"Night Eats Color" and "Another Faded Day Remains"...The names of these two pieces are taken from the poetry of Chika Sagawa. Chika Sagawa was one of the most innovative and prominent avant-garde poets in early-twentieth-century Japan. At the time, few women in Japan wrote poetry, and those who did typically used traditional forms to address domestic concerns. Sagawa sounded different: she wrote in free verse, not tana or haiku, and her images were shockingly new.
Sagawa used free verse to explore her interiority through imagery: rather than relying on traditional forms, she expressed an individual relationship with the world and with nature. Deep pain and deep beauty oscillate throughout Sagawa's work, often triggered in the same image. Not long after Sagawa's death in 1936 at 25 years old and the end of WWII, drastic changes came to Japanese culture that more or less assures she would be all but forgotten.
Sagawa used free verse to explore her interiority through imagery: rather than relying on traditional forms, she expressed an individual relationship with the world and with nature. Deep pain and deep beauty oscillate throughout Sagawa's work, often triggered in the same image. Not long after Sagawa's death in 1936 at 25 years old and the end of WWII, drastic changes came to Japanese culture that more or less assures she would be all but forgotten.
