人目なく荒れたる宿は橘の
花こそ軒のつまとなりけれ
花こそ軒のつまとなりけれ
- Roma-ji
-
Hitome naku aretaru yado wa tachibana no
hana koso noki no tsuma to narikere - English Translation
-
At a house gone wild
where no one comes to see it,
it is the orange
bloom alone that has become
the eaves' one reason to call
- Meaning
- At this neglected house where no one comes, it is the orange blossom alone that has given the eaves a reason to be visited.
- Commentary
-
Part One: Hanachirusato
The Reikeiden Consort answered his poem with this one. If he has come to a house no one visits, she says, it must be the orange blossom's doing—thanks and a statement of her own solitude in the same breath. Genji thought again that though she was never a woman who stood out, she was unlike the rest. Afterward he went quietly to the sister in the west wing, and the chapter closes there.
"No one comes to see it" describes how she has lived since the Emperor's death. "A house gone wild" is one no longer kept up. "The orange blossom" takes up his own word and returns it, as the exchange required. "Tsuma" is an edge—the eaves—and also plays on the sense of something that draws a person in. Glad of the visit and saying all the same that it was the flower that brought him, the poem shows her character exactly.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- The cuckoo's voice that comes calling and asking is the same voice, and yet how hard it is to be sure under a sky of long rains
- Finding the fragrance of the orange dear to it, the cuckoo has come, seeking out and calling on this village of fallen bloom
- Wondering whether it might resemble the smoke that burned at Toribe, I go to see the shore where the fisherfolk burn their salt
- Will the parting from the one already dead grow further still, unless it be in that cloud-realm where she rose and became the smoke