Kochikaze wa kyō higurashi ni fukumeredo ame mo yo ni hata yo ni mo araji na

English Translation

The east wind has blown
all day today, so it seems
and yet surely the
rain will not still be with us
surely not, when night comes on

Meaning

The east wind has blown all day, it seems. And yet surely the rain will not last into the night — surely not.

Commentary

112 The East Wind

The same third daughter of Tachibana no Kinhira had become the lover of a man called Morotada, who held a post in the Palace Guards, and she sent him this poem on a day of wind and rain.
Tachibana no Kinhira headed the Palace Table Office, and his daughters lived at the place called Agata no Ido. The eldest served the empress under the name of the Lady Shōshō. The third was the first love of Minamoto no Saneakira in his youth, and her poems appear in the hundred and eleventh through hundred and thirteenth sections and in the hundred and sixteenth. Morotada held a third-rank post in the Palace Guards and appears in the hundred and thirteenth section.
The setting is a day of wind and rain. The east wind tells us it is spring.
What prompted the poem was that weather, which threatened to keep him away.
The section ends with the poem; no reply and no later event is recorded. The hundred and thirteenth gives an exchange between the two after they had drifted apart.

The east wind blows in spring and was held to bring rain.
The second line means that it has blown all day, in the grammar of what one supposes rather than knows, and the concessive turns on it.
The adverb in the fourth line means surely not, and works with the negative that follows to make a strong denial.
The syllable in the last line carries both the word for night and that same adverb, so that the rain not lasting into the night and its surely not being so are heard together. The plain fact that rain would keep him away is put entirely as a forecast. She never asks him to come; she only says it will clear by evening.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

Other