Yado chikaku utsushite ueshi kai mo naku machidō ni nomi miyuru hana kana

English Translation

For all the trouble
of moving it in close by
the house, it has come
to nothing: this is a tree
I do nothing but wait for

Meaning

For all the trouble of moving it close to the house, it has come to nothing. This is a tree I do nothing but wait for.

Commentary

74 Nothing but Waiting

The same Middle Counsellor of Tsutsumi moved a cherry that had been standing at some distance from the main hall of his residence to a place close by, and when it looked as though it might die he composed this poem. The prose says no more, and the section consists of this single poem.
The Middle Counsellor of Tsutsumi is Fujiwara no Kanesuke, one of the thirty-six poetic immortals, who appears in the seventy-first and seventy-third sections as well.
The setting is his residence, where a cherry standing at some distance from the main hall had been moved in close.
What prompted the poem was that the transplanted tree looked as if it were dying.
The section ends with the poem; nothing further is recorded. It has been suggested that the poem originally concerned a plum, with a different closing line, and was altered to a cherry to match the seventy-first section.

The opening states what was done: the tree was moved close to the house, to have the blossom nearer.
The third line says it came to nothing — the trouble taken has not produced what was wanted.
The fourth line means nothing but waiting, its particle of limitation marking that waiting is all there is to do. Bringing the tree closer has only made the flowering further off; that reversal is the point.
The closing is an exclamation. Something brought near has become more distant, and the poem states how little such things answer to one's wishes. The seventy-first section set cherries beside a human life, and this cherry stands in the same run.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

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