わが宿をいつかは君がならし葉の
ならし顔には折りにおこする
ならし顔には折りにおこする
- Roma-ji
-
Waga yado o itsuka wa kimi ga narashiba no narashigao ni wa ori ni okosuru
- English Translation
-
When was it that you
grew so familiar with my
house — that, like the oak's
own name, you should send for a
branch with such an easy face
- Meaning
- When was it you grew so familiar with my house, that you should send for a branch of it with such an easy face?
- Commentary
-
68 The God Who Guards the Leaves
The lord of the Biwa mansion sent to Toshiko's house, where a kashiwa oak was growing, asking leave to have a branch broken off. She had a branch broken, wrote a poem, and sent it with the branch: "Waga yado o itsuka wa kimi ga narashiba no narashigao ni wa ori ni okosuru". The lord of Biwa's reply was "Kashiwagi ni hamori no kami no mashikeru o shirade zo orishi tatari nasaru na". That is the whole of the section.
The lord of the Biwa mansion is Fujiwara no Nakahira, so called from the residence where he lived. Toshiko was the wife of Fujiwara no Chikane and appears in the sixty-sixth and sixty-seventh sections. The kashiwa oak was held to house the god who guards the leaves.
The setting is Toshiko's house, where a kashiwa oak grew in the garden.
What prompted the poem was the messenger from the Biwa mansion asking leave to break off a branch. She had one broken and wrote this to go with it.
He answered with a poem of his own, and the exchange closes the section. This poem was later included in the Gosen-shū.
The opening asks when he became so familiar, in a tone that carries its own answer: he did not.
The word for the oak leaf in the third line supplies, by its sound, the phrase that follows. The same sound is struck twice in succession.
That phrase means the face of someone quite at home, a manner without ceremony, and it is what she objects to in the way he asked.
The closing names the sending for a branch. She gives him the branch and takes issue with the asking. Complying and adding a word about it is the same movement as the willow branch in the third section, where gift and poem work as one.
- Source
- Yamato Monogatari
- Other
-
- Deep in the night the rice-bearing bird was calling and I — I took it for the sound of your hand at my door, and went to answer
- I had thought this house had no gap in it, so full was it of my thoughts of you — yet tonight's rain finds no part of it that holds dry
- I did not know that the god who guards the leaves was dwelling in the oak and so I broke the branch off May no curse come of it, please
- Night upon night the longing in me grows — this robe for the hunt turns out to be a thing that spends the whole of a man's heart on it