The one who has passed
and the one who parts today
go by two separate roads,
and where either of them goes
I know not, this autumn dusk
- Meaning
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The one who is gone and the one who leaves today take two different roads, and where either of them goes I cannot tell, on this autumn evening.
- Commentary
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Part One: Yugao
On the day Utsusemi went down to Iyo, Genji carried both his grief for Yugao and this second parting at once. That autumn had been for him a season of one loss after another, and this poem closes it. The Yugao chapter ends here, and the tale moves on to Wakamurasaki.
"The one who has passed" is Yugao, dead; "the one who parts today" is Utsusemi, leaving the capital; the two women stand side by side in a single poem. "Two roads" are the paths that diverge, and two partings of quite different kinds—by death and in life—are gathered under the same phrase, "where they go I do not know." "Aki no kure" holds both an autumn evening and the end of autumn, so that the season's close coincides with the close of a section of the tale. It ends quietly a chapter covering Genji's seventeenth summer through the tenth month.
- Author
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Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
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Genji Monogatari
- Other
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