Published in 1928, Doko e yuku, or Where to Go?, is the poet Morio Hayashida’s (b. Aug. 25, 1904 Fukuoka, Japan–d. Apr. 23, 1993 Los Angeles, USA) longest work of collected poetry, consisting of 130 free-verse (shintaishi) poems. According to the Zaibei Nihonjinshi (History of Japanese America, 1940), this volume was one of a trio of poetry monographs that defined a “golden age” of late-1920s Japanese-language modernist poetry in the Los Angeles area. (The other two works were Rihei Numata’s Konna no ga (1929) and Akira Togawa’s Shishū (1932).
Hayashida was a prolific writer who emigrated from Japan to Los Angeles at about age seventeen. Hayashida became part of the flourishing of Japanese-language modernist literature in the 1920s and 30s in the United States and was a leading figure in the Los Angeles poetry group Agosto-sha, or “The August Society.” Hayashida and his Issei literary contemporaries contributed to anthologies, wrote for newspapers such as the Rafu Shimpo and Kashū Mainichi, self-published books, and supported each other through collectively-funded journals, including the journal Shūkaku (Harvest). Hayashida was friends with more well-known contemporaries such as Yoné Noguchi (writer), Sōjin Kamiyama (actor), Takehisa Yumeji (artist), and Michio Itō (dancer). After World War II, Hayashida co-founded the Japanese American Community Credit Union and served as president of the Southern California Gardeners’ Federation (SCGF) in the 1970s. He was part of a community of Japanese American gardeners who regularly published Japanese-language senryu poems in SCGF’s Turf and Garden, writing about their daily lives caring for the gardens of Los Angeles’ wealthy.
The title poem of Where to Go? condenses the main thematic concerns of the collection as a whole into the space of only ten lines. For Hayashida, migration is not merely a physical, geographical movement from one nation to another, but a spiritual journey that requires confrontation with the terrifying desolation of modern life.
The opening stanza inverts a standard trope in Buddhist scripture, which treats the migratory behavior of wild geese (雁, kari or gan)as a positive symbol of mindful detachment from worldly affairs. In the Dhammapada, for instance, the Buddha observes that “mindful ones depart; they do not find delight in houses. They abandon every abode, just like wild geese leave a pond.” [1] By contrast, the soul in this poem has retained its attachments, returning to the north even though it is locked in winter cold. Unable to achieve enlightened detachment on its own, the soul requests intercession from an external power by reciting the nenbutsu, or the name of the Amida Buddha.
The concluding stanza reinforces the images of the speaker’s soul, mind, and body being trapped in the cold north. In Japanese, the final stanza’s second line, kokoro wa awadatsu could more literally be translated as “the mind gets goosebumps,” since the Japanese idiom for skin prickling from fear or cold is “standing millet grains” (awadatsu). However, since the direct translation would suggest too close of an association with the opening image of the wild goose, we have chosen the translation “the mind crawls with fear.”
Read through the context of this title poem, the collection’s driving question is less a celebration of free movement on the open road and more of a question posed by a desperate soul seeking warmth and shelter: where can I go?
[1] Translation modified from Dhammapada 91 in “Readings in Pali Texts,” Research Center for Digital Humanities, NTU. National Taiwan University Library, 1995. https://buddhism.lib.ntu.edu.tw/en/lesson/pali/lesson_pali3.jsp