Katsumi Ikeda (1908–1953) was a poet born in Yoshino, Nara Prefecture. Today, the site of Katsumi Ikeda’s childhood home stands diagonally across from my own house in Yoshino. It was this unexpected proximity that first drew me to his work, and eventually led me to write and translate poetry myself. I now maintain a small memorial room and blog to introduce his poems to readers both in Japan and abroad.

Before and during World War II, he lived in Shanghai, where he worked in photography and publishing, and was active in literary circles. As the war worsened, he refused to continue writing propaganda for the Japanese puppet government, stating that he could no longer write lies.

He eventually made a harrowing escape from Shanghai. While traveling by train, Ikeda was shot twice during an ambush by Chinese Communist forces, and a colleague who was with him was killed. Ikeda returned to Japan carrying his colleague’s ashes, wounded in both body and spirit.

“The Earthen Wall of Hōryū-ji” is one of Ikeda’s most powerful works. It is not simply a poem of return—it is a solemn testament to survival, to the scars of history, and to the quiet presence of places that remember more than we do.

The Earthen Wall of Hōryū-ji

Brushing rainwater off my hat,
rubbing the mud caked to my soles into the weeds,
wiping the droplets trailing down my cheeks—
along the straight path from the Tatsuta River,
a path blurred by a torrential downpour,
at last, I have returned.

　Beyond the pine windbreak, roofs mossed over in green verdigris,
　beyond them, a straight path vanishing into smoke over the rice fields.
　A path embroidered with green—
　with small stipules of wood sorrel,
　serrated leaves of ground cherry,
　sedges, barnyard millet—
　a path of white bands stitched with green.

This road,
after ten long years,
leads from the Republic of China, within me.
Lying face-down on the straw mats
in the hold of the repatriation ship Enoshima Maru,
head pounded by the roar of screws and boilers—
for nine days and seven nights I wandered.

　That alley in Beiping's Inner District 1, Magpie Lane,
　where H completed his drafts on History of Chinese Sculpture
　and The Three Principles of the People and Sun Yat-sen.

And Langya Road in Nanjing,
where K made me baozi—steamed meat buns—
in a loose apron with eighteen pockets,
amid eighty-six stalks of hollyhocks, the scent of gardenias,
and the play of Ari the dog, the geese, and the ducks.

And Baoshang Road, Zhabei, Shanghai,
where the diapers of my children, Hara and Michi—
born in the 33rd and 35th years of the Republic—
fluttered in the wind…

This road continues from those alleyways,
compressing ten years of visions and illusions
into an instant.

My chest pounds.
My cheeks burn.
With no sadness, no anger,
no hesitation, no foolishness, no forgetting—
I have returned.

Japan was defeated.
A friend died on the northern plains of China, four days later.
A gunshot wound pierced my left arm.
All of it now, like rainwater on my hat,
like mud on my shoes.

This road continues
from beyond the pine windbreak,
from beyond the rice fields,
from beyond the weeds,
from beyond the East China Sea—
and at last, I have returned.

The rice planters in straw capes outside the earthen wall,
the Buddhas and temple halls inside it.
The ruin and defeat of today outside the wall,
the ages of Asuka, Hakuhō, and Tempyo inside.
And here—
at the end of my ten long years in the Republic of China,
carried all the way to this place in one desperate breath,
my drenched body, now delivered,
is held and upheld
by the chest of the earthen wall.

This chest—
once embraced the Six Dynasties.
This chest—
reached out to East Turkestan,
Gandhara, India, Sassanid Persia, Eastern Rome,
and Saracen lands.
This chest—
touched Greece, Assyria, and Egypt.
And this chest, too—
was soaked in the blood spray of the Mononobe and Soga clans,
gathered the primordial mists of chaos,
sealed the torrents of history and geography—
and now lies still,
crawled upon by ground spiders,
an earthen wall of raw clay.

I have returned.
Still wearing my dust-covered clothes,
paying no mind to the rubble and rusted steel of the cities,
along this straight road from the Republic of China, after ten years—
at last, I have returned.

On my back—
the years since then.
I, hunched like a cat,
squinting at the sails of junks cutting the dusk sky
from the rooftop above the Huangpu banks.
I—
who counted the jars of old wine
filling the walls between recluse poet Luisi and the statue of the Horseback Marquis,
as though counting lines of poetry.
I—
who captured from the air
flooded plains of Zhejiang,
the houses, the people, the livestock and trees,
all drifting past in the lens.
I—
who, under a shower of bullet fire like cicadas’ cries,
lifted the buttocks of a laborer with skin disease
to rub in a salve.

Back then—
What was it I mourned?
What did I rage against?
What wonder stirred in me?

Ten years.
The far reaches of that formless time—
in one dark corner of a freight car,
pulled from the ruins of the Japanese internment camp
at the site of the Tianjin Freight Depot.
There,
as the sound of stones thrown by local boys
struck the train’s embankment—
I listened in silence.

By then,
I had no sorrow,
no anger,
no surprise.

Brushing rainwater from my hat,
rubbing the mud from my soles into the weeds,
wiping the drip from my cheek—
the straight road from the Tatsuta River,
splashing under the downpour,
at last—
I have returned.

Before my body,
rushed and breathless,
out of that chaotic and disorderly decade
in the Republic of China—
there stands
the rough clay wall,
the earthen wall
of Hōryū-ji.

Ikeda’s poem is not just a narrative of physical return from China to Japan—it is a spiritual reckoning. Through images of mud, rain, weeds, and the tactile reality of the dorohei (earthen wall), he stages a confrontation between memory and the eternal. Each place-name and historical echo—from Gandhara to the Sassanids, from ducklings in Nanjing to war wounds—forms a fragmented cartography of his identity.

By contrasting the “outside” world of destruction and agriculture with the “inside” world of Buddhism and continuity, he sets up a tension: modernity and war have desecrated time, yet the wall endures. In standing before it, soaked and broken, he finds no comfort—only presence.

There is no easy redemption in this poem. Rather, it is the act of facing—of recognizing one’s unaltered material existence (“my drenched body”)—that provides a kind of dignity. Hōryū-ji’s earthen wall becomes both a witness and a mourner, an object that has “embraced the Six Dynasties” and now embraces the poet.