in discussions of her work, given the brevity of her life. But undeniably, she has also tended to be discussed in this vein—as a tragic poet who died before her time—because of how deeply death saturates the poems she left behind. Indeed, the speaker in Sagawa’s poems cannot help but remind us of the poet herself. Kido Shuri writes, “The ‘I’ in her poems is nearly equivalent to the ‘I’ who is alive and present in the here and now,” and credits this with “the appeal [of Sagawa’s poetry] that cannot be fully accounted for by the word experimental alone.”33 Though I agree, I caution that the death that appears persistently throughout Sagawa’s poems cannot always be read as a foreboding of the poet’s own fate. Admittedly, she was far from robust, frail since childhood and dealing with various ailments. Yet it is not as though Sagawa, who moved to Tokyo against her family’s wishes with aspirations to the literary world, had known that her life would end shy of twenty-five, nor had she experienced long stretches of debilitating sickness. In Tokyo, she worked for a while as a part-time employee of the Postal Savings Bureau, and often had Itō look at her translations or helped Kitasono with editorial work late into the night. Once a month, she would meet fellow poet Ema Shōko for a walk down the streets of Ginza. Sagawa had even confided in Ema about her hopes of someday writing a novel.34

I cannot help but feel that the air of death that permeates Sagawa’s poetry is indicative not of something the poet sensed in her physical body but rather of something she felt on a different dimension altogether. Perhaps, as is oft suggested, it was rooted instead in Sagawa’s feelings for Itō, whom she had met at the age of 12 and adored like an older brother, developing a close friendship with him as he introduced her to literature until, when she was 19, he married someone else with no forewarning. Yet, even if this were the case, once those emotions were translated into the language of poetry, the world Sagawa spun together was no longer one of lost love, but rather a poetic universe of resolute independence, gained through the sublimation of that experience.

With this in mind, I return to the text of “Green Flames” once again, to consider the relationship between the overflowing “green” and the speaker. As I have discussed, Sagawa does not anthropomorphize nature. “Green” is neither a metaphor nor a lyrical expression of the scenery unfolding before the speaker’s eyes. In “Green Flames,” the speaker watches through the window as the entire landscape is dyed green, the trees springing to life and putting on their young leaves in the season of fresh buds. Of course, the experiences of the speaker are not necessarily those of the poet. Sagawa might not have ever seen for herself what is depicted in this poem. This is why I begin by focusing on the way that the world, as seen through the eyes of the speaker, is expressed in her work.

Traces of the innovative techniques of the European avant-garde art movements, introduced to Japan through the very magazines Sagawa was involved with, such as Shi to Shiron, Hakushi, and MADAME BLANCHE, are readily apparent in her work. The description of a stretch of distant green mountains reaching into the foreground peak by peak as “descending numerous green stairs” is reminiscent of cubism. Meanwhile, the bold interplay of macro- and microscopic viewpoints that shake up perspectival stability, and the rupture of continuous meaning through the stringing together of abrupt and disjointed images, are disturbances that bear the mark of surrealism. The whirlwind motion of “green” as it approaches the speaker could also be described as a futurist technique. These are the elements of Sagawa’s work for which she has earned the title of modernist poet, yet her poems are not merely experiments with new techniques, nor can their place in literary history be explained adequately as simply one part of a broader renewal of poetic language. Her poetry refuses such labeling, for it contains within it an omnipresent speaker that absorbs the full force of the surrounding world.

Nearly all of Sagawa’s poems contain elements of nature. Though she lived in Tokyo when she was writing during the last years of her life, Sagawa never ceased to see past the cityscape into the nature that lay beyond. Though some poems may have been based on Yoichi, her hometown in Hokkaido, the nature manifested in the text of her poems is intensely abstracted, a sublimation of real nature. And for Sagawa, this was the very sphere of her existence. The “green” in “Green Flames” is the force of nature overtaking everything else. The speaker knows that nature will invade, consume, and finally, when the “I” can no longer maintain a distinct self, extinguish. The figure of the “blind girl” playing in the shadows of the world appears for a single moment, but in a flash, “my weight takes leave of me.” With “eyes are dyed green,” the line between the speaker and nature has already blurred. Finally, the “I” is “blindfolded,” and descends into darkness.

The short story-like prose poem, “Dark Summer,” consists of five paragraphs that depict the speaker’s experience of “green.” Below is an excerpt from the second paragraph:

Here too, “trees grow by stealing their vitality.” As in “Green Flames,” the following section repeatedly draws our attention to the rising momentum of the life force of the external world: “When I awakened, the leaves had increased at an incredible rate. They were spilling over.” The speaker gazes out blankly while being invaded by the outside. “Something invisible lives in my flesh, violating me from the edges, little by little”— the speaker is on the edge of collapse.

The long prose poem “Prelude” also depicts the relationship between the speaker and the overflowing force of life. This poem is composed of eleven paragraphs in the style of an essay. It opens with a similar image as “Dark Summer”: “Out of sight and covered by clouds, the leaves multiply with incredible vigor. Without warning they are carried in, the sycamore and zelkova trees filling up with new leaves—like wriggling creatures they well up and overflow, sparkling.”36 The speaker stares outside as though possessed by the sight of the growing plants. Seeing “how varied are the repeating lives” of the natural world, and “their stifling propagation and battle and exultation,” “I am on the brink of losing.” But the sound of their “moaning in inexplicable gloom,” forces the speaker “to keep watch outside.” The second half of this poem, which describes a vigorous energy and the shifting of seasons, contains the following passage: “I can no longer tell which is the shadow of which. There is nothing that I have given them. And yet I have accepted everything they do. Sooner or later I shall transform into a tree and disappear into their fold. All this time I had believed I was alive, and yet perhaps I do not even exist.”37 In this passage, the speaker is about to “turn into a tree,” and disappear into the environment. Elsewhere in “Prelude,” the arrival of dawn, breaking through the budding green, is described as “beautiful.” Read together, this string of poems about “green” presents a speaker who is both overpowered by, and yet deeply drawn to, the vitality of plants. Needless to say, the speaker’s own fragile vitality is its antithesis; unable to endure, it is eventually depleted. This brings us to the theme of death that pierces through Sagawa’s poetic space, though it bears repeating that the “death” in her poetry should not be equated with “death” in the poet’s life.

Let’s look at a final poem on “green,” titled “Green”:

This is the poem in its entirety. The first six lines appear as though written solely in order to make the ending, with its disarmingly abrupt last line, possible. The sense of trying desperately to forge ahead is found in “Prelude” too: “People will lose their equilibrium, bracing themselves, and stagger forward, pressing their hats against their heads.”39 In “Green,” the speaker walks along “a mountain path,” “many times bracing myself from falling forward.” From a different angle, this can also be read as the speaker trying to capture the force of vitality that presses against their body. But unable to keep from “falling forward” any longer, the speaker crumbles. The final line reads only, “I was abandoned,” but in this brusque, throwaway line, one can sense the spirit of the poet who, finally buckling under the weight she has been carrying, throws herself into the depths of darkness with this single utterance, releasing herself at last.

“Green Flames” concludes with the line, “Shove me into sleep.” Once again, the speaker is overwhelmed by the power of the “beautifully burning green flames,” and stares as though entranced, feeling the “green” invade its body. Eventually, the speaker loses control, and the surrounding world descends into madness too. No longer able to maintain an identity, the “I” demands whoever blindfolds it from behind shove it into the shadows of sleep. In “Dark Summer,” the speaker allows its flesh to become slowly infiltrated by the energy of “green,” and in “Prelude,” too, even as the speaker has “accepted everything they do,” it becomes one with the trees, disappearing amongst them.

These poems about “green” do not simply depict a speaker intimidated by the power of nature. On the one hand, the speaker knows and is terrified of the danger of nature’s force, fully aware it will be crushed by its power. And yet, the speaker does not turn its back against the world, driven instead by a fierce will to continue fighting. This strength is precisely what enables the speaker to perceive the vividness and vitality of “green” in the first place. Tsuruoka Yoshihisa writes about the manifestation of death in Sagawa’s poetic space in the following: “Her sense of crisis, activated by ‘death,’ sounds an alarm that stems from none other than ‘life’ itself.” Tsuruoka is pointing to the strength of the “life” that upholds Sagawa’s representations of “death.”40 Her poetic universe is not dimming, as though seen through the haze of a fading life—her eyes are as clear as the sights they capture.

But then why is it that her words are not simply an exultation of life? Why does nature, in all its immensity, shake so viciously and leave a trail of cacophony in its wake? And does it ultimately bring about the speaker’s death? The aggressive, even violent, motion of nature is not limited to “green.” The ocean, another recurring image, is an abyss capable of swallowing life whole, its surface a tumble of turbulent waves. “Ocean Angel” opens with these three lines: “The cradle rings loudly./As spray shoots up,/As if tearing off feathers.” How roughly must a cradle rock for it to “ring loudly [gon gon]”? The poem is just eight lines long: “I try to complain, raising my voice—/The waves come erase it from behind,” followed by a stanza break before the parting words, “I was abandoned in the ocean.”41

Although the speaker is “raising my voice,” it reaches no one. Nature is as brutal as the speaker’s emotions. In “Abandoned Child of the Ocean,” the subject of the line, “As though ripping out feathers,” from its likely variant, “Ocean Angel,” is revealed to be the speaker itself: “I rip the feathers out of my chest.” Once again, the speaker is easily silenced out despite its fierce attempt to be heard.

The absence of a recipient for any of the speaker’s actions is a motif that appears throughout Sagawa’s poetry in various forms. The seven-line poem “Ribbon of May” begins:

But no one is. The poem concludes: “I reach a hand into the darkness/Only to find a long wind of hair.”42 The speaker’s fingers tangle in their desperation to grab hold of the “long wind of hair” that blows in the place of air, an eerie—and seductive—image.

In “Beard of Death,” one of Sagawa’s most oft-cited works alongside “Green Flames,” “death” is tied directly to the act of grasping for something beyond reach. An excerpt is reproduced below:

The poem begins with the sudden image of a hand reaching for the blue sky, leaving fingerprints. Who is the “chef,” and what do “a chicken bleeds” and “the sun is crushed” mean? The intensity of these images, strung together so abruptly, recalls the paintings of Salvador Dalí, and in fact, this poem is often raised as an example that highlights Sagawa’s engagement with surrealism. In Bandō Yumi’s detailed analysis of this poem, she writes, “Perhaps the chef, who strangles the chicken, is “death” itself, with hands large enough to drain the life of anything.” In other words, according to Bandō, it is the “chef” who leaves prints on the sky and strangles the bleeding chicken. Bandō interprets the line, “the sun is crushed,” as the destruction of the sun that once shone light upon life. If we continue with her reading, the “long tendril of death” in the second half of the poem also belongs to the chef, and a concrete image of the figure begins to take form. In a section of the poem not included in the above excerpt, the reader is introduced to “guards of the sky wearing blue,” and learns that, “in prison, they watch over a dream longer than life.” Bandō writes that, “the guards of the sky in blue have come to make sure we don’t run away.” Her interpretation of the poem as a portrayal of “death” as it threatens and constricts life is compelling.44

On the other hand, in the context of my earlier discussion on the tension between the speaker and the outside world, this poem can also be read in connection to the theme of death as something arising from desperate longing coupled with the knowledge of its own futility. The hand that reaches into the empty sky and finds nothing to grab hold of, leaving behind only its own trace, is reminiscent of the voice drowned out by the waves and the hand grasping for the wind in vain. Is it the speaker who bleeds like the “chicken”? Or has “death” come for something else, for whatever the outstretched hand had been reaching for? In either case, as Bandō also writes, the “sun” is “crushed” by the arrival of “death,” which chases away light, cloaking the sky. There is, of course, no need to arrive at a single interpretation here. In fact, the text itself seems to urge a dual reading. If the first two lines are read as being continuous, as Bandō suggests, it is natural to interpret the hand that has left “four fingerprints” and “clutches” the sky as the same hand that strangles the “chicken.” The feeling of grasping air is transposed into the tangible sensation of gripping a living creature. One can almost see drops of blood trickling down from the “four fingerprints” in the sky. In this reading, it would follow that the same hand also crushes the “sun” Meanwhile, the phrase “even here” suggests that these events are occurring everywhere. But whose hand is it that leaves the “four fingerprints” and grabs at air? This is where Bandō’s and my interpretations diverge.

My earlier readings of the poems about “green” demonstrated that the speaker is not simply consumed by the force of nature—rather, the speaker possesses the strength to be both drawn to, and resist, nature, fighting it for as long as the “I” can remain standing. This is the source of the world’s brilliance as seen through the speaker’s eyes. The same can be said for the vividness of “Beard of Death,” a poem that contains both the hopelessness—and the cruelty—of the speaker who resists. For is it not true that the speaker in this poem is both the killed and the killer?

The second half of “Beard of Death” contains this striking line: “Trying to reach the outside world that is like the back of an embroidery, I become a moth that slams into the window.” The figure of the “moth,” unable to break the window even with the full force of its body, is easily read as the speaker itself. The world beyond the window is “like the back of an embroidery.” If the outside is “the back of an embroidery,” then the inside, where the speaker is trapped, is its beautifully adorned front. I have written elsewhere about this poem and its reversal of front and back, and victim and victimizer, in a discussion of the body in Sagawa’s poetry.45 In this essay, however, I will turn my attention to the moth’s desperate attempts to escape, which can be read as a shimmering portrayal of boundless yearning and the despair of knowing this desire can never be fulfilled. “A moth…slams into the window” over and over in a room sealed off from everything else. A jumble of colors and threads entwine and entangle in the world outside, “the back of an embroidery,” spreading out in thick clusters that evoke the voracious and vulgar reproduction of life seen in “Green Flames” and elsewhere.46 Both enchanted and threatened by this world, the speaker is increasingly unable to protect its body and slowly overpowered. Again and again, Sagawa’s poetry reminds us that to be cut off from the outside and to be taken over by it are two sides of the same coin.

In “Beard of Death,” the “moth” is trapped inside a space that resembles a beautiful cocoon, modeled on the smooth texture and delicate colors of an embroidered surface. Yet this interior also represents a wounded, struggling body, contained in the image of the “moth” slamming against the window. It seems only a matter of time before the space is enveloped by the darkness of “death.” “The long tendril of death” in the following line can be read as a reference to embroidery thread; with the reversal of front and back, the insidious thread of reproduction has infiltrated the interior. On the other hand, if the tendril is read in reference to the “chef,” then, as Bandō has argued, it can be interpreted as the “beard” of the grim reaper, ruler of “death.” Note too that the “tendril” wraps around not the singular “I” but rather a plural “us.” It is not “I” alone, the “moth,” who is strangled. The speaker has fused with someone else, and together, they are constricted—an image steeped in eroticism. In the grip of “death,” it is “us” who dream of a “miracle.” Yet after the stanza break, the poem concludes, “Death strips my shell.” “Death” commands time and space. With this final line, inside and outside cease to exist and all that remains is an expanse of silent darkness. If only the line had read, “I take off the shell of death,” with “I” as its subject, perhaps the speaker could have escaped. But here, too, is a reversal. The line is, “Death strips my shell,” the subject “death,” not “I.” Under the absolute authority of “death,” the speaker is laid bare and abandoned.

The poem “Illusory Home” can be considered a variant of “Beard of Death.” Published a year after the latter, its first half comprises essentially identical images, with only minor changes to line breaks and other small details. The second half, however, is wholly rewritten. The reader is introduced to “an empty white house where no one lives,” and the poem closes, “This house connects a brilliant road to the distant memory of a distant world.”47 Arai writes, “‘Beard of Death’ is a poem about the inevitability of death that haunts and constricts, while ‘Illusory Home’ depicts a posthumous landscape of memories.”48 Indeed, gone is the frustration, rage, and pain of the “moth” that beat against the window.

By now, it has become clear that the motifs comprising Sagawa’s poetic universe are remarkably consistent. Enchantment coupled with fear and intimidation. The destructive power of an unrelenting will to desire, even knowing this will lead to one’s own destruction. A climax of pain, followed by the reprieve of peace found in the territory of “death.” These motifs do not appear chronologically in order of publication, instead often coexisting within the space of Sagawa’s poetry. On occasion, time flows in reverse. “Shapes of Clouds” was published three times during Sagawa’s lifetime, in MADAME BLANCHE, Bungaku, and Gasshū Shishō I, each time with minor alterations, but with the basic structure remaining intact across all the variants. Below are a few lines from the middle of the poem.

The poem opens in a place where everything has already come to an end, and “broken-down memories” sparkle in the sky and on the earth. But in the following line, violent craving and the desire for destruction make a return. There is no question that it is the speaker who gathers the curtains and tears them apart. Is the world behind the “curtain” overrun by an expanding “green,” or is it like the “back of an embroidery”? A “curtain” can delineate exterior from interior and block out external light, but when opened, it also symbolizes a passageway connecting one to the outside world. The act of gathering up the “curtain,” only to tear it apart forcefully, hints at a battle of wills, caught between desire and despair. In the line that follows, the perspective shifts to the figure of a “garland” swaying along in the “city of marble” brimming with “radiant light,” possibly a depiction of the world post-death. The poem culminates with “Every day, fingertips thin like leaves/Are drawing maps.” The faint silhouette of a poet at work begins to emerge, distinct from the speaker.

To read Sagawa’s poetry in light of the events of her life is to fail to hear the voice that speaks through her words. As I have shown, Sagawa and the speaker in her poetry are not one and the same. In the space of these poems, it is the speaker that raises its voice, that fights and resists until, at last, it falls silent. For as long as Sagawa chose for these words to take the form of poetry, to read her texts for what lies beneath them, trying to decipher their meaning through the poet’s life experiences, is to rob them of their vitality. As seen in Sagawa’s review of Kashiwagi referenced earlier in this essay, the nature that appears in her poetry in all its varied forms is not a symbolic representation of something else, nor does it function as metaphor.50 As a member of the avant-garde art movement that swept through the Japanese poetic community from the mid-1920s to the early 1930s, Sagawa sought to discover all the possible forms that “poetry” could take. Struggling against words, she constructed a space within language that was all her own. Working alongside poets who associated themselves with modernism, and translating modernist writers and poets from English herself, Sagawa pursued new possibilities for linguistic expression. This is the course through which the eighty-something poems we are left with have been spun together. When her poems are read together as one body of work, it will become clear to any reader that it was the events of Sagawa’s life, not those of anyone else, that gave birth to her poetry. The strength of her poetry as literary language, and the reason her voice continues to resonate with readers today, lies in the fact that they are not merely the product of modernist experiments, nor the fictional story of a “woman” with literary talent, but rather words wrung out of the poet’s own life. For Sagawa, the act of stringing words together was one and the same as the experience of processing the events of her life, and as such, it was impossible for her words to take the poetic form tidily. Her poems, full of what first appear to be mismatching word choices, predicates that lack clear subjects, and abrupt images that clash against one another, reject any singular interpretation. Yet this is, in fact, the text telling the reader of its inseparability from Sagawa’s experiences, which could only have been translated into language this way.

But the specifics of her experiences, whatever they may be, do not matter here. For it is by reading not through the details of Sagawa’s life but from the text itself, with careful attention to each of the words that have been woven together, that the unique voice of her poetry becomes audible, a voice that could have taken no other form of expression. As we have seen, the speaker in Sagawa’s poems risks its entire existence in its struggle to face the surrounding world. And sometimes, through the cracks, the speaker’s voice can be heard directly.

“I” “dance about” the city, trying to shake off “the grief.” This is not a simple declaration of the speaker’s sadness. There is not a scrap of self-pity to be found, nor an appeal for sympathy. The speaker, aware that it is the only one that can eradicate the pent-up “grief” that has taken hold of its body, sets out to “dance about” alone, but there is no way to stop the colors as they “slowly fade.” Frustration leaks out of the phrase, “at any rate.” It is unclear what the “colors” refer to. Perhaps it is the speaker’s determination to live, and the entirety of the world it confronts. As the speaker’s resolve weakens, “my vision is about to come to a halt.” Still, the expression, “come to a halt,” instead of, “my vision deteriorates,” indicates the presence of the subject’s will.

As I have discussed earlier, the themes that run through Sagawa’s poetry do not develop chronologically. Considering the overarching flow of her work, however, the poems written toward the end of her five years of poetic output do appear marked by scenes of apocalyptic emotion. At the same time, they also contain shimmering views into a dream world. I begin first with some examples of poems that unravel in the future perfect tense, depicting time already belonging to the past.

In each of these scenes, time has run its course. The bell tolls of “time that has already passed,” and what has been lost remains so. The last bars of the “finale” have been performed, and bruised fruit lies in disarray on the ground where it has been tossed aside. Deep resignation has begun to permeate the speaker’s surroundings. Then, the reader is presented the white, arid landscape of the world after “I” “have died”:

These poems have been quoted in full. “Please Cover Me With Dirt Every Year” brings to mind a graveyard, while in “Afternoon,” “Insects” that once crowded the ”Green” descend from the trees. The “mast wall” refers to the mast of a ship and could perhaps be a sexual allusion, but nonetheless, the ocean that once stormed furiously has fallen silent, all “sounds” killed. Read literally, “skeleton places white flowers upon it,” is the ship’s mast covered by white flowers, but this string of words unmistakably conjures the image of “white bones.”59 The phrase “fish climb the cliff” is no surrealist experiment. It is difficult not to imagine the painful sight of them shriveling in the sun. These “fish” will dry and fall out of the sky before they can ever reach the top of the cliff.

Among the last of Sagawa’s works is “Night Walk,” seven paragraphs that can be described both as a prose poem and an essay. The speaker straightforwardly describes its present, as though to summarize all its struggles leading to that moment.

The speaker now knows that what it had clung to so desperately was nothing but “the shells cast off by others,” the “reality” it had believed in nothing but its “residues.” The “beautiful feathers” that the speaker had risked its life for are found “just above a muddy, undependable swamp.” The speaker’s precarious foothold is described in the following paragraph:

In a later section, the landscape of a bygone time is once again portrayed by the remains of a “skeleton” and the silencing of a “voice.”

Even as we are repeatedly presented with scenes of the stillness that follow death, we must not fail to see that this “death” is not the end of all things. Nor does the speaker, who accepts “death” as a place from which it cannot return, wither. Even in the presence of death, the speaker in these works from Sagawa’s later period feels the fullness of life with the entirety of its body. Here lies the eroticism that lurks beneath the surface of Sagawa’s poetry. The pleasures of sensuality are dynamically verbalized through these representations of “death” from front and back.

Let us confirm first that the words of Sagawa’s poetry from this period show no signs of weakness. This is clear from the poems that speak of death’s arrival, which unfold in starkly vivid scenes of sharply edged elements. The desolate winter earth is as brittle as an old man’s hair, and the image of the white flowers, placed upon the mast after the insects have descended the trees and the waves silenced, comes to a sudden stop, creating a charged emptiness. The strength of Sagawa’s spirit is palpable throughout her work, with its construction of tightly woven images and precisely arranged lines that waste not a single word. And even during this final period, the speaker, shaking with violent emotion and craving what cannot be had, persists.

“Shapes of Clouds,” with the “curtain” that is “torn apart,” was published around this time, and “Ocean Angel,” with the opening line, “The cradle rings loudly,” even later. It is during this same period that the speaker begins to reveal its sexuality as a “woman.” Below is “Ocean of Memory,” quoted in full.

The tranquil ocean becomes the stage for intense lovemaking. There is an “accordion,” but it has been broken—perhaps, just as the cradle “rings loudly,” cacophony resounds here too.64

The above is the second half of “Mystery,” a poem that abounds with sexual implications. Throughout Sagawa’s poetry, sap, insects dripping secretions, and fruit are associated with intense sensuality. This poem opens with a succulent image of fruit: “Golden delicious tumbling.” “Delicious” likely refers to a variety of apples, also known as hi no koromo, grown in Sagawa’s hometown Yoichi.66 In the following line, “they dive in spinning,” the apples are referred to as though they are people [karera], in an image depicting the vigorous motion of mind and body. The focus then shifts to “two flower petals” that form a “butterfly” as they “bloom towards morning,” recalling a woman’s body released in pleasure.

Another poem, titled “Constellation,” is a direct depiction of the “madness” of sexual love. The poem begins, “From a sky wet with dew/From wide green plains.” “Dew” and “green” both foreshadow the eroticism of the following lines, “Just barely supported by the dark air of night/As when I was dancing between sleep and death,” where the danger of the midnight hours awaits. The poem concludes:

By the last line, “this madness thrown against the glamorous sky” has become as heavy as a “rock” and presses down against the speaker, and yet, the line, “our fingers opened like a corolla” is a clear moment of ecstasy.
Finally, I will consider the poem “Like a Cloud,” an intimate and brilliantly detailed portrayal of a woman’s body. This poem too begins with an image of “green,” though here it is notable in drawing out the work’s sexual evocations.

The final lines of the poem read:

Torii Mayumi interprets the “skin of the earth” that is “burning” as something resembling “a vitality that is chaotic like magma,” in a state preceding sexual differentiation.69 Indeed, the poem contains a sense of freedom on an immense scale that could be described as ecstatic. The “orchard” in Sagawa’s poetry serves as a core element of the original landscape in which her speaker is rooted.70 When overlayed by the intense sexuality of the first half of this poem, the cleaving orchard can be read as a revelation of the vitality—and deep pain—emitted by the body in its release.

Upon reexamination, the eroticism that underpins “death” in Sagawa’s poetry is present throughout the entirety of her oeuvre. It lies at the source of her poetic imagination, never wavering, even when confronted with physical deterioration or the unequivocal knowledge that what is desired cannot be had. And yet, never does Sagawa speak of it: “Their sorrows will never be/Spoken of in their entirety.”71

I will conclude with “Mountain Range,” a poem published during the same month as “Ocean Angel” and a work from Sagawa’s final period. In a complete reversal from “Ocean Angel,” here, the speaker’s voice is soft, one of complete acceptance. The poem is 28 lines long, an unusual length for Sagawa’s non-prose poems. Below are the first seven lines:

The speaker gazes into the distance at the mountains. The “orchard” is a return to the nostalgic landscape of Sagawa’s hometown.73 It must be apple trees that bloom in white. “Water flows noisily through my eyes”—what a painful yet powerful expression that conjures the catharsis of all her life experiences in a river of unending tears.

Sagawa did not write poetry as a “woman.” She persisted in writing an “I” who loved and who desired. To label her work as “women’s poetry” is to silence the unique voice that speaks through her texts. In this essay, I have traced the trajectory of the words left behind by Sagawa, who lived her life as a poet to the end, to demonstrate the insight her poetic practice can provide into new possibilities for the Japanese poetic language. Much remains to be uncovered about her impact as a Japanese modernist poet, and her experiences moving between languages through translation. And perhaps, from a different angle, the world revealed through Sagawa’s poetry may enable us to consider the relationship between humans and the natural environment, and even between humans and all that is non-human [mono], anew. In this present moment, when our planet, which has long revolved around human pursuits, does not appear with any kind of certainty directed toward a better future, the story of Sagawa’s “I” cannot be reduced to a single individual’s experience of love. The speaker in Sagawa’s poetry does not lyricize nature through human emotion, let alone destroy it by painting over it in human colors; nor, on the other hand, does it seek to become one with the earth. Even knowing it will one day be destroyed by this very world, Sagawa’s “I” accepts the world for what it is, never ceasing to seek its allure. The questions posed by her poetry are, it seems, decidedly contemporary.