Is it that you are
not one to look with feeling
at the late-night moon,
that you will not stay the night
in a house so near the ridge
- Meaning
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Are you not one to look with feeling at the late-night moon, that you will not stay in a house so near the mountain ridge?
- Commentary
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Part Three: Tenarai
As the night wore on and the Captain made to leave, the nun held him back with this poem. It is in a house close under the ridge that the moon is best seen, she says, urging him to stay on the pretext of the view. She was set on bringing him and Ukifune together and made her chances this way, while Ukifune felt it only as a weight upon her.
"The late-night moon" is the moon well after dark, brought in as the test of a taste for such things. "A house near the ridge" stands where the moon's rising and setting can be watched close at hand. "Not one to look with feeling" is put as a half-rhetorical question, a light reproach for want of refinement. Hospitality and matchmaking are wrapped together in an elegant turn of phrase.
- Author
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Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
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Genji Monogatari
- Other
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