Kimi o omoi namanamashi mi o yaku toki wa kemuri ōkaru mono ni zo arikeru

English Translation

When I think of you
and the fire takes this body
still green, still living
the smoke that rises from it
is a great deal of smoke, then

Meaning

When I think of you and the fire takes this body, still green and living, there turns out to be a great deal of smoke.

Commentary

60 The Body Burning

There was a woman known as the Lady of Gojō. She painted a picture of herself for a man, showing the woman in flames, with a great deal of smoke drawn around her, and sent it with this poem. The prose says no more, and the section consists of this single poem.
The Lady of Gojō takes her name from that quarter of the capital. Of the man the prose tells us nothing.
Neither time nor place is given. All we are told is that she painted the picture and sent it.
What prompted the poem was the sending of that picture. The poem went with it.
The section ends there; no response and no later event is recorded.

The word for thinking in the first line is also the word for fire, so that thinking of him and the fire that burns her are one word. Love as a fire was an old figure.
The body she calls green is a body still living, unseasoned; and green wood, when it burns, makes a great deal of smoke. That is the reasoning the poem rests on.
The closing says that the smoke is abundant, with an emphatic particle governing its verb, in the tone of something discovered.
The picture she sent showed a woman in flames with a great quantity of smoke around her. The poem supplies the reason for all that smoke. Picture and poem work as one thing, in the manner of the willow branch in the third section and the pampas grass in the seventeenth.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

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