Sate mo kimi wasurekerishika uguisu no naku ori nomi ya omoiizubeki

English Translation

So you had forgot
me after all. Is it on-
ly when the warbler
happens to call that I come
into your mind at all, then

Meaning

So you had forgotten me after all. Is it only when the warbler happens to call that I come into your mind?

Commentary

105 The Mountain of Kurama

When the daughter of Taira no Nakaki was possessed by a spirit and the priest Jōzō performed rites for her, people began to talk, for what passed between them did not look like an ordinary matter. They went on meeting in secret, and the talk grew unpleasant; and thinking he could not stay in the world any longer, Jōzō left it. He shut himself away on Mount Kurama at severe austerities, but the woman remained dear to him, and he practised with his mind turning towards the capital. One day, lying prostrate in his grief, he saw a letter close beside him. Wondering how a letter came to be there, he picked it up and read it, and it was from the woman he was thinking of: "Sumizome no Kurama no yama ni iru hito wa tadoru tadoru mo kaeri kinanamu". It was a strange thing, and he could not think who had brought it, nor was there anyone who could have; and it was so unaccountable that he went off alone, distracted, to her. Later, having returned to the mountain, he sent her "Karakushite omoiwasururu koishisa o utate nakitsuru uguisu no koe", and her reply was "Sate mo kimi wasurekerishika uguisu no naku ori nomi ya omoiizubeki". On another occasion he composed "Waga tame ni tsuraki hito o ba okinagara nani no tsumi naki yo o ya uramimu". The woman had been brought up with the greatest care, and though noblemen had courted her, her parents had kept her from them, intending her for the emperor; but after this she was cast off. That is the whole of the section.
Jōzō was a Tendai priest who appears in the sixty-second section, exchanging poems with the Lady Nōsan. Taira no Nakaki served as Assistant Governor of Ōmi; the fifty-seventh section tells of his daughter's fallen circumstances. Mount Kurama, north of the capital, was known as a place of austerities.
The setting is the capital, where his poem reached her.
What prompted it is his, "Karakushite omoiwasururu koishisa o utate nakitsuru uguisu no koe", with its account of a longing nearly forgotten.
Another poem of his follows, and the section closes with the note that she was in the end cast off by her parents.

The opening draws the conclusion out of his own words and puts it to him at once.
What follows takes up the very verb he used for forgetting.
The particle of limitation and the question together ask whether it is only when the bird calls.
The closing asks whether that is when she comes to mind. He blamed the bird; she reads that as meaning that without the bird he would not think of her at all. Attacking the way the other's words came to be made is the same manoeuvre as the exchange over pampas grass in the seventeenth section.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

Other