If this were a world
where the blossoms of my home
could speak and answer,
how much I would ask of them
about the days that are gone
- Meaning
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If this were a world in which the blossoms of my old home could speak, how much I would ask them about the days that are gone.
- Commentary
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Volume Three: The Lesser Captain Returns to the Capital
Volume Three of the Tale of the Heike opens with an amnesty granted on the occasion of Empress Tokuko's confinement, by which two of the three exiles on Kikai-ga-shima—the Tanba Lesser Captain Naritsune and Taira no Yasuyori—are pardoned. Shunkan's name is not on the document, and the scene that follows is his, left alone on the shore, stamping his feet and crying out.
On his way to the capital Naritsune stopped where his father Narichika had died. At the Ariki retreat he raised earth, set up a fence, and even built a temporary shelter to make something like a grave, then chanted the Buddha's name and copied sutras for seven days and nights. On the last day he set up a large stupa, wrote on it the formula for the dead, and beneath the date signed himself "the filial son Naritsune." He would rather have stayed longer, he said—speaking as though to someone present—and took his leave of his father's spirit in tears.
On the sixteenth of the third month he reached Toba, where his father's villa, the Suhama Hall, stood. Once beautiful, it now had no one living in it and had been left to fall apart; moss covered the garden and no one came. Around the pond a spring wind raised small waves, and mandarin ducks and gulls moved happily over the water. His father had loved this view; he used to come and go by that door; that tree he had planted with his own hands—memory after memory rose up and sharpened his longing. Here and there in the garden spring flowers were in full bloom, as though they knew nothing of the master's absence.
Looking at them, Naritsune found himself murmuring first an old Chinese couplet—the peach and plum do not speak, and how many springs have passed; mist and haze leave no trace, and who lived here long ago—and then this poem. Yasuyori, beside him, was moved as well and wet the sleeve of his dyed robe.
The two lingered at the Suhama Hall until deep in the night. As happens in a ruined house, moonlight leaked in everywhere through the gaps in the old eaves. Even as dawn approached he could not hurry homeward; but thinking it unkind to keep those waiting with a carriage, he left in tears and returned to the capital.
The poem is a counterfactual: if it were so, then I would. He sets up a condition that cannot hold—that flowers should speak—and states what he would do inside it.
What he would ask about is "the days that are gone," meaning how his father lived here. No one is left who knew him directly. The house has fallen in and the people have gone. Only the flowers remain, and the flowers must have seen him, and they do not speak. The absence of anyone to ask takes the grammatical form of an impossible condition.
What draws the poem out is the Chinese couplet just before it. The peach and plum do not speak: taking that line as given, he goes on—then if it were a world where flowers did speak. Chinese verse and Japanese verse are linked here by a shared subject, and the passage shows clearly how the Tale of the Heike sets the two traditions side by side as equals.
furusato……one's former dwelling place; here Toba, where the father's villa stood.
mono iu……to speak.
yo nariseba……if it were a world in which.
ikani……how greatly.
towamashi……I would ask.
Suhama-dono……Narichika's villa at Toba.
tōri fugen……from the Chinese line that the peach and plum do not speak, yet a path forms beneath them of itself.
Ariki no bessho……the mountain temple on the Bizen–Bitchū border where Narichika died.
kōshi……a filial son; a term used in signing memorial offerings.
sotoba……a long narrow board set up as a memorial offering.
- Source
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Heike Monogatari
- Other
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