Under a strange sky,
in the closeness of this hut
of packed earth and thatch,
how you must be longing for
the home you have left behind
- Meaning
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Under a strange sky, in the closeness of this poor earthen hut, how you must be longing for the home you have left.
- Commentary
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Volume Ten: Down the Sea Road
By Yoritomo's order, Shigehira set out for the east on the tenth of the third month, with Kajiwara Kagetoki attending him.
Passing Shinomiya-gawara, he thought of Semimaru, who had played the lute there with his mind cleared by the wind off the barrier. Over the Seta bridge with the horses' hooves ringing, past Noji where the larks go up, spring had come again to the waves at Shiga and to the hazed slopes of Kagamiyama. Past the boarded eaves of the ruined barrier at Fuwa, past the tide flats at Narumi, and as they went east his thoughts flew back endlessly to the sky over the capital.
One evening they stopped at Ikeda in Tōtōmi, at the house of the woman who kept the post station, a daughter of Kumano called Jijū. It seems to have moved her greatly that a man who had once shone at court should be lodged, a prisoner, in so rustic a place. She composed a poem and sent it to him. This is it.
Haniu no koya is a hut daubed with earth, the dwelling of the poor. She belittles her own house and, in the same breath, reads his longing for the capital out of its meanness.
It is a courtesy. But saying that he must be longing for the capital only makes sense if he cannot go back to it. She says it to a man being taken east under guard. Sympathy doubles as the plain statement of his case.
Shigehira praised the poem as gracefully done and asked who had written it. It is a scene in which a poem crosses rank: a woman of a post station and a captured nobleman face each other as equals on the one ground of verse.
"Down the Sea Road" is famous as a michiyuki, a passage that strings together the poetic place names of the Tōkaidō from Shinomiya-gawara to Kamakura. This exchange is set inside that journey.
tabi no sora……away from home, on a journey.
haniu no koya……a poor hut daubed with earth.
ibusesa……stuffiness; cheerlessness.
furusato……one's home; here the capital.
ikani……how greatly.
koishikaruran……must be longing.
chōja……the woman who ran a post station and its women.
Ikeda no shuku……a post station in Tōtōmi.
Jijū……a daughter of Kumano; later called the finest on the sea road.
michiyuki……a passage listing place names along a journey.
- Source
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Heike Monogatari
- Other
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