Though all in vain I go,
And only come back again,
Empty as before—
Yet in longing to see you
I will set out once again.
- Meaning
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Though I go to see you only to return in vain, still, moved by the longing to see you, I will set out once again.
- Commentary
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65. Wailing as the "Self-From"
A certain woman served the emperor and received his favor. She was a cousin of the emperor’s mother, the lady known as the Nyōgo, and she was permitted to wear robes of the forbidden colors. From her youth she had known a man of the Ariwara family who served in the Hall of the Palace in the Seiryōden. The man was allowed to enter the women’s quarters of the palace.
He often went in and out of the rear palace and met the woman. Yet she said that if they continued to meet in this way, someday their guilt would be discovered and they would ruin themselves, but the man paid no heed. The woman worried that if she kept her distance he might give up, and so she returned to her home. The man too eventually feared the excess of his own love and struggled to restrain his feelings, but his longing only grew deeper and more painful.
At last their relationship was discovered by the emperor, and the man was exiled from the capital. The woman was confined in a storehouse and punished by the emperor’s mother, who was her cousin.
While the woman wept in the storehouse, the man who had been exiled from the capital came every night from another province. He played the flute beautifully and sang with a moving voice. By the sound she knew that the man was nearby.
Not knowing that the woman had been confined in the storehouse, the man wandered about playing the flute and singing, and then returned to the province to which he had been exiled.
This poem was composed by the man after he returned to his province without being able to meet the woman.
In the traditional identification of the tale, the man is :contentReference[oaicite:0]{index=0} and the woman is :contentReference[oaicite:1]{index=1}. Takako was in the position of receiving the emperor’s favor, and Narihira too was of imperial lineage as the son of Prince Abo. From the viewpoint of others, Narihira was pursuing a woman favored by the emperor, and thus their relationship must have been extremely precarious.
Although the man and woman who appear in this section, Narihira and Takako, were historical figures, if their real ages are applied to the story there is some difficulty: when Narihira began serving at court at the age of twenty-three, Takako would have been only six years old. For this reason, the episode is likely a fictional composition using the two figures—both known for their many romantic reputations—as its motif.
- Source
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Ise Monogatari
- Other
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