Irihi sasu mine ni tanabiku usugumo wa
mono omou sode ni iro ya magaeru

English Translation

The thin cloud trailing
over the peak where the sun
sinks—has it made its
color match the mourning sleeve
of one sunk deep in sorrow?

Meaning

The thin cloud trailing over the peak where the sun sinks—has it matched its color to the mourning sleeve of one sunk deep in sorrow?

Commentary

Part One: Usugumo

　After the death of the Chancellor, Fujitsubo fell gravely ill in her thirty-seventh year and died. Amid a grief that gripped the world, Genji, looking at the cherry before the Nijo residence, recalled the flower banquet where he had once danced the Waves of the Blue Sea before her. Murmuring a line of an old poem, "this year alone," and fearing to be noticed, he shut himself in the chapel and wept the day through. As the setting sun shone bright and the treetops stood out along the hills, a thin grey cloud trailing there, he was moved despite himself, though nothing else caught his eye, and spoke this poem. It was a murmur to himself where none could hear. This verse gives the chapter its name, Usugumo.

　"The peak where the sun sinks" lies before Genji's gaze turned toward the western paradise. "The trailing thin cloud" suggests too the smoke of Fujitsubo's pyre. "The mourning sleeve" is his own, sunk in sorrow. "Has it matched its color" lays the grey of mourning over the color of the cloud. Binding the sky and his own mourning sleeve in one color, the poem sets the grief of a man who has lost the love of his life as a murmur that never becomes voice.

Author

Murasaki Shikibu

Source

Genji Monogatari

Other

Irihi sasu mine ni tanabiku usugumo wa mono omou sode ni iro ya magaeru

Irihi sasu mine ni tanabiku usugumo wa
mono omou sode ni iro ya magaeru