Sagawa Chika, born Kawasaki Ai in 1911, died of stomach cancer in 1936, before her twenty-fifth birthday. Even with such a brief career, she 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 tanka or haiku, and her images were shockingly new. “A chef clutches a blue sky,” begins one of her many short, lyric poems, “Illusory Home.” “Four fingerprints are left; gradually / the chicken bleeds. Even here the sun is crushed.”

Not long after Sagawa’s death, drastic changes came to Japanese culture that more or less assured she would be all but forgotten. In the nineteen-thirties and forties, the country’s nationalist government promoted writers who used familiar Japanese forms, rather than those who wove Western influences into their work. An organization called the Tokubetsu Kōtō Keisatsu, sometimes referred to as the “Thought Police,” arrested intellectuals whose work was deemed unpatriotic. As a result, “virtually every avant-garde poet co-operated with the war effort,” John Solt writes, in “Shredding the Tapestry of Meaning,” his biography of another Japanese modernist, Kitasono Katue. “After the war, the younger poets were disillusioned with the modernists, some of whom had coöperated with the militarists, so they rejected all of that,” Eric Selland, a scholar and translator of Japanese poetry, explained to me.

For years, Sagawa—the pen name is written with the characters for “left” and “river,” likely an allusion to the left bank of the Seine—was barely read. But over the past decade, her work has enjoyed a revival among contemporary Japanese poets, and it has begun to appear in English. In 2011, the poet and translator Sawako Nakayasu produced “Mouth: Eats Color: Sagawa Chika Translations, Anti-Translations, & Originals,” a slim volume of loose, experimental riffs based on Sagawa’s poems. “The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa,” translated by Nakayasu and published this past April by Canarium Books, is the first full-length English-language version of Sagawa’s work.

Sagawa grew up in Hokkaido, an island at Japan’s northernmost tip. Even as a child, she was frail. “Spring was bursting with light and energy that was difficult for her to physically withstand,” Nakayasu told me recently. “Bright green colors would be painful to her eyes.” In 1928, when Sagawa was seventeen, she followed her older half-brother to Tokyo. It was the height of Japanese modernism.

Five years before Sagawa’s arrival in Tokyo, the Great Kantō Earthquake had struck the city with such force that the Great Buddha of Kamakura, a ninety-three-ton statue nearly forty miles from the quake’s epicenter, shifted two feet. More than a hundred thousand people died in the disaster and its aftermath. The scale of the destruction brought change to the cultural landscape as well, John Solt argues. “To fill the vacuum of the cultural past that had been swept away with the earthquake rubble,” Solt writes, “contemporary Western art, architecture, design, and literature were imported on a wide scale.”

By the end of the nineteen-twenties, the cultural border between Japan and the West had blurred. Japanese mogas and mobos (“modern girls” and “modern boys”) wore Western-style clothing and frequented jazz clubs. Artists and writers embraced Dadaism, Futurism, symbolism, and surrealism, and they frequently translated prominent European works. Ito Sei, a friend of Sagawa’s brother and, Nakayasu told me, Sagawa’s unrequited love, helped to complete the first Japanese translation of Joyce’s “Ulysses.” Kitasono Katue, the charismatic center of this scene, championed Sagawa’s work. Sagawa joined the Arcueil Club, an avant-garde poetry coterie, and her poems appeared in the club’s publication, Madame Blanche. Sagawa also became involved with the journal Shi to Shiron (Poetry and Poetics), whose poets were collectively known as “l’esprit nouveau.”

But, after the Second World War, Japanese modernism virtually disappeared. “After the war, Japanese society decided just to forget the whole period, and in the process seemed to have forgotten about the era before that, too,” Eric Selland told me in an e-mail. Some poets continued to read Sagawa and her fellow avant-gardists, but few, if any, scholars wrote on their work. Authors who seemed “authentically” Japanese—who wrote in traditional forms on traditional subject matter—gained favor instead. When, in 1999, John Solt published his biography of Kitasono Katue, it helped to reintroduce both Japanese and Western readers to a body of avant-garde literature that had been overlooked for generations. Nakayasu herself discovered Sagawa through a reference in Solt’s book.

For centuries, the only accepted way to write poetry in Japanese was waka, that is, within the established traditions of tanka and haiku. Writers began to experiment with free verse during the Meiji era (1868-1912), and a sharp divide emerged between poets who wrote waka and those who composed in forms outside the tradition. “In Japan,” Selland explained to me, “poetry is a completely separate genre from haiku and tanka. Japanese has no single word that applies to all these forms.”

In addition to the gulf between free verse and waka in Japan, there is also a sharp historical divide between male and female poetry. Japan has a long tradition of female authors––the eleventh-century masterpiece “The Tale of Genji,” for instance, was written by Lady Murasaki Shikibu—but by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, literature had become overwhelmingly dominated by men. A few writers pushed boundaries: Yosano Akiko and, later, Sagawa’s friend Ema Shôko, for example, wrote openly erotic, sexual poetry that embraced their bodily connection to the world. Sagawa forged another path. Her poetry, Nakayasu told me, is “almost asexual. She doesn’t do what almost every other female poet was doing, which is to talk about the female lived experience in the context of the writing.” Partly, Nakayasu said, that’s because Sagawa’s “relationship to her own body is so torturous. Death is always looming in her work. Her physical existence in the world is precarious.”

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. As Dr. Noriko Mizuta, the chancellor of Japan’s Jōsai University and a scholar of Japanese modern poetry, puts it, “Here was a woman, fragile physically, who stood up alone, communicating with the universe.” Deep pain and deep beauty oscillate throughout Sagawa’s work, often triggered in the same image. “Insects pierce green through the orchard,” she writes in “Like a Cloud.” “The sky has countless scars. The skin of the earth emerges there, burning like a cloud.”

Sawako Nakayasu’s first Sagawa project, “Mouth: Eats Color,” is less a translation of Sagawa’s poetry than of Sagawa’s process. Nakayasu’s multilingual poems draw on Sagawa for inspiration, but she also includes riffs on poems from poets contemporary either to Sagawa (Mina Loy, Harry Crosby) or to Nakayasu herself (Steve Willard, Masako Hiraizumi). There’s a jazzy, puckish energy to the improvisatory collection. “The Collected Poems,” which Nakayasu worked on for over a decade, takes a more straightforward approach to translation. Sagawa’s poem “Promenade,” which appears in seventeen different forms in “Mouth: Eats Color,” appears just once, like so: