If you start awake
at every water rail that
knocks upon the door here,
you may let in a moon that
is only there in passing

Meaning

If every knocking water rail startles you awake, you may let in a moon that is only passing by.

Commentary

Part One: Miotsukushi

　Genji answered her poem with this one, turning her reproach aside in jest: she must not open the door to just anyone. He knew perfectly well that she was not a woman to behave lightly, and the words meant nothing. She went on to say that he had told her at his departure for Suma not to gaze at a clouded sky, and that now he was back her sadness was the same.

　"Oshinabete" is indiscriminately. "Water rail" takes up her own word. "A moon in the upper air" plays the moon aloft against an inconstant man. Where she made the bird the occasion of a visit, he recasts it as knocking at any door at all, so the exchange turns on inverting the same image.

Author

Murasaki Shikibu

Source

Genji Monogatari

Other

The crane that cries out hidden away on an isle of no account here— today too there is no one to ask how it is with her
Were it not even for the water rail's knocking startling me awake, how should I let the moonlight into a house so ruined?
It is the pines here at Sumiyoshi that first bring the sadness on, when I set my mind upon what happened in the gods' age
Through the wandering of those rough waves, could I e'er set my mind aside from the Sumiyoshi god, or forget him even once?

If you start awake at every water rail that knocks upon the door here, you may let in a moon that is only there in passing

If you start awake
at every water rail that
knocks upon the door here,
you may let in a moon that
is only there in passing