Backside Research

About the Author: Chika Sagawa was a young poet, translator and modernist writer. She was born in 1911 in Hokkaido, which is the northernmost island of Japan. In 1928 at the age of nineteen, she ventured alone to Tokyo where she was exposed to western artistic movements such as surrealism, Dada and western writers. At the age of 25 in 1935, Sagawa passed away due to stomach cancer. After her death, her poems were collected, edited, and published by Ito Sei (a Japanese poet, novelist and translator) as the Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa. Sagawa had previously been excluded from the Japanese literary canon. Some believe she was omitted because her poems did not consist of typical feminine topics, while others argue that her engagement with Western modernity did not serve the nationalistic agenda of literary historians in her time. She was not acknowledged for many years after her death, but she is now cited as the first female Japanese modernist poet and one of Japan's best.

Night eats color,
Flower bouquets lose their fake ornaments.
Day falls into the leaves like sparkling fish
And struggles, like the lowly mud,
The shapeless dreams and trees
Nurtured outside this shriveled, deridable despair.
And the space that was chopped down
Tickles the weeds there by its feet.
Fingers stained with tar from cigarettes
Caress the writhing darkness.
And then people move forward.

Poem Analysis: Backside is a poem that you read and immediately can sense its beauty. Her poetry contains the clearest and precise images, fore she gives human descriptors to inhuman objects. The effect of this is a touch of elegance throughout. But by enhancing these things with human activity, she also burdens them with human plight. To exist is to suffer, according to Chika Sawaga's poetry. Man and nature exist together in the same space, which is magnificent yet awful at the same time. In the coexistence of man and nature, the world becomes dark. Line 1 states- "Night eats color". Night symbolizes darkness of the soul, evilness and loss of faith. Color is symbolic for happiness, innocence, joy and nature. Sagawa is literally saying that the world's darkness is devouring and destroying the goodness of the Earth. Hands appear in the third to last line- "Fingers stained with tar from cigarettes/ caress the writhing darkness". These are the hands of humans in society. Society is stroking the atrocities in life as if they are it's pet. The fingers appear ghostly and blackened. Her image proposes that the stains are more than a blemish but a wound or scar. "Flower bouquets lose their fake ornaments," - line 2. The flowers that one can assume were once beautiful, are now wilted and presumed as 'fake'. The last line then gives a completely different aura to the poem. "And then people move forward." As Earth's creations tremble from abuse as their offenders turn the cheek and walk away, the poem ends with a debatable question. Is it people who are enduring the world, or is it the other way around?


Works Cited:

Sitar, James. "Chika Sagawa." Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, 2014. Web. 12 May 2014.

Kashima, Shoko. "Chika Sagawa." Chika Sagawa. The Other Voices, 23 June 2013. Web. 13 May 2014.

"Poems by Sagawa Chika -- Translation." Poems by Sagawa Chika -- Translation. Ed. HOW2. Kathleen Fraser, 2014. Web. 10 May 2014.

Newick, Zack. "'Backside' by Chika Sagawa - Asymptote Blog." Asymptote Blog. Zack Newick, 19 Nove 2013. Web. 13 May 2014.