We did not lie down
unguarded, root beside root—
then why should the young
grass wear the look of one who
has something to be tangled about?
- Meaning
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We did not lie down together, root beside root—then why should the young grass wear the look of one who has something to be tangled about?
- Commentary
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Part One: Kocho
He told her that even between strangers the world allows such things, and that after so long an intimacy there could be nothing hateful in this much; and he promised to press her no further. Aware that he had been abrupt and unsteady, and afraid her women would wonder, he left before the night was far gone. She, who knew nothing at all of what passes between men and women, lay wretched at the thought that the world held such surprises, and her women, seeing her out of sorts, did not know what to make of it. When Hyobu and the others whispered that not even a true parent would have taken such care of her, her loathing only grew, and she felt her own life a misery. Early the next morning a letter came, on white paper of a deliberately plain and businesslike look, very beautifully written, and it held this poem.
It draws on the forty-ninth episode of the Tales of Ise, where a brother sends his sister a poem about the young grass that looks so fit to lie down on, and her reply. "Ne" plays on lying down and on the root of a plant, and root belongs to the young grass. The young grass is Tamakazura. "The look of one who has something" is an air of having been through something; "musubohoru" is to be knotted, to be low in spirits, again belonging to the root. Nothing happened, he says, so why be so downcast?—a brazen line, and it is the brazenness that makes the letter so unpleasant. She wrote back on thick Michinoku paper only that she was unwell and would not reply. At her curtness he smiled, feeling that here at least was something he might reproach her for; a troublesome heart indeed, as the narrator says.
- Author
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Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
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Genji Monogatari
- Other
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