The rush-thatched hut where
I have passed these years will fall
to ruin—shall I
send my body along with
the sad waves, the way they turn?

Meaning

The rush-thatched hut where I have passed these years will fall to ruin; shall I let my body go with the sad waves, the way they turn back?

Commentary

Part One: Akashi

　Akashi no Kimi answered his poem with this one, setting down exactly what was in her mind, and it made Genji weep openly. Behind it stands the charge her father had laid on her since the Wakamurasaki chapter—that if her destiny failed she should go into the sea—so that the poem hints at drowning. Its weight settles the shape of her character from here on.

　"The rush hut of many years" is her own home, spoken of with self-deprecation; "tomaya" is a hut thatched with sedge. "Uki nami" is a floating wave with the word for wretched inside it. "The way they turn back" is the direction of the retreating water, and also the capital Genji is returning to. "Tagufu" is to send one thing along beside another. Letting her body go with the waves suggests drowning, so that the gravest thing in the poem is the thing never said outright.

Author

Murasaki Shikibu

Source

Genji Monogatari

Other

The rush-thatched hut where I have passed these years will fall to ruin—shall I send my body along with the sad waves, the way they turn?

The rush-thatched hut where
I have passed these years will fall
to ruin—shall I
send my body along with
the sad waves, the way they turn?