Were I one to be
drawn onward by a flower's
fragrance as it blows
would I have let the message
the wind brought me pass me by
- Meaning
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Were I a man to be drawn on by the scent of a flower, would I have let the word the wind brought me pass me by?
- Commentary
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Part Three: Kobai
Niou stopped the boy at the palace, and the boy gave him the branch of red plum. Smiling, and saying that an answer after he had complained first would have been nothing much, he looked at it without setting it down. The branch, the clusters, the color and the scent were all out of the ordinary. People say that the red plum loses its scent to its color and falls short of the white, he said, but this one has come out splendidly in both; and since it was a flower he had always loved, he made much of it, so that the sending of it was not wasted. That night he kept the boy with him and would not let him go to the Heir Apparent. When he asked why the mistress of the flower had not gone to the Heir Apparent, the boy said he had heard she was to be shown to one who knew what flowers were worth. Niou gathered that the Dainagon wanted to give him a daughter, but his own heart was set elsewhere, and he gave no clear reply. The next morning, as the boy was leaving, he handed him this poem as though it were nothing much. Seeing it, the Dainagon said it was a galling sort of answer.
The scent of the flower stands for Naka no Kimi and takes up the garden plum of the other poem. "The word the wind brought" answers "the wind that bears the scent," and it is also the phrasing of the old Kokinshu poem the Dainagon had drawn on. The "seba ... mashi" construction supposes what is not the case, so that to say "were I one to be drawn" is to say that he is not such a man. He refuses, but he picks up every word the other had used, and so gives no offense. The refusal is wrapped in a supposition and can be read on the surface as modesty, which shows how practiced he is. In fact his heart is set not on Naka no Kimi but on the Lady of the Chamber, his stepdaughter, and that discrepancy carries into the latter half of the chapter.
- Author
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Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
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Genji Monogatari
- Other
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