Even if I turn
to smoke in a sky where there
is no way to go,
I will not rise and leave the
place where the one I love is
- Meaning
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Even if I turn to smoke in a sky with nowhere to go, I will not rise and leave the place where the one I love is.
- Commentary
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Part Two: Kashiwagi
Seeing the answer he had not expected, Kashiwagi wept and added this poem. It was the last he ever wrote. Soon afterward the Princess bore her son, and in the weakness that followed she begged to be allowed to take vows. Suzaku came down from the hills in secret one night, went to the Rokujo residence, and over Genji's objections had her shorn on the spot. When word of it reached Kashiwagi he sank further, entrusted the future of his own wife to Yugiri when Yugiri came to see him, and died as quietly as a bubble going out.
"No way to go" is having no fixed direction, and it describes the smoke. "Smoke in a sky" is the pyre's smoke rising. "The place where the one I love is" is where the Third Princess is. "Will not rise and leave" is refusing to go, and the verb belongs to the smoke that has run through all three poems. To say flatly that he will not leave even in death goes past the etiquette of an exchange into attachment itself, and it prepares the ground for his spirit's appearance later in the tale.
- Author
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Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
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Genji Monogatari
- Other
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