No need to go seek
the mountain borne on the turtle—
here, aboard this boat,
let us leave behind us the name
of those who never grow old
- Meaning
-
There is no need to go seeking the mountain borne on the turtle's back; here, aboard this boat, let us leave behind the name of those who never grow old.
- Commentary
-
Part One: Kocho
This too was made during the boating. The young women were so taken up that they forgot where they were going and where they had come from—no wonder, the narrator says, on such a face of water. As the light began to fail and the piece called Oshoo came very beautifully across to them, they were rowed, with much regret, up to the fishing pavilion and set ashore. Its furnishings were plain but elegant, and the young women of all the quarters, each dressed as finely as she could manage, made a showing no worse than brocade with flowers worked into it.
"The mountain borne on the turtle" is Horai, carried on the back of a great tortoise, as in the Liezi—the abode of the undying. "Never grow old aboard the boat" reverses a line in Bai Juyi's "The Sea Is Wide," where the boys and girls sent to seek Horai grow old aboard their ship. There is no need to go looking for the immortal mountain; it is here, on this water—so the spring garden of the Rokujo estate is made Horai itself. Where the two preceding poems drew on real poetic places, this one draws on Chinese legend, and the play widens further.
- Author
-
Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
-
Genji Monogatari
- Other
-