Sato wa iu yama ni wa sawagu shirakumo no sora ni hakanaki mi to ya narinamu

English Translation

In the villages
they talk; up in the hills there
is uproar; and I
like white cloud, am I to be
an empty, unmoored body

Meaning

In the villages they talk of it; up in the hills there is uproar. Am I to become like white cloud, a body adrift in empty air?

Commentary

42 The Empty Sky of White Clouds

A priest called Eshū was serving a certain woman as her exorcist when talk began to circulate about them, and he composed "Sato wa iu yama ni wa sawagu shirakumo no sora ni hakanaki mi to ya narinamu". He also sent her "Asaborake waga mi wa niwa no shimo nagara nani o tane ni te kokoro oikemu". That is the whole of the section.
Eshū was a priest. An exorcist was a monk who performed rites of healing and protection. He appears again in the forty-third and forty-fourth sections, where he is also called a holy man. Of the woman the prose tells us only that he served her in that capacity.
The setting is the period of his service to the woman as her exorcist. Talk had spread in the village and in the hills alike, and his standing as a priest was in danger.
What prompted the poem was that talk.
A second poem, sent to the woman, follows in the same section. In the forty-third he gives up his lodging and goes off into the deep mountains.

The opening sets village against mountain: the world of ordinary people and the world of priests, with the talk running through both.
The white cloud of the third line leads into the word for sky, which is also the word for what is empty and vain.
So he becomes a body adrift in empty air — a man whom rumour has left with nowhere to stand, laid over a cloud.
The closing asks whether that is what he is to become. He neither denies the rumour nor admits it; he speaks only of what it will make of him.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

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