昇りにし雲居ながらもかへり見よ
われ飽きはてぬ常ならぬ世に
われ飽きはてぬ常ならぬ世に
- Roma-ji
-
Noborinishi kumoi nagara mo kaerimi yo
ware akihatenu tsune naranu yo ni - English Translation
-
Even from above
the clouds you have risen to,
turn and look back here:
I have had my fill at last
of this world where nothing holds
- Meaning
- Even from above the clouds you have risen to, turn and look back here: I have had my fill at last of this world where nothing holds.
- Commentary
-
Part Two: Minori
Genji answered the Akikonomu Empress's poem with this one. He calls to the woman who is gone, asking her to look back at him from above the clouds, and says outright that nothing here holds him any longer. It has the shape of a reply and is in fact addressed to Murasaki, which says a good deal about the state he is in. The chapter ends with him coming to the close of the year in his grief, and the tale moves on to the last chapter of his life.
"The clouds you have risen to" is where the smoke of the pyre went, that is, where she is. "Turn and look back here" is a call to the dead. "Had my fill" carries the sound of the word for autumn and so takes up the Empress's season. "This world where nothing holds" is the impermanent world. A poem written as a reply drifts, as it goes, toward another addressee altogether, and the emptiness Genji is left with is there in the language itself.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- This wetness I can not tell as of then or now, and it is autumn nights themselves, taken all in all, that are hard to bear at all
- Was it that she found the fields withering away hard to look upon, that the one who is gone left no part of her heart in autumn
- At my house there is no one left to make much of the blossoms—for what, then, has the spring come looking and found its way here at all
- Then all my coming here in search of the fragrance is for nothing, and you will call it no more than an ordinary flower-viewing