Do not lay the blame
on a house overgrown with
creeper, for a hunting
robe that has come here parting
the dew of the autumn fields

Meaning

Do not blame this creeper-grown house for a hunting robe that has come parting the dew of the autumn fields.

Commentary

Part Three: Tenarai

　The nun's reply. It was not this house that soaked him, she says lightly, turning him aside. That day the Captain stayed on into the night, and the nun kept him there with further poems. The old mother nun played the koto and the Captain the flute, and it became a night of music such as the ruined mountain village had not known.

　"A hunting robe that has come parting the dew" is a robe wet from the fields, taking up his "lost my way in the dew." A house overgrown with creeper is a place gone to waste, said of their own dwelling in self-deprecation. Kakotsu is to lay one's own trouble at another's door. Telling him not to blame the house for the grief of his suit, she puts the suit aside.

Author

Murasaki Shikibu

Source

Genji Monogatari

Other

Do not lay the blame on a house overgrown with creeper, for a hunting robe that has come here parting the dew of the autumn fields

Do not lay the blame
on a house overgrown with
creeper, for a hunting
robe that has come here parting
the dew of the autumn fields