Is it that he too
longs for those who are gone—the
cuckoo, who has come
following the fragrance of
the orange flowers, and cries
- Meaning
-
The cuckoo has come following the fragrance of the orange flowers and cries. Is it that he too longs for those who are gone?
- Commentary
-
The Initiates' Chapter: The Empress Takes Vows
Kenreimon-in, who had survived Dan-no-ura against her will, took shelter in a ruined monk's cell near Yoshida, at the foot of the Eastern Hills. It had stood empty for years: the garden was deep in weeds, hare's-foot fern grew along the eaves, the blinds were gone and the sleeping room open to view, and there was nothing to keep out rain or wind. Flowers gave their scent with no master to receive it; the moon came in night after night with no one to sit up and watch it. A woman who had passed her days in a polished hall behind brocade curtains was now parted from every living soul and shut in a crumbling cell. She was like a fish out of water, the tale says, like a bird gone from its nest.
On the first of the fifth month of the first year of Bunji she cut off her hair. Her preceptor was the holy man Insei of Chōraku-ji. For an offering she gave the late emperor's own robe. He had worn it until the last, and its scent had not yet faded. She had carried it all the way from the western provinces as a keepsake, meaning never to be parted from it in any world to come; but having nothing else to offer, and thinking too of his enlightenment, she brought it out in tears. The holy man received it without a word he could say, wrung out his dyed sleeve, and withdrew weeping. The robe was sewn into a banner and hung before the buddha at Chōraku-ji.
She had received the imperial decree at fifteen and been made consort at sixteen; at twenty-two she bore a prince, and when that prince came to the throne she was granted the title Kenreimon-in. She was twenty-nine that year. Her beauty had not faded, but there was no longer any use in kingfisher hairpins, and so at last she changed her appearance. She had turned from the world into the true way, and her grief did not end. The sight of her people going into the sea, the faces of the emperor and of the Nii-dono, she could not forget in any world; and thinking why a life light as dew should have lasted to see such things, she could not hold back her tears. The short nights of the fifth month she could not get through, and since she never dozed she did not even dream of the past.
As if to leave her something by which to remember, an orange tree—planted, perhaps, by the cell's former owner—was in fragrant flower near the eaves; and a mountain cuckoo called two or three times and passed. Remembering something long ago, the empress wrote this on the lid of her inkstone.
It rests on the old poem in the Kokinshū: catching the scent of orange flowers that wait for the fifth month, one smells the sleeves of someone long ago. That orange scent recalls the dead is an established convention.
She reads the cuckoo as having followed that scent: the bird too, then, must be longing for someone gone. She lends her own feeling to the bird and never says that she longs. Having taken vows, she cannot say it. What she cannot say, the bird says.
The cuckoo was also held to travel between this world and the next, and carries the suggestion of a messenger from the dead. To a woman longing for people who went into the sea, that bird came and cried.
This is the first poem of the Initiates' Chapter. The last poem she composes is addressed to the cuckoo as well. The chapter begins and ends with the same bird.
hototogisu……the cuckoo.
hana tachibana……orange blossom, held to recall the past.
ka wo tomete……seeking out the fragrance.
naku wa……the reason it cries.
mukashi no hito……those who are dead.
Kenreimon-in……Taira no Tokuko, daughter of Kiyomori and mother of Emperor Antoku.
Chōraku-ji……a temple in the Eastern Hills.
onnaoshi……an emperor's informal robe.
hata……a banner hung before an image.
Bunji 1……the year 1185.
- Source
-
Heike Monogatari
- Other
-