六つの詩

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 These range from minor differences such as outdated kana and lack of a small tsu (っ vs つ) to indicate a double consonant, to larger issues like colloquialisms, regional dialects, and kanji currently only being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.