雁がゐし苗代水の絶えしより
映りし花の影をだに見ず
映りし花の影をだに見ず
- Roma-ji
-
Kari ga ishi nawashiromizu no taeshi yori
utsurishi hana no kage o dani mizu - English Translation
-
Since the paddy water
where the geese used to gather
ran dry, I have not
so much as seen the shadow
of the flower it once held
- Meaning
- Since the seedbed water where the geese used to gather ran dry, I have not so much as seen the shadow of the flower it once held.
- Commentary
-
Part Two: Maboroshi
The Akashi lady answered Genji's poem with this one. Since Murasaki no Ue died, she says, she has not even seen him—a quiet way of saying that he no longer comes. Conscious all her life of her low birth, she had served long at Rokujo, and it is like her not to put a grievance directly. Genji went on deepening his wish to leave the world while spending his days calling on his women and talking of the past.
"Where the geese used to gather" takes up his own goose. "Seedbed water" is the water standing in a rice bed, and here it is Murasaki no Ue. "Ran dry" is coming to an end. "The shadow of the flower it once held" is what the water reflected—Genji himself. If the water is gone there is nothing to hold a reflection: a figure that follows its own logic, and it says exactly what Murasaki had been between the two of them.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- If I go now, shall I leave it to run wild in the end—the fence of this spring garden where the one who is gone had set her heart
- Weeping, I have come back again after all—this borrowed world of ours is nowhere, in the end, a land that goes on without change
- On this day at least, when the summer robes have been cut and changed anew, will the old remembering not come forward of itself
- From this day, when I change into something thin as a feathered robe, this world of the cast-off cicada grows sadder to me by far