The Owl Calls and Other Essays

Sugita Hisajo asks how women’s haiku changed when modern daily life entered the poem: electric lamps, bank doors, theater programs, domestic work, and difficult feelings.

Her critical essay quotes and closely examines a wide range of women’s poems, tracing new ways of observing objects, bodies, movement, and personal circumstance.

“The Owl Calls” remembers her younger brother’s illness and death during the family’s move to Taiwan in 1897, through the precise details of a child’s grief.