Admirers of Sagawa’s work often describe the same two reactions regarding the first time they read her poems: that of never having encountered anything like it before, and disbelief that it was written so long ago. My own first encounter was in 2002, and coincided with a moment when my main objective was to curate a set of poems by contemporary, experimental Japanese poets for the New York-based journal, Aufgabe. I knew it made little sense to call a poet who died in 1936 “contemporary,” but the poems themselves seemed to transcend this minor detail, taking a seat alongside other contemporary, postmodern and experimental poems of the moment. Sagawa’s work simply did not fit in any pre-existing category. Translators often aim to translate “the best” of a literature, and it was unclear where Sagawa stood, but the work compelled me to continue to translate it. In 2016, the English translation of her Collected Poems was published, receiving the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation in 2017, and in 2020 the book was acquired for the Modern Library Torchbearer series by Penguin Random House.

In the early days as I translated her work, Sagawa was considered a “minor” poet, or on better days, she was “everyone’s favorite unknown poet.” Given the context, this is hardly surprising. Though many poets from her community did eventually become “major” Japanese poets, in the larger view of global literary history, that community itself was marginalized in many ways. Experimental and avant-garde poetry is a minority literary genre anywhere, but for Japanese poetry considered through a Western lens, various threads of Orientalist predilections favored and promoted what seemed more “authentically” Japanese, at the expense of ignoring more relevant and culturally complex developments.

Two additional factors include the fact that Modernist studies, as it evolved in the latter half of the 20th century, centered Western Europe and dismissed that which occurred elsewhere as a cheap imitation at best—an oversight currently experiencing a course-correct. And in Japan’s own literary history and canon-building efforts, this same community of experimental poets was, in the years following WWII, scapegoated by the postwar poetic establishment for its inability to resist the fascist wartime Japanese government. The true work of reckoning for Japanese wartime poetry, and the legacy of propaganda poetry, is still very much a work in progress. On the other hand, resistance had real consequences: poet and artist Takiguchi Shuzo was thrown in jail, while the activist novelist Kobayashi Takiji was tortured, then murdered by the Japanese government for his novel portraying the exploitation of Korean laborers.

Within the community, many of Sagawa’s peers gained recognition by claiming to be the Japanese face of Dada, Futurism, and the like, but Sagawa refused to grab an “-ism” and hop on a bandwagon, even though it was, for some, an irresistible way to stake a new claim. There was also an “old boys club” aspect to the male-dominated Tokyo literati that made little space for women (historically, waka was always the woman-friendly poetic genre), and she was also a young outsider from Hokkaido, which was a very remote, recently incorporated settlement of the Japanese empire. One element of good fortune was that she met Kitasono Katsue shortly after arriving in Tokyo. Kitasono was a central figure among the avant-garde—a stylish, restless, experimental and ambitious poet who was extremely supportive of other poets, including women. He seemed to instantly recognize Sagawa’s ability. He recalled of that time that “she was still in a state of uncertainty, given that her own poems were so different from those of other poets. No mediocre poet can imagine just how cruel this feeling is—this unjust sense of insecurity that is experienced by an extraordinary poet as they are first setting out.”1 On the other side of the planet, another voice—that of Gertrude Stein—would have nodded: “The creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic.”2

One day in August 1928, an unknown but aspiring seventeen-year-old poet went against her family’s wishes and left her hometown in Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan, for Tokyo. Her half-brother, Kawasaki Noboru, and his childhood friend, Ito Sei, had gone a few years earlier and were the only people she knew in Tokyo. She quickly integrated into the literary avant-garde community, publishing her first translation in 1929, and her first poem in 1930, having traded her legal name, Kawasaki Ai, for her pen name, Sagawa Chika [link].3 It marked the beginning of a short but remarkable poet’s life. Between 1929 and 1936, Sagawa wrote and published roughly 90 poems4, and translated modernist poetry and prose from the English.

Sagawa wrote in a moment of tremendous cultural upheaval: Tokyo was in the midst of Western-facing modernization, the rebuilding of infrastructure following a catastrophic earthquake in 1923, the emergence of leisurely consumerism, and change in dress from traditional Japanese to Western style clothing. In literature, emergent technologies like the mimeograph amplified the overall explosion of journals and periodicals, which served multiple demands: a powerful tide of socially conscious literature addressed proletarian, socialist, and feminist concerns, whereas small presses and coterie journals (dōjinshi—a practice that still exists today) became critical nodes in the formation of literary communities, particularly for experimental artists who coalesced around their aesthetic affinities. Translation played a key role, and these journals’ abilities to quickly publish literary content in translation—poetry, prose, and criticism, mostly from French, German, and English—aided the exchange of ideas and aesthetic experiments, linking writers and artists globally with unprecedented speed. This flow of ideas across borders, languages, and continents moved quickly, and helps explain why a poet like Sagawa might have had more in common with counterparts in Paris and Buenos Aires than in mainstream Japanese literature.5

Because of the aesthetic lineage that connects modernism, postmodernism, and the avant-garde, any of these terms could apply to Sagawa’s work as well. Though imprecise, Sagawa is generally labelled a modernist poet because she wrote alongside and contemporaneously to literary Modernism, and because of the significance of her aesthetic innovation.6 Toshiko Ellis (one of the foremost scholars of modernist Japanese poetry), however, is quick to point out in the 2021 zadankai [link] the complexity of casting Sagawa as a “modernist” poet, in part because these writers did not self-designate as such. More common for the time, poets identified with the name of their dōjinshi, like membership in a club. Sagawa belonged to the “Arceuil Club,” which published the journal Hakushi (White paper/blank slate) and also identified as one of the “l’esprit nouveau” poets, another identifying label of that moment that linked to an experimental, avant-garde stance.

If we claim that Sagawa was ahead of her time, the delayed arrival of her readership serves as evidence. When Ellis objects to calling her a modernist poet, she is also suggesting that Sagawa was not merely a modernist poet, just as feminist scholars like Noriko Mizuta insist that she is much more than a “woman poet.” The challenge today to take Sagawa seriously on her own terms, even as she stands outside of conventional categorization.

On February 20, 1933, the proletarian Hokkaido writer Kobayashi—famous for his novel Kani Kōsen (Crab Cannery Ship), depicting the abuse and exploitation of laborers on a crab cannery ship, was brutally tortured then murdered by the Special Higher Police (Tokubetsu Kōtō Keisatsu). Two months later, Sagawa published the poem, “Hana sakeru ōzorani” (“To the Vast Blooming Sky” in my translation.) Earlier, I had translated the last line of this poem as “The things I’ve lost are never to return.” Now, in consideration of this timing, I revised it to read, “Those we have lost are never to return.” In the translation by Rina Kikuchi and Carole Hayes, the line reads, “What is lost will never return, will it,” preserving the original line’s degree of uncertainty. Translation is a concrete reminder that a single poem is actually a somewhat different poem every time it is read by someone new—an undocumented proliferation that is true for all literature.

While print culture depends on the published text as a fixed and stable object, the prolific and fast-paced culture of small journals in Sagawa’s time moved outside of copyright concerns over reprints. She and most others rarely were paid for publishing work in small journals, and Sagawa frequently revised and republished her poems. Because she never had the chance to edit and publish her own collection of poetry, no existing edition has the approval of the poet herself. This deprives readers of the confidence of a singular, “authoritative” version—she instead left behind multiple versions of many of her poems as published in small journals. There is even disagreement among editors as to at what point a poem has been revised so much that it became an entirely different poem. All of this is a matter of circumstance, not design—but such is the way in which Sagawa Chika’s poems evade the “cult of the original.” Rather, hers is a unique legacy of multiplicity. She did not leave us with her final product—instead, we are privileged to have access to something perhaps of greater value: her process.

By creating this shift in how we receive an “original” text, this body of work also alters the role of translation. For example, in literary translation we commonly assume a hierarchy wherein the “original” poem is by default superior to its translation, considered an inferior replica, however implicitly. Sagawa fails to supply us with a single “original” poem to which we should defer—she disrupts this basic hierarchy by creating a situation wherein we as readers might disagree and argue over which version of her own poems might be the “better” one, or better yet—disregard the entire question in favor of an entirely different set of questions.

Translation is already an act of proliferation, and all the more so with Sagawa. This excessiveness, these multiples, create new kinds of interest. They are interesting to experience, to study, to understand the poetics of a singular poet. (The only vector in which this is not of interest is that served by the logic of capital, which requires that we distinguish the good from the bad, as a means of generating profit.7) As a translator herself, Sagawa displays a lack of undue loyalty to the “original” text, and provides clues regarding her own understanding of the fluidity of a literary text. As Fujii Sadakazu discusses in the zadankai, Sagawa, in translating Joyce’s Chamber Music, transformed his rhyming verse into prose poetry, a seemingly bold move at the time.

For readers of contemporary USAmerican experimental poetry, the notion of an “open text” is central to an avant-garde poetics espoused by the “Language Poetry” movement in the 70s and 80s.8 The fluid space between Sagawa’s own versions of poems, translations of her (multiple versions of) poems, and her own translations of poems in relation to her own writing of poems creates the conditions of an open text, while breaching the bounds of a single text with all its multiplicity. It seems to embody, then, a new articulation of what it might mean for a text to hold openness as such.

And if the result of this stance is an emphasis on process rather than product, Sagawa leaves us wondering how she felt about the products of translation. Her translations of Joyce might have gotten her foot in the door with the prestigious Shi to Shiron journal, but ultimately, she was quick to abandon the act of translating the most well-known Modernists, like James Joyce and Virginia Woolfe. As Alys Moody points out, Sagawa’s later translations are of lesser known, almost unknown poets, indicating a different intention. It is perhaps evidence of her interest in an evolution and development of her own poetics. Sagawa seems to be valuing translation processes, rather than products, in what Alys Moody refers to as “apprenticeship,” and Toshiko Ellis calls a kind of “muscle training.” (That said, we should not dismiss the keenness of Sagawa’s eye: she was the first to translate Mina Loy into Japanese, decades before others caught on.)

Some translation-related elements visible in Sagawa’s poetics include: the use of English-language words; English-language syntax integrated into Sagawa’s own poetic syntax and grammar; as well as entire phrases and lines transplanted from the works she translated, into her own poems. Recent studies of Sagawa’s work take note of the fact that Sagawa’s training to be an English teacher meant that she was especially steeped in the negotiations and nuances of syntax and grammar between English and Japanese. The ability to turn something we conventionally think of as “translationese”—the glitchy errors of an amateurish translator—and convert it into a poetic feature is yet another aspect of Sagawa’s uniqueness.

Although we are “late” to the gathering, in another sense, we are here just at the right time. Sagawa constellates elements of language and literature in what seems like a contemporary mode. Over her oeuvre as a whole, she enacts a wide range of translation—or translational—activities. Even the poem of hers titled “Late Gathering” enacts a beautiful conceptual translation of a John Cheever story of the same title. Reading Howard Weeks’s “Poem” followed by “Grape Stains”9 by Sagawa reveals an interwoven process of writing and translation, as if the two had occurred simultaneously. This is perhaps most vividly apparent in the Japanese, but reading Sagawa’s “Rusty Knife” following the first three sections of her Chamber Music translation, one sees how the syntax, the concepts, and some details from the Joyce poem, are alchemized and reformulated into a poem that is and can only be distinctly Sagawa Chika.

Translation enabled Sagawa and other Japanese modernist poets to rapidly consume and process ideas from abroad, at a time of major aesthetic shifts in poetics that decentered the subject-based lyric poem, and instead foregrounded the materiality of language. But for Sagawa, the act of translation went far beyond the consumption of translated texts; it was deeply integrated into her poetics. She metabolized a cultural moment of rapidly emergent ideas into a wholly original poetic stance. The inputs came equally from poetry and language as they did from the visual arts, along with the city itself as a fluid, evolving entity—they all helped her invent her own idiosyncratic style which formed the brilliant core of her poems.

Sagawa was born in Hokkaido in a small coastal fishing town called Yoichi, meaning “place of many snakes” or “place of many fish” in the indigenous Ainu language. It had long been home to the Yoichi kotan, an Ainu village, until around the time of Sagawa’s birth. Hokkaido is known today for the beauty of its rugged landscape, but in those days, it was still thick in the midst of its transition as a colony of the Japanese Empire into a fully assimilated state (or do, meaning prefecture). This included agricultural development; exploitative labor10; and the forced assimilation and dispossession of the Ainu people. Visitors to Yoichi can still drop by the unjoya, a trading post built in 1853, where Japanese settlers had at first traded goods with local Ainu, and later, as capitalist settler colonialism took full force, contracted Ainu labor.

Compared to prominent members of the Japanese literati, many of whom had studied literature in school, Sagawa’s path was slightly different. High school education is not compulsory in Japan (then as well as now), and Sagawa passed rigorous entrance exams in order to gain admission to a selective high school in the larger port city of Otaru, about one hour away from Yoichi by train. Otaru was bustling with commerce at the time, and with growing trade between the US and the UK, as well as the legacy of American agriculturalists who had assisted in Hokkaido’s development, English was the secondary language on offer, and Sagawa attended a post-secondary program to receive her license to teach English. While Sagawa’s expressions indicate deep familiarity with Japanese literature, the fact that she had studied the English language likely contributed to her wide capacity for poetic innovation.

Likewise, Sagawa’s upbringing in Hokkaido, and her attendant proximity to Ainu culture11, might provide clues as to why her poems seem to sharply differ from more common manifestations of nature in poetry. It does not resemble waka and its specific use of an emotive, nature-rich lexicon, and it is also far removed from pastoral poetry from the lyric tradition. It is not anthropocentric, and in fact nature is often a violent force in her poems, as is explored in Toshiko Ellis’s essay [link], as well as Kawasaki Kenko’s 2025 monograph on Sagawa. Given Ainu culture’s deep respect and awe for the forces of nature, it seems very possible that non-Ainu residents of Hokkaido might inherit similar attitudes. Many of Sagawa’s poems reference the proximity of deep forest, steep cliffs, and treacherous ocean waves. Even the color green, and its attendant lushness of nature, is in Sagawa’s poems a threatening force. Although she wrote her poems in Tokyo, and rarely returned to her homeland, this background of her upbringing lived deeply in her words.

When Sagawa Chika passed away in 1936, discussions regarding the publication of her first collection of poetry was just getting under way, but time was not on her side. In the end, the only book that Sagawa published in her lifetime was Shitsugaku, her translation of Chamber Music, a collection of poems by James Joyce (Shii no ki, 1932), in an edition of 300. All collections of her own poetry are posthumous publications. Ten months following her death, in November 1936, Sagawa’s first collection, Sagawa Chika Shishū (Collected Poems of Sagawa Chika) was published by Shōshinsha in an edition of 350 copies. Ito Sei, with whom she had a close relationship for most of her life, edited the collection without attributing credit to himself.

In 1983, a more complete edition that included her prose, tribute writings from poets [link], and a bibliography, was published as Sagawa Chika Zenshishū (Collected Poems of Sagawa Chika) by Shinkaisha. It was edited by Ono Yuse, Sone Hiroyoshi, and Kawasaki Hirofumi12, and printed in an edition of 550. In 2010, Ono Yuse republished with Shinkaisha the Sagawa Chika Zenshishū Shinpan (Collected Poems of Sagawa Chika—New Edition) in an edition of 500. Ono had combed through old journals in used bookstores throughout Japan in search of stray Sagawa poems, which led to the addition of ten newly discovered poems in this edition. In parallel, in 2011 he published a 75-page collection of Sagawa’s translations from the English, which included poems by Charles Reznikoff, James Joyce, and Mina Loy among others. Publishing a collection of translations by a single translator is not standard practice, but Ono seems to have presciently done so in consideration of future scholarship.

Recent years have seen the emergence of books by and about Sagawa that includes translation into English and other languages, emergent criticism, and still newer editions of her work that establish the fact that Sagawa Chika was a tremendously important Japanese modernist poet. Significantly, the Sagawa Chika Zenshishū (Collected Works of Sagawa Chika) edited by Shimada Ryu and published by Shoshi Kankanbou made Sagawa’s work widely available to Japanese readers for the first time, and has undergone multiple press runs since its first publication in 2022. This book is notable for its thoroughness in research and bibliographical detail, and its commitment to publish every known work that Sagawa published while living. In a unique editorial gesture, Shimada makes extensive and deliberate consideration of these multiple variant poems, in order to determine a representative version, sometimes reversing decisions that had been made by previous editors. By tracing Sagawa’s revision history in an appendix at the back of the book, his transparency and meticulousness make space for new kinds of scholarship around this body of work.

Another unique book that Sagawa’s particular legacy has engendered is a collection edited by Asao Shimon called Sagawa Chika Shiryou Shūsei, (Collected Materials of Sagawa Chika) (Edition Umi no Hoshi, 2017), which collects reproduced images of every available original journal publication of Sagawa’s poems, grouped by poem, making them all accessible to the reader at once in the format in which they were first published. This ability to observe the evolution of her work, on the micro and macro levels, is particularly intriguing when considered in parallel to the evolution of print and publication culture, and the shifting roles of authorship and translation.

Finally, as if to attest to Sagawa’s belated arrival in the canon of Japanese literature, Kawasaki Kenko in 2023 edited and published the Sagawa Chika Shishū (Selected Poems of Sagawa Chika) with the Iwanami Bunko imprint, marking it as a Japanese “classic.” Kawasaki is also the author of the first full-length monograph on Sagawa’s work, Sagawa Chika—Aozorani yubiatowo tsukete (Iwanami Shoten, 2025).

Mizuta Noriko, a fierce and influential feminist scholar of contemporary, switches for a moment in the zadankai to use the English word “justice” when referring to the importance of reading Sagawa’s work. What does justice look like for a poet like Sagawa Chika?

Through decades of obscurity and neglect, Sagawa remained a small footnote in Japanese literary history, mostly as a former lover of the novelist Ito Sei. As the editor of Sagawa’s posthumous poetry collection, Ito had famously chosen not to include one of her best poems, titled “Umi no stego” (Ocean Orphan, or Orphan of the Sea). In fact, Ito Sei had also written a poem with a similar title, “Umi no suteji” (Orphan of the Ocean)—a poem he liked so much that he selected it to be engraved on a memorial stone in his hometown of Otaru. Ito began his literary career as a poet, and his first published book was a poetry collection, but his style of poetry was sentimental and lyric in style, compared to Sagawa’s cool, detached, aesthetically innovative work. In a 1978 essay titled “Shijin no Tanjo” (Birth of a Poet), Tomioka Taeko refers to Ito’s poetry as “modern,” in relation to Sagawa’s, which she calls “contemporary.” Furthermore, she considers the complexity of their relationship: “The fact that Ito Sei wrote almost nothing about her [following her death] is revealing of a man’s restraint as well as sheepishness, and also one can read in it a certain sense of defeat as poet, too.”13

A few short months after Sagawa’s passing, Kitasono Katsue started a new literary journal and group, called VOU—and also mailed his first letter to Ezra Pound in Italy, beginning a long and curious correspondence between two literary men of high ambitions.14 One wonders what might have happened, had Sagawa lived longer and had continued her literary engagements alongside Kitasono—or if her poems might have found English-language translation at an earlier moment in time. Yoshioka Minoru, widely acknowledged as one of the most important postwar Japanese poets, is known to have obsessively read two books during a key moment in his own development as a poet. These two books were Shirono Arubamu (White Album) by Kitasono Katsue (Koseikaku Shoten, 1929), and Sagawa Chika Shishū (Collected Poems of Sagawa Chika, Shōshinsha, 1936).15

What does it mean, exactly, to be a “major poet”? To be sure, there are many important poets of this time, and most of their names are already well-known. I could be wrong, or glitching—but one thing I know is that history is full of its own glitches. The poetry of Sagawa Chika has already survived close to one hundred years, and when all is said and done, it is beginning to seem likely that we might be reading her into the next hundred years as well.