On the pond's mirror,
where the thin ice has melted
and the water clears,
there stand side by side two forms
the world can show no like of
- Meaning
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On the mirror of the pond, where the thin ice has melted away, two forms stand side by side that the world can show no like of.
- Commentary
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Part One: Hatsune
In the First Month of Genji's thirty-sixth year, the Rokujo estate woke to a New Year's sky without a cloud in it. Before the spring quarter above all, the scent of plum blew together with the perfumes within the blinds, so that one might have thought it the land of a living Buddha. The women were keeping the tooth-hardening rite, and had even sent for the mirror-cakes, and were making merry over the observances of the season, when Genji looked in on them and they drew back in confusion. He laughed and offered to speak a blessing of his own. Toward evening, dressed with particular care for his New Year calls on the ladies, he said that the women's play that morning had made him envious, and that he would show Murasaki the mirror-cake himself; and mixing jests into his felicitations, he made this poem. That day the first of the year fell on the Day of the Rat—a day fit for wishing a thousand springs.
"Usu-gori" is thin ice. Melted away, the clear surface of the pond is likened to a mirror, and with it the mirror-cake of the New Year rite. "Kage" is a form reflected in water. "Of which the world has no like" praises the two figures the water holds. Though a poem of New Year congratulation, it entrusts the whole shape of a long marriage to that single point—two shadows lying side by side on the water. Mirror-cake, Day of the Rat, a thousand springs: the furnishings of the season melt into the scene of the spring quarter itself.
- Author
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Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
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Genji Monogatari
- Other
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