Though the years go by,
this bond I cannot forget—
that one word you spoke,
when you called me, so you did,
the parent of a parent.
- Meaning
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Though the years pass, this bond I cannot forget—that one word of yours, when you called me the parent of a parent.
- Commentary
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Part One: Asagao
While Genji sat listening to the Fifth Princess's old tales, an aged woman appeared with an old-fashioned cough. She was the Naishi no Suke, with whom Genji had trifled in his youth; now a nun, she had become the Princess's disciple and served the Buddha. Genji was startled that she still lived, past seventy. When he called out to her, likening himself to "a traveler lying ill with none to tend him," she remembered the past and answered, old as she was, with coquettish airs still. Seeing Genji sunk in wistful thought, her heart quickened, and she spoke this poem to him.
"Though the years pass" means even as time goes on. "This bond" points to her old tie with Genji, and "ko" plays on "child." "Cannot forget" is: cannot be forgotten. "The parent of a parent" recalls that Genji had once teasingly called her "grandmother" and the like—treated, that is, as an elder above a parent. "That one word" is the single word he spoke. It is a poem of the old woman's heart, still clinging to love, unable to forget the teasing bond she shared with Genji in her youth.
- Author
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Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
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Genji Monogatari
- Other
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Autumn at its end,
I cling tangled to the hedge
where the mist hangs low,
and barely there at all, I
fade—this morning-glory flower.
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While was it, that here,
tangled at the mugwort's root,
a village of falling
snow, a fence gone all to ruin—
this home I once knew so well?
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When my body changes,
wait and watch even then—
for was there ever,
in this world, a single case
of a child forgetting a parent?
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This heart that never
learned its lesson from your old
coldness—it is this
that, joined to your cruelty now,
weighs on me all the harder.