Nogaru tomo tare ka kizaramu nureginu ame no shita ni shi sumamu kagiri wa

English Translation

Though one flees, who then
can keep from wearing it — the
robe soaked through with rain
so long as one goes on living
under this rain, this heaven

Meaning

Though a man flees, who can keep from wearing the soaked robe, so long as he goes on living under the rain — under this heaven?

Commentary

44 The Wet Robe

Someone asked the priest Eshū when he would be going up to Mount Hiei, and he answered "Noboriyuku yama no kumoi no tōkereba hi mo chikaku naru mono ni zo arikeru". Then, the trouble mentioned earlier having come upon him in the middle of his practice, he composed "Nogaru tomo tare ka kizaramu nureginu ame no shita ni shi sumamu kagiri wa". That is the whole of the section.
Eshū appears here for the third time, after the forty-second and forty-third sections: in the first he serves a woman and becomes the subject of talk, and in the second he writes a poem on wood shavings and departs for the mountains. Of the questioner the prose tells us nothing.
The setting is again the period of his practice. The talk of the forty-second section has followed him into it.
What prompted the poem was that trouble catching up with him.
The section closes with these two poems. Three sections in a row, the forty-second through the forty-fourth, are given to this one priest.

The first line means: even supposing one flees — a reference to his leaving the world for the mountains, with the concessive carrying on past it.
The wet robe of the third line is at once a garment soaked by rain and the standing expression for a charge one does not deserve, a false accusation. The whole poem turns on that word.
The word in the fourth line means both heaven and rain, so that living under heaven — that is, in this world — and standing out in the rain are the same condition.
The closing states the condition and stops there. That a robe gets wet in the rain is obvious; and so, he says, is being wrongly accused while one is alive. He does not deny the rumour; he treats it as unavoidable.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

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