How frail it all is—
once the master has gone off
beyond the cloud line,
the house he lived in goes up
and rises away as smoke
- Meaning
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How frail it is—once the master has gone off beyond the clouds, the house he lived in rises away as smoke.
- Commentary
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Volume Seven: The Flight of the House
Koremori and the five other brothers of the Komatsu line caught up with the main body near the riverbed at Mutsuda in Yodo with about a thousand horse. Munemori, unable to hide his relief, asked what had kept them. Koremori said his small children would not let go of him and he had been trying to calm them. Then why did you not bring them, Munemori asked; and Koremori, darkly, said only that when he considered it, the future did not look to him very promising.
Those leaving the capital that day were Munemori, Tokitada, Norimori, Tomomori, Tsunemori, Kiyomune, Shigehira, Koremori, Sukemori, Michimori, Nobumoto, Tokizane, Kiyotsune, Arimori, Tadafusa, Tsunemasa, Yukimori, Tadanori, Noritsune, Tomoakira, Morotoshi, Kiyofusa, Kiyosada, Tsunetoshi, Masaakira, Narimori, Atsumori, and the clerics Zenshin, Nōen, Chūkai, and Yūen—some seven thousand horse in all, men who had barely come through the fighting in the east and the north.
At Sekido-in in Yamazaki, Tokitada set down the emperor's palanquin and bowed toward Otokoyama, praying to Hachiman that the sovereign and all of them might return to the capital. Looking back at the sky over the city they had just left, they saw only haze, and here and there a thread or two of smoke rising. It came from their own mansions, which they had fired themselves.
Norimori murmured this poem.
Kumoi is the sky and also the palace; here it means going far from the capital.
The poem states a consequence—when the master goes, the house burns—but in fact they set the fires themselves, so that the enemy should not have the buildings. From a distance that fire is only smoke going up.
The opening lament, "how frail it all is," probably comes from catching himself watching that smoke as though it were someone else's. When people leave, houses vanish; that is the way of the world and no one's fault. By looking at a house he burned with his own hand as an instance of the way of the world, he barely holds himself together.
A tale that opened by declaring that the proud do not endure has run through six generations of splendor and here turns the family mansions into smoke. That single line makes visible the subject announced by the bell of Gion.
hakanashi na……how frail, how fleeting.
aruji……the master of a house.
kumoi……the sky; the palace; here, far away.
yado……a dwelling, a mansion.
keburi……smoke.
Sekido-in……a lodging at Yamazaki.
Otokoyama……the hill of the Iwashimizu Hachiman Shrine.
Mutsuda-gawara……a riverbed near Yodo.
Norimori……Taira no Norimori, younger brother of Kiyomori.
- Source
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Heike Monogatari
- Other
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