Even the dead man
cannot have thought of it—that,
casting you aside,
he would leave you to put on
this haze of the evening
- Meaning
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Even the one who is gone can never have thought that, leaving you behind, he would set this evening haze upon your shoulders.
- Commentary
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Part Two: Kashiwagi
Yugiri answered the retired minister's poem with this one. Kashiwagi himself, he says, can never have imagined going before his father—and so he takes up the older man's grief. Yugiri had been Kashiwagi's closest friend; at the end he had been given a hint of what lay behind it all, and had been asked to look after the Fallen Leaf Princess. But he had not been told the whole of it, and the doubt stayed with him unresolved. It is carried on into the chapters that follow.
"The dead man" is Kashiwagi. "Casting you aside" is going on ahead and leaving a parent behind. "This evening haze" takes up the minister's robe of haze, keeping the mourning dress and adding the dimness of dusk. "Set upon your shoulders" is to make another wear it. Receiving the older man's words exactly and moving the grief from the father to the son who is gone, the poem states a sorrow with no one left to blame.
- Author
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Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
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Genji Monogatari
- Other
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