by Chika Sagawa
Translation copyright © 2015 by Sawako Nakayasu
Introduction copyright © 2020 by Sawako Nakayasu
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Originally published in trade paperback and in slightly different form in the United States by Canarium Books, in 2015.
The translation of this book was made possible by a generous grant from the Japan Foundation.
ISBN 9780593230015
Ebook ISBN 9780593230022
modernlibrary.com
randomhousebooks.com
Cover design and illustration: Ella Laytham
ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction by Sawako Nakayasu
Poems
Insects
Morning bread
My picture
Rusty knife
Black air
It is snowing
Green flames
Departure
Blue horse
Visibility through green
Beard of death
Seasonal monocle
Blue sphere
Fragment
Glass wings
Circuit
Illusory home
Ocean of memory
Blue road
Portrait of winter
White and black
Ribbon of May
Mystery
Opal
Dream
In white
Green
Sleeping
The mad house
Shapes of clouds
Wind
Day of snow
The day the bell tolls
The city possessed
Waves
Like a cloud
Please cover me with dirt every year
To awaken
To the vast blooming sky
Gate of snow
Simple scenery
Spring
Dance hall
Dark summer
Constellation
Ancient flowers
One other thing
Backside
Blemish on the grape
Snow line
Promenade
Conversation
Late gathering
Climbing to heaven
Mayflower
Dark song
Afternoon of fruit
Flower
Afternoon
Meerschaum
End of summer
Finale
A plain, moonlit night
Prelude
Seasons
Words
Downfall
Composition in three primary colors
Ocean bride
Song of the sun
Mountain range
Ocean angel
Voices of summer
Seasonal night
The street fair
1.2.3.4.5.
Newly Collected Poems
Falling ocean
Tree spirits
Flower
Flowers between the fingers
Lavender grave
Smoke signals
Night walk
Larks of the flower garden
Wind is blowing
Seasons
Prose
Notable poems from the second year of publications by Shii no ki
While waiting for Christmas
Winter diary
Chamber music
Crystal night
Had they been the eyes of fish
My nighttime
Kinumaki-san and his poetry collection, Pedal Organ
On Bucolic Comedies by Edith Sitwell
Bouquet of fog
Like fairy tales
When passing between trees
Ema Shōko and my radiant dreams
Diary
Dedication
Acknowledgments
About the Author
INTRODUCTION
SAWAKO NAKAYASU
Sagawa Chika*1 is Japan’s first female Modernist poet, whose work resonated deeply with, and helped shape, the most dynamic shifts and developments in the poetry of the era. I know this now after spending almost two decades with Chika’s poetry, but at the time of my initial encounter in 2002, she was generally considered a “minor” poet—some even questioned my decision to translate her work in the first place.*2
I first learned of Chika in John Solt’s Shredding the Tapestry of Meaning: The Poetry and Poetics of Kitasono Katue, where he reflects upon his choice of PhD dissertation topic: “I could have focused on any of a dozen fine poets active before the war—such as Takiguchi Shūzō, Nishiwaki Junzaburō, Haruyama Yukio…and Sagawa Chika (1911–36).” I was intrigued to hear Solt mention a female name among this male-dominated group of poets, and my initial research indicated that Chika’s work was long out of print, nearly impossible to access. The single exception was that a sixteen-year-old with the username “Ririka” had typed and posted all of Chika’s poems on her blog. This is where I first read, and fell in love with, the extraordinary poems of Sagawa Chika.
Chika’s poems are delightfully surreal. “Interrupted by thoughts, fish climb the cliff” is the final line of the poem “Afternoon,” while in another poem, “The sky has countless scars. / Hanging like elbows” (“Like a Cloud”). Elsewhere, I found a sensual, emotional complexity: “Fingers stained with cigarette tar / Caress the writhing darkness. / And the people move forward” (“Backside”). I had never before read poetry quite like Chika’s. I was still new at translating Japanese poetry, but I thrilled at the idea of sharing this work with other people.
To this day, I have only taken one formal workshop in literary translation, taught by the great poet and translator Keith Waldrop in the spring of 2002. Beginning to translate can be a fraught endeavor—there is a seeming abundance of potential errors, pitfalls, and failures. There is an assumption that one should be translating “the very best” texts in the most accurate, “faithful” rendering. Waldrop, brilliant iconoclast that he is, eschewed most conventional wisdom and encouraged us to translate what we most wanted to translate, and to “make it better in the translation”—he refused the conventional thinking that a translation was, by default, inferior to the original text. Thanks to his teachings—as well as my own youthful boldness—when I came across the poems of Sagawa Chika, the fact that she was a little-known poet, and that
I was only beginning to translate, did not dissuade me.
It is now evident to more people that Sagawa Chika was a singular and deeply compelling poet, part of a global literary modernism.*3 Her influences include the Modernist Anglophone writers whose work she translated, as well as work from European literary and artistic movements, much of it translated or imported by her peers. Within this context, Chika’s poems have a particularly idiosyncratic way of merging elements from her nature-filled upbringing with the cosmopolitan bustle of Tokyo. Despite her early death at the age of twenty-four, and her subsequent omission from the Japanese literary canon, her poems have leaped over time to reach a wider audience today. It is proof of the importance of her remarkable œuvre, created in less than six years of poetic production during one of the largest social and cultural shifts of her nation’s history.
* * *
—
Sagawa Chika was born in 1911 as Kawasaki Chika (川崎愛),*4 to a family that owned apple orchards in Yoichi, Hokkaido, a small rural city with a population of about sixteen thousand. Nestled between the mountains and the sea in the far north of Japan, it is buried in deep snow for much of the winter. Frail from birth, Chika had difficulty walking until the age of four, and had problems with her vision. She had no father figure, but instead grew close to her half-brother, Kawasaki Noboru. Against her family’s wishes, she entered a girls’ high school, and then went on to attain her license to teach English. In 1928 at age seventeen, she again disregarded her family’s advice and moved to Tokyo, following her brother who had gone four years prior, as well as his friend Ito Sei, who had left for Tokyo four months before Chika and with whom she had a brief romantic relationship. By the time Chika arrived and moved in with her brother, the two young men had established some literary connections in Tokyo and helped usher her into their milieu.
Decades before Chika was born, the Meiji era (1868–1912) saw the overhaul of many fundamental aspects of Japanese government, economy, society, and culture. The old shogunate system was dismantled and eventually replaced with Japan’s first constitution. Industrialization accelerated the rise of its military and paved the way for a horrifying, brutal history of imperialism that lasted until the end of World War II in 1945.*5 The Taishō era (1912–1926) saw the emergence of multiple and varied political parties and movements (including feminism and socialism), and was followed by the Shōwa period (1926–1989). The early Shōwa period preceding World War II was the moment of peak activity for the avant-garde poetry of Chika and her peers. They were not, for the most part, overtly political, but the fact remains that the boldness of their aesthetic experiments took place against the backdrop of Japan’s intense nationalist ambitions, and these same engagements with foreign art movements would eventually become a liability, making them appear unpatriotic when such appearances were forbidden.
Meanwhile, in Tokyo, Japan’s popular culture underwent great transformation. Restaurants served Western food, and jazz music played in dance halls and “jazz cafés.” Young stylish people in Western-style clothing were, with either admiration or mockery, referred to as moga or mobo, short for “modern girl” and “modern boy”—they could be seen enjoying their “promenades” through the streets of the Ginza district. Chika, too, was photographed sometimes in kimono and sometimes in Western dress.
Modernism in art, architecture, and literature flourished during this early Shōwa period. In July 1923, just two months before the Great Kantō Earthquake, the radical art group MAVO was formed. Inspired by Dada and futurism from Europe, and in their explicit and sometimes violent rejection of the art establishment, they were the first to create a Japanese avant-garde. Many avant-garde poets likewise drew from similar influences and set about forming a new poetics. The fact that printing had recently become more accessible enabled art and literary groups to print and disseminate manifestos, pamphlets, and small coterie journals all over Tokyo.*6
When the Great Kantō Earthquake hit in 1923,*7 the devastation it caused had a profound impact on Japanese culture, and was followed by an intense period of reconstruction. Many saw this reconstruction as an opportunity for new cultural elements to take hold and alter the traditional ways of life.
To fill the vacuum of the cultural past that had been swept away with the earthquake rubble, contemporary Western art, architecture, design, and literature were imported on a wide scale. Thus Dadaism, “destructive” of the tradition, spread easily in the atmosphere of constructing the new.*8
Chika had a strong interest in paintings; other avant-garde poets were inspired by visual art, design, and film. They abandoned traditional poetic models like the waka,*9 made abundant use of foreign vocabulary, favored abstraction over narrative lyric, and absorbed the values of the Modernist texts they translated from French, English, and other languages. Japanese avant-garde poetry, though it had plenty in common with Western counterparts, developed within its own complex web of influences particular to the geopolitical and cultural shifts of the time.
* * *
—
In 1930, Chika met Kitasono Katue, one of the dominant figures in Japanese avant-garde poetry.*10 Upon reading her poetry, it was not Chika’s adoption of foreign elements that impressed him—he simply recognized her tremendous talent as a poet, and instantly became one of the greatest champions of her work. He said, “The best poets often have their own complete identity from their first poem. Sagawa Chika was such a poet.”*11 She was quickly immersed in Kitasono’s literary community, joining the Arcueil Club, with the journal Hakushi (which later became Madame Blanche) as its publication outlet.*12 Chika soon became an influential member of the group, and even after Madame Blanche grew to encompass more than forty writers, she consistently stood out as one of the best. Kitasono described her as “naturally modest and quiet, but in the realm of poetry she wrote boldly and freely, like a princess…neither beauty nor death would pilfer nor even distort this freedom of hers.”*13
Chika began publishing her poetry in 1930. The following year saw her first publications in the esteemed Shi to Shiron (Poetry and Poetics)—the publication hub for the avant-garde poets—beginning with her translations of James Joyce’s poems from Chamber Music, shortly followed by her own poetry. Now Chika shared the pages with some of the most influential poets of the time, including Kitasono Katue, Nishiwaki Junzaburō, Kanbara Tai, Anzai Fuyue, and Haruyama Yukio. They published poetry, translations, essays, reviews, and esquisses (sketches), as well as special features on major foreign poets and ideologies. There was great aesthetic variation in Shi to Shiron, but the poets involved with the journal (and other smaller coteries with similar ideals) were grouped under the umbrella term l’esprit nouveau.*14
The esprit nouveau poets were in sync with the popular culture’s warm embrace of French café culture, fashions, language, and literary culture. Thus it is likely that the pen name “Sagawa” (左川), written with the characters “left” and “river,” alludes to the Left Bank of the Seine—the intellectual headquarters of Parisian artists and writers. In correspondence with the poet Uchida Tadashi, Chika wrote:
Once we have some money, Ema Shoko and I want to set up shops in Ginza—she’ll have a hat shop and a photography shop, I’d like to own a bookstore, like Sylvia Beach’s.*15
The Ginza district was home to Columbin, the first Japanese shop to emulate a French café. It was the fashionable place to be and be seen, as depicted in Chika’s prose text “Ema Shoko and my radiant dreams.” It is no surprise that Chika would know of Sylvia Beach, not only as the owner of the fabled Shakespeare and Company bookstore on Paris’s Left Bank, but also as the first publisher of James Joyce’s Ulysses, as Ito Sei was at that moment collaborating on the first-ever Japanese translation of the book.
* * *
—
Amid the frenetic activities of the literary community, Chika was also a bit skeptical of some of her peers, who seemed too keen to engage th
e trends of the moment. “When passing between trees” is a prose text that leisurely meanders through trees and wheat fields, eventually landing on specific commentary on poems by others.
I wonder if the sun in May isn’t a little too bright for the Japanese poets of today. They speak only of dreams and illusions, failing to harmonize with this all-too-French air. […] They lose themselves only when imitating others, and when that figure has been chipped away at, are quite tired.
In comparison, Chika’s poems wear their influence distinctly, but lightly. Her work is unique in its ability to straddle contrasting elements—East and West, nature and the urban, archaic and brand-new poetic lexicons. Her deftness at managing this dislocated, tenuous ground gives her work potency years after her death. While many Japanese artists struggled with their ambivalence about Western influence, Chika seems to have taken ownership of this tension. In the same text, she continues: