水まさる遠方の里人いかならむ
晴れぬ長雨にかき暮らすころ
晴れぬ長雨にかき暮らすころ
- Roma-ji
-
Mizu masaru ochikata no satobito ika naramu
harenu nagame ni kakikurasu koro - English Translation
-
How must it fare with
the one who lives in that far
village where the stream
is rising, in a season
of unclearing endless rain
- Meaning
- How must it fare with the one who lives in that far village where the stream is rising, in a season of endless rain that will not clear?
- Commentary
-
Part Three: Ukifune
About the same time as Niou's letter, this came to Uji from Kaoru. Anxious that the long rains were raising the Uji river, he thinks of the woman he has left in that distant place. The new house in the capital was going forward, and Kaoru, suspecting nothing, was waiting for the day he would bring her there. With these two letters before her Ukifune wrote her answers, and in the writing let something of her cornered mind escape.
Mizu masaru is the rising of a river, and is taken up again in her later mikasa masarite. "The one who lives in that far village" is Ukifune at Uji. Kakikurasu is to pass one's days in low spirits. It is a quiet poem of concern, and the shape of the chapter's tragedy is that this very concern is a cause of her suffering.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- More surely than snow that falls in confusion and freezes at the shore, it is I who shall melt out of the middle of the sky
- Even the clouds in that quarter where you are can no longer be seen: how forlorn a season, when the very sky is darkening
- When I take the name of this place to be my own, then the neighbourhood of Uji in Yamashiro grows harder still to live in
- I would make myself over into those rain clouds on the peak, that dark the sky and never clear, and float there, and so pass my life