Michinoku no Adachigahara no Kurozuka ni oni komoreri to kiku wa makoto ka

English Translation

In Michinoku
at Kurozuka, out on
Adachi's wide plain
they say an ogre is shut
up there — can this be true, then

Meaning

At Kurozuka, out on the plain of Adachi in Michinoku, they say an ogre lies shut away. Can that be true?

Commentary

58 Kurozuka

While Taira no Kanemori was in Michinoku, a man descended from the Kan'in prince was living at a place called Kurozuka, and Kanemori teased his daughters as country ogres, composing "Michinoku no Adachigahara no Kurozuka ni oni komoreri to kiku wa makoto ka" and the like. In time he asked for one of the daughters in marriage, but her father said only that she was still very young and that when the proper time came — . Kanemori had to return to the capital, and likening the girl to the yellow roses of Ide he composed "Hanazakari sugi mo ya suru to kawazu naku Ide no yamabuki ushirometashi mo". As for Kurozuka: there was a wife of Lord Tsunetada who worked the name of the hot spring called the Natori Bath into a poem, and she it was who was mistress of Kurozuka. When she composed "Ōzora no kumo no kayoiji mite shi kana tori nomi yukeba ato wa ka mo nashi", Kanemori heard it and composed in the same manner "Shiogama no ura ni wa ama ya taenikemu nado sunadori no miyuru toki naki". As for the girl on whom Kanemori had set his heart, what he had feared came to pass. She came up to the capital with another man; and Kanemori, not knowing it, wrote asking why she had not let him know she had come. She sent back the very poem he had made about the yellow roses of Ide, saying it was his present. Understanding at last that he had been refused, he composed "Toshi o hete nurewataritsuru koromode o kyō no namida ni kuchi ya shinuramu" and sent it. That is the whole of the section.
Taira no Kanemori is one of the thirty-six poetic immortals; he exchanges poems with the Lady of Hyōe in the fifty-sixth section and with the daughter of Taira no Nakaki in the fifty-seventh. The man at Kurozuka was a descendant of the Kan'in prince, and his daughters are the ones Kanemori teased. Of Lord Tsunetada's wife the prose says only that she was mistress of Kurozuka.
The setting is Kurozuka in Michinoku, during Kanemori's time in that province.
What prompted the poem was his teasing of the daughters of the house there as country ogres.
Afterwards he asked for one of them in marriage, and the section goes on from there to the poem about the yellow roses of Ide. This poem was later included in the Shūi-shū.

Three place names are stacked one on another, narrowing from the province to the plain to the single spot.
What is shut away there is an ogre; the verb means to keep indoors and out of sight.
The closing asks whether what one hears is true. What it actually points at is the daughters of the house, girls who keep indoors, made into ogres by way of a joke.
For a piece of teasing the roll of place names carries considerable weight, and it is on this poem that the later legend of the ogre woman of Adachigahara was built. From this joke the section goes on to a proposal of marriage and its failure.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

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