Takaku tomo nani ka wa semu kuretake no hitoyo futayo no ada no fushi o ba

English Translation

High though you may be
what use is that to me — like
the joints of bamboo
one night, two nights, and no more
idle joinings, and nothing

Meaning

High though you may be, what use is that to me? Like the joints of bamboo — one night, two nights, and no more: idle joinings, and nothing else.

Commentary

90 The Idle Joints of Bamboo

While the late Prince of the Ministry of Military Affairs was corresponding with the same Lady of Shuri, he said that he would come to her, and she answered with this poem. The prose says no more, and the section consists of this single poem.
The Lady of Shuri appears in the eighty-ninth section, exchanging eight poems with the Master of the Right Horse Bureau. The Prince of the Ministry of Military Affairs headed that ministry; a prince of the same title appears in the ninth section, but the prose does not say whether they are the same man.
Neither time nor place is given. All we are told is that he wrote to her and proposed to visit.
What prompted the poem was that proposal. It is her reply.
The section ends with the poem; no response and no later event is recorded. It was later included in the Shinchokusen-shū.

The opening word means tall, of bamboo, and high, of rank, and the question that follows is rhetorical: what good would it do? None.
The bamboo of the third line is a fixed epithet leading to the word that ends the poem; it is a bamboo of many joints.
The word for night in the fourth line is also the word for the length between one joint and the next, so that one night and two are one joint and two.
The word in the last line means idle, of no substance, and the word for a joint also means lying together. An invitation from a man of high rank is turned away as a thing of one or two nights. Bamboo holds the poem together from end to end, and what it delivers is a refusal.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

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