With the brine-wet one
to guide me along the sea
roads as I go, how
I would like to seek it out—
that rush-thatched hut on the beach
- Meaning
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With you, wet with brine, to guide me along the sea roads, how I would like to go and see that rush-thatched hut on the beach.
- Commentary
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Part Two: Wakana Jo
Hearing the nun's poem, the Akashi Consort added this one. Moved to tears by what her grandmother told her, she says she would like once to see the Akashi shore where she was born. Taken into Murasaki no Ue's keeping almost at birth and raised in the residences of the capital, she took her own origins as her own for the first time only now. The exchange marks a turn in the long hardship of the Akashi family, and in the Third Month of the following year she safely bore the Heir Apparent a son.
"The brine-wet one" takes up her grandmother's phrase and means the weeping nun. "Sea roads" are the ways over water and "guide" is one who leads. "Rush-thatched hut" is a rough shelter roofed with sedge, standing for the dwelling on the Akashi shore. To ask her grandmother to lead her to the place of her birth is not mere courtesy; it is a wish to look for her own root. The poem carries the exchange's words forward and at the same time turns the subject from the past toward herself.
- Author
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Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
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Genji Monogatari
- Other
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