むらさきの色はかよへど藤の花
心にえこそかからざりけれ
心にえこそかからざりけれ
- Roma-ji
-
Murasaki no iro wa kayoedo fuji no hana
kokoro ni e koso kakarazarikere - English Translation
-
Though the purple runs
the same in her blood and mine
the wisteria
would not for all of that fall
trailing as my heart would have
- Meaning
- Though the same purple runs in her blood and mine, the wisteria would not fall trailing as my heart would have had it.
- Commentary
-
Part Three: Takekawa
The Fujiwara Chamberlain answered him with this. He was his mother's third son and the elder sister's full brother, and he was unhappy that she had gone to an aging Retired Emperor; his poem hints that the matter had never been in his hands. Being an honest young man, he was sorry for Kaoru too. From here the tale turns to the Chamberlain Lieutenant's torment and to the changes around the elder sister.
"Murasaki" is the purple that stands for kinship, and since wisteria is purple the color itself carries the fact that they are brother and sister. "Kakaru" is both the flower trailing from a branch and a thing hanging upon one's heart, that is, going as one wishes. The blood may run the same, he says, but his sister's fate was never his to arrange, so that he both sympathizes with Kaoru and admits his own regret. The two wisteria poems of this chapter gather the young men's disappointment into a single picture of pine and flower.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- In this living world dying is not ours to choose and so must I end without ever having heard that one word of yours to me
- If it were a thing that one could take in the hand the wisteria would I have ever seen the color that outdoes the pine
- Do you remember that night when we sang the song Takekawa through though there was no joint in it worth the keeping in the mind
- Time has flowed away and the hope you gave me then came to nothing there by Takekawa I learned that the world is a hard thing