我もまた憂き古里を荒れはてば
誰れ宿り木の蔭をしのばむ
誰れ宿り木の蔭をしのばむ
- Roma-ji
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Ware mo mata uki furusato o arehateba
tare yadorigi no kage o shinobamu - English Translation
-
If I too should go,
and this bitter old place fall
wholly into ruin,
who is there to remember
the shade of the lodging tree
- Meaning
- If I too should go, and this bitter old place fall wholly to ruin, who will be left to remember the shade of the lodging tree?
- Commentary
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Part Three: Kagero
Kaoru went to Uji after a long absence and drew from Ukon and Jiju the truth of how Ukifune had ended. Learning that she had drowned herself, and learning too what had passed between her and Niou, he blamed himself again. Looking back over the years in which he had lost three people in that place—the Eighth Prince, Oigimi, and now Ukifune—he spoke this to himself. Afterwards he wrote to Ukifune's mother and had the forty-ninth-day services performed with great care.
"The bitter old place" is the villa at Uji, with ushi, bitter, sounding in Uji. Yadorigi, the lodging tree, is the word he and Ben the nun exchanged in the chapter of that name, and stands here for himself as well, the man who has kept coming to the place. Once the people are gone, he says, no one will remember it: ruin and forgetting together. The poem retraces the words of the earlier Uji chapters, and stands where the sequence pauses to look back over itself.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
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Tachibana no kaoru atari wa hototogisu
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Aware shiru kokoro wa hito ni okurenedo
kazu naranu mi ni kietsutsu zo furu