Morio Hayashida — Six Poems

Morio Hayashida crossed the Pacific as a teenager and spent much of his life in Los Angeles, writing for Japanese-language newspapers, working as a gardener, and joining the literary clubs that made Issei culture far richer than the surviving English record suggests. War uprooted that life; after leaving California during World War II, he farmed near Salt Lake City with his brother before returning to Southern California. These six poems, translated by Kenji C. Liu, are jagged, visionary pieces in which a foreign street, a broken mirror, illness, blood, and the glare of the sea become forms of estrangement and endurance. They are a small surviving English window onto a much larger Japanese-language career.