The bamboo shoot I
planted deep within my hedge—
is it to grow up
and go its own way from here,
into a life of its own?
- Meaning
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The bamboo shoot I planted deep inside my hedge—must it grow up and part from me, to a life of its own?
- Commentary
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Part One: Kocho
Genji told Tamakazura that it was too soon to declare herself to her true father, the Minister of the Center, and better to wait until she was suitably settled; and he spoke of the Prince of War's roving temper and of the Commander's domestic troubles, and of his own difficulty in choosing for her. Then he asked her to think of him in her mother's place. Embarrassed, she answered mildly that from her earliest years she had grown used to thinking of parents as something she did not have. He allowed the justice of it and said that she should take the later parent for her own and see for herself how far from ordinary his devotion was. What he truly felt he could not say; he let hints of it into his talk from time to time, and she noticed nothing. Sighing to himself, he was on his way out when the young bamboo before her rooms, grown green and supple and swaying, caught his eye; and stopping, he lifted the blind and addressed her with this poem.
"Mase" is a hedge—here the Rokujo estate. The bamboo shoot is Tamakazura. "A life of its own" plays "yo," a life or a union between man and woman, against "yo," the joint of a bamboo, which belongs to the plant's imagery. "Grow up and part" is to be reared and then go away. The regret that the shoot he planted must one day move elsewhere sounds like a foster father's, but it is the other face of a lover's unwillingness to give her to any man. There had been young bamboo, too, at the house in Gojo where he spent his nights with Yugao, so that the old days lie across this planting. Unable to say what he means, he entrusts it to the garden—which is exactly the bind he is in at this point.
- Author
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Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
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Genji Monogatari
- Other
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