Kamogawa no se ni fusu ayu no io torite nede koso akase yume ni mietsu ya

English Translation

Taking the sweetfish
as they lie asleep in the
shallows of Kamo
I stayed awake the whole night
Did I appear in your dreams

Meaning

Taking the sweetfish as they lay asleep in the Kamo shallows, I stayed awake all night. Did I appear in your dreams?

Commentary

70 Station After Station

When the Lady of the Palace Guards sent arbutus fruit to Tadafumi, who had gone down east, she worked the name of the fruit into the poem "Michinoku no Adachi no yama mo morotomo ni koeba wakare no kanashikaraji o". She was living in the house by the embankment, and when she caught sweetfish and sent them she composed "Kamogawa no se ni fusu ayu no io torite nede koso akase yume ni mietsu ya". After the man had gone down to Michinoku he sent several affectionate letters by messenger; then word came that he had fallen ill on the road and died, and she was overcome with grief. After she had heard this, a letter of his, written with great feeling, was brought to her by a messenger from the post station at Shinozuka. She was much distressed and asked when it had been written; the messenger said it had been a long while in coming. She then composed "Shinozuka no umaya umaya to machiwabishi kimi wa munashiku nari zo shinikeru", and wept. The man who had died had been admitted to court service as a boy, under the childhood name Daishichi; on coming of age he served in the chamberlains' office, and had gone to Michinoku in his father's train, with the additional charge of conveying gold to the capital. That is the whole of the section.
Fujiwara no Tadafumi had gone down to Michinoku as commander of the expedition and appears in the sixty-ninth section. The man attached to the Lady of the Palace Guards was his son, who composes the poem about the hunting robe there. She appears repeatedly in this book; the tenth section tells how she sold the house by the embankment and moved to Awata. Shinozuka was a post station on the road east.
The setting is her house by the embankment of the Kamo river, with the water close at hand.
What prompted the poem was her catching sweetfish and sending them east. It went with the fish.
From here the section moves to the news of his death.

The sweetfish lie in the shallows of the river; her house on the embankment is what makes the scene possible.
The word in the third line means both a fish and the act of sleeping, so that catching fish and catching them asleep are the same phrase.
She stayed awake all night, with an emphatic particle governing the verb. Sweetfish were taken by torchlight through the night, so that the sleeplessness of the work and the sleeplessness of longing coincide.
The closing asks whether she appeared in his dreams. A woman who did not sleep asks whether the sight of her reached him — a letter carried by a gift of fish.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

Other