Chika Sagawa is an anomaly in the history of Japanese poetry. Born in Hokkaido as Aiko Kawasaki in 1911, she became one of Japan's first modernist poets, refusing to use the traditional poetic forms of tanka and haiku. The nation was changing in the early 20th century — Westernizing, nationalizing, militarizing — and she built new poetic forms to express this shifting landscape. The world she created was one where horses go mad and women turn blue; where "the sky has countless scars" and "eyes are covered by clouds."
The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa, by Chika Sagawa, Translated by Sawako Nakayasu.
184 pages