Tamakushige futatose awanu kimi ga mi o ake nagara ya wa aramu to omoishi

English Translation

A fine jewelled box
two years its lid has not met
two years apart, friend
who would have thought you still wear
the same vermilion as then

Meaning

Like the lid of a comb box that will not close, two years have passed without our meeting — and who would have thought you would still be in the same scarlet robe?

Commentary

4 The Jewelled Comb Box

The Governor-General of the West was appointed to lead the punitive force during the Sumitomo rising, and went down to his post while still holding the rank of Lesser Captain. He had served the court and had reached the year in which he might expect promotion to the fourth rank, so the New Year appointments weighed heavily on him. Hardly anyone came down from the capital, and those he asked gave contradictory answers: some said he had been promoted, others that he had not. While he was longing for something definite, a messenger arrived from the capital with a letter from Lord Kintada, Governor of Ōmi. He opened it in haste and gladness. After a great many other matters, and after the date, this poem stood at the very end. Reading it, he wept without measure. The news that he had not been promoted appeared nowhere in the prose of the letter; it was in the poem alone.
The Governor-General of the West is Ono no Yoshifuru, so named for the post he later held at the Dazaifu. The poet, Minamoto no Kintada, served as Governor of Ōmi and is counted among the thirty-six poetic immortals.
The Sumitomo rising was the revolt of Fujiwara no Sumitomo, and Yoshifuru's part in putting it down falls in the Tengyō years. The setting is his post, far from the capital. Since promotions were announced in the First Month, a man away on service had no way of learning the outcome.
What prompted the poem was simply the errand of conveying that outcome. Kintada said nothing of it in the prose and put a single poem at the end instead.
Yoshifuru read it and wept. The section closes on that sentence and on the remark that the news was nowhere but in the poem. The poem was later included in the Gosen-shū, where Yoshifuru's reply appears alongside it.

The jewelled comb box is a fixed epithet brought in for its lid, and the word for lid yields the word for two years.
The word for opening the box is also the word for scarlet, the colour of the robe worn by officials of the fifth rank. Promotion to the fourth would have changed the colour, and it has not changed. That is the substance of the poem.
The fourth line means: still in that same state, unaltered. The closing construction is rhetorical: who would have thought you would still be so. Two years apart, and you are still in scarlet — which conveys the failed promotion without stating it once.
The point of the episode is that the bad news is kept out of the prose entirely and packed into a single pun. That the recipient understood and wept is how we are told the message arrived.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

Other