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“One Other Thing” is a poem that holds many of Sagawa’s unique qualities as a poet working with surrealist imagery, short lyric lines, brilliantly realized via the song composition by Miyoshi Akira, cubist assemblage, iconoclastic use of color, odd, ominous relationship to nature, and a slightly hopeful ending. There is even a very subtle torque in the title, that is not just “another” thing, as might be standard phrasing, but “one” other thing, a specificity that evokes mystery and points towards expansiveness in factuality. It packs a lot of Sagawa poetics in one small poem.
Handwritten manuscript paper in Sagawa’s handwriting
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Notes on composition:
“One Other Thing” (Song)
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Notes on composition:
There is a strange sense of despair in the poems of Sagawa Chika a lost voice a sound from the other side invisible flowers and summer, already distant but they are enrobed in a seductive elegance mostly with the appearance of a dignified thing thorns infused with the slightest amount of poison smirk at an old person plant emptiness in the fingertips of young girls and sting me
One Other Thing
Translated by Miryam Sas
A group of asparagus
Dives into the afternoon sun, dirty
Their stems are severed by glass
Blue blood running down the window
On the other side
The sound of a fern unwinding
“Hoka no hitotsu no mono” (“One Other Thing”), Sagawa Chika Shishū (Poems by Sagawa Chika) (Shōrinsha, 1936)
“Hoka no hitotsu no mono” (“One Other Thing”), Kōdō, Vol. 1 No. 3, December 1933
“Hoka no hitotsu no mono” (“One Other Thing”), Shī no ki, Vol. 1 No. 8, August 1933
One Other Thing
Translated by Sawako Nakayasu
A thicket of asparagus
Dives into the dirty afternoon sun
Their stems cut off by glass
Blue blood streams down the window
And on the other side
Is the sound of a fern unfurling