Had I not come here
to seek the place where they stand,
those two cedar trees,
would I have found you at all
beside the old river's edge?
- Meaning
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Had I not come to seek out the place where the two cedars stand, could I ever have found you here beside the old river?
- Commentary
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Part One: Tamakazura
In the capital the party had taken a poor lodging in the Ninth Ward, among market women and traders, and autumn found them with no one to turn to. At the Vice Governor's urging they discharged their vows at the Iwashimizu Hachiman Shrine, and then set out for Hatsuse. On the way, at the inn at Tsubaichi, they fell in by chance with Ukon, who had once served Yugao—and who had been praying all these years to the Kannon of Hatsuse that she might find the lost girl. Through three days of retreat Ukon talked with the nurse's people of all the years between and told them she was now in Genji's household. As they were leaving the temple, looking down from the height on the pilgrims below and on the Hatsuse River running past, she made this poem.
"The two cedars" are a noted sight at Hatsuse, and the poem draws on the old sedoka: "By the old river at Hatsuse stand two cedars; after the years, may we meet again—two cedars standing there." Her gratitude—that without this pilgrimage there would have been no meeting—is set together with the Kannon's power. "Furu-kawa," the old river, is another name for the Hatsuse and sounds "furu," old, so that it carries the long years before the meeting. "Would I have found you" is a rhetorical question: could I have? No, I could not. The words she adds, "and at so glad a crossing," quote another old poem about praying at the Hatsuse for a glad meeting, so that quotation is laid on quotation to express her joy.
- Author
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Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
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Genji Monogatari
- Other
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Out on a sea road
whose far end cannot be seen
we have set our boat,
and this body of mine drifts,
floating wherever the wind wills
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Set against the beat
of a heart that pounds and pounds
with all its trouble,
even the Sea of Thunder
proved no hindrance to us at all
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Of the Hatsuse,
of its swift past, I know nothing—
yet at this meeting,
this glad crossing of today,
even my body flows away
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Though you do not know,
ask, and you will come to know:
like the sedge that grows
in the inlet of Mishima,
these threads of ours will not break