Sparkling Sea
Boom boom boom boom booom
Boom boom boom boom booom
Answering the wind hidden among clouds
the ocean tide swings and holds up its white hair
Hóhóhóhóhō
Háháháháhā
From the pier’s shadow
Red white heads line up and swell on the sea
Annoying
Annoying
Glittering sea
Bathing in the sand, what should I do
Autumn in a Foreign Country
Suddenly stopped—
shoulder-to-shoulder, strolling
profiles of alien faces to stare at
After all it isn’t as thought
doesn’t look like home
Toward a nostalgic burning sunset
wandering quietly in the autumn night
Japan
Japan
Japan
While lost in memories of home
A faltering
exchange of greetings in an irritating foreign tongue
Smirks hidden behind smoke rings
forcing open the bag of illusions
and so
a line of strolling white people’s complexions to slap
Broken Mirror
Evil spirits do you blame me?
After three years’ hardship, the mirror backing peeled off
That’s why (I) carry a truly torn shape
build a castle of memories
Buffalos eating green grass forever
For a while I dream
Bloody
In the watermelon field pulling on heavy boots
Azure water shifting dead vines
I shade my gloomy face
The autumn sun is silent, unfriendly
With an ei!
aim for a big one and kick it
I meditate on the cleaved red pieces
Illness
Fighting fatigue at 2 o’clock
Awful!
White-hot pressure nesting in the pupil
The milk cart’s horseshoes strike at 3 o’clock
Why can’t I sleep!
The 4 o’clock window begins to faintly peek
Aah aah
Through this gloomy heart, arms meander endlessly
Where to Go
The soul
becomes a goose, flies away—
the north is a cold country—
to leave and not return
Namu Amida Butsu
Namu Amida Butsu
I’m human too
The heart bubbles
Dark night wintry night
the body shudders in it
Six Poems
Morio Hayashida
translated from the Japanese by Kenji C. Liu
With thanks to Hirokazu Kosaka and the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center.
These poems are from the 1928 Japanese-language poetry collection 向處に行く (Where to Go) by 24-year-old Morio Hayashida, who immigrated to the United States from Fukuoka. Today, the US publishing industry would probably categorize the book as “foreign” literature, but Hayashida wrote it in Los Angeles, where he lived until his death in 1993. The decades leading up to World War II saw a blossoming of Japanese-language US literature—a network of writers publishing and supporting each other through literary clubs and in the pages of US-based publications.
At the same time, Japanese immigrants lived under vehemently racist, anti-Asian federal and state laws. The day-to-day of being a Japanese immigrant in a hostile country—including feelings of melancholy, alienation, and ambivalence—forms an important subtext when reading Hayashida’s work. The Japanese-language literary community allowed writers to explore the complexity of being unable to return to Japan or call the US home. Together, they formulated an early Japanese American sensibility.
Hayashida’s poetry also sits squarely in both Japanese and Anglo-American modernism. His work seems to echo some of the formal innovations of the latter but from a different trajectory, since imagists owe their inspiration to loosely translated Japanese and Chinese poets. Exploring the modernism of pre-war Japanese American artists, forcibly interrupted by the federal government’s concentration camps, is an important historical and archival project.
As a diasporic person educated in the United States, translating early twentieth-century Japanese-language poetry presents challenges. These range from minor differences such as outdated kana and lack of a small tsu (っ vs つ) to indicate a double consonant, to larger issues like colloquialisms, regional dialects, and kanji currently only being used in Chinese (or not at all). Also, Hayashida’s uses of onomatopoeia can sometimes have meaning in both English and Japanese, and it is hard to know if he meant one or both. I am grateful to my father and friends for help with deciphering and clarifying where possible.
The Japanese language—my first language—can skip subject and pronoun, and has a sentence structure that confounds English. I have attempted to retain this in translation as much as possible as I dislike reading English translations of Japanese that sound too anglicized. Growing up in English-language educational settings, I was “corrected” for inadvertently writing or speaking in English using Japanese grammar, and now, disrupting English in this way, in this political moment, is a pleasure.
These poems are from the 1928 Japanese-language poetry collection 向處に行く (Where to Go) by 24-year-old Morio Hayashida, who immigrated to the United States from Fukuoka. Today, the US publishing industry would probably categorize the book as “foreign” literature, but Hayashida wrote it in Los Angeles, where he lived until his death in 1993. The decades leading up to World War II saw a blossoming of Japanese-language US literature—a network of writers publishing and supporting each other through literary clubs and in the pages of US-based publications.
At the same time, Japanese immigrants lived under vehemently racist, anti-Asian federal and state laws. The day-to-day of being a Japanese immigrant in a hostile country—including feelings of melancholy, alienation, and ambivalence—forms an important subtext when reading Hayashida’s work. The Japanese-language literary community allowed writers to explore the complexity of being unable to return to Japan or call the US home. Together, they formulated an early Japanese American sensibility.
Hayashida’s poetry also sits squarely in both Japanese and Anglo-American modernism. His work seems to echo some of the formal innovations of the latter but from a different trajectory, since imagists owe their inspiration to loosely translated Japanese and Chinese poets. Exploring the modernism of pre-war Japanese American artists, forcibly interrupted by the federal government’s concentration camps, is an important historical and archival project.
As a diasporic person educated in the United States, translating early twentieth-century Japanese-language poetry presents challenges. These range from minor differences such as outdated kana and lack of a small tsu (っ vs つ) to indicate a double consonant, to larger issues like colloquialisms, regional dialects, and kanji currently only being used in Chinese (or not at all). Also, Hayashida’s uses of onomatopoeia can sometimes have meaning in both English and Japanese, and it is hard to know if he meant one or both. I am grateful to my father and friends for help with deciphering and clarifying where possible.
The Japanese language—my first language—can skip subject and pronoun, and has a sentence structure that confounds English. I have attempted to retain this in translation as much as possible as I dislike reading English translations of Japanese that sound too anglicized. Growing up in English-language educational settings, I was “corrected” for inadvertently writing or speaking in English using Japanese grammar, and now, disrupting English in this way, in this political moment, is a pleasure.
Morio Hayashida (b. Aug. 25, 1904 Fukuoka, Japan – d. Apr. 23, 1993 Los Angeles, USA) was a first-generation Japanese immigrant who came to Los Angeles at about nineteen years old. He worked as both a writer for the Rafu Shimpo and Kashū Mainichi newspapers and as a gardener. He actively participated in local literary clubs and the flourishing Japanese American literary community. He was also part of a community of gardeners who regularly published senryu poems in association magazines about daily life caring for the gardens of Los Angeles’ wealthy. During World War II, he and his brother rented land and farmed near Salt Lake City. Later, he served as president of the Southern California Gardeners’ Federation in the 1970s and was a co-founder of the Japanese American Community Credit Union.
Kenji C. Liu is author of Monsters I Have Been (Alice James Books, 2019), finalist for the 2020 California and Maine Book Awards for poetry, and Map of an Onion, national winner of the 2015 Hillary Gravendyk Poetry Prize (Inlandia Institute). His poetry is in numerous journals, anthologies, magazines, and he has published two chapbooks: Craters: A Field Guide (Goodmorning Menagerie, 2017) and You Left Without Your Shoes (Finishing Line, 2009). An alumnus of Kundiman, the Djerassi Resident Artist Program, and the Community of Writers, he lives in Los Ángeles.
