How unsure it is
and of whom am I to ask
by what means to learn
the beginning and the end
of this body I know not

Meaning

It weighs on me, and of whom am I to ask, when I know neither the beginning nor the end of this body of mine?

Commentary

Part Three: Niou Miya

　This is the tale after Genji has left the world. Two young men were spoken of together as the ones who carried on his light: the Third Prince, born to the reigning Emperor and the Akashi Empress, and the young lord born to the Third Princess. Kaoru had carried an indescribable fragrance in his body since birth, and the Retired Emperor Reizei favored him as though he were a son of his own, so that he rose steadily in rank. But something he had half heard as a child stayed with him, unclear and troubling from time to time, and there was no one he could ask. To let his mother see any sign of it would be to have her think that he knew, and that he could not bear. "What was it, and by what bond did I come to be born into a body with so restless a thought attached to it? I would have the understanding that Prince Zenkyo is said to have won by asking it of himself," he murmured, and then spoke this poem. It is a solitary poem with no one to answer it. From here his weariness with the world and his turn toward the Buddha's way deepen, and the tale moves on to Hashihime, where he goes to the Eighth Prince at Uji.

　"Obotsukana" is the state of not seeing a thing clearly and being troubled by it. The "-mashi" of "tare ni towamashi" carries hesitation, so that the line itself enacts the grief of having no one to ask. "Beginning" is how he came to be born, and "end" is where he is going and what comes after death: he says that he knows neither the circumstances of his birth nor his future. The narration has just said that there was no one he could ask, and the poem says the same thing in his own voice. Read together with the murmured words just before it, the content of the doubt stays hidden and only the impossibility of asking comes to the surface. This is the only poem placed in the Niou Miya chapter, and it is not an exchange but a solitary one. As the poem that marks Kaoru's starting point, it stands where the theme of the whole Uji sequence is set out in advance.

Author

Murasaki Shikibu

Source

Genji Monogatari

Other

How unsure it is and of whom am I to ask by what means to learn the beginning and the end of this body I know not

How unsure it is
and of whom am I to ask
by what means to learn
the beginning and the end
of this body I know not