Fuetake no hitoyo mo kimi to nenu toki wa chigusa no koe ni ne koso nakarure

English Translation

A single night — one
joint of the bamboo flute — with-
out you beside me
and I cannot help but cry
aloud in a thousand voices

Meaning

A single night — one joint of the bamboo flute — without you beside me, and I cannot help crying aloud in a thousand voices.

Commentary

121 The Flute of Bamboo

A man who was visiting the daughter of the man known as the Shōni Sanetō composed "Fuetake no hitoyo mo kimi to nenu toki wa chigusa no koe ni ne koso nakarure", and her reply was "Chiji no ne wa kotoba no fuki ka fuetake no kochiku no koe mo kikoe konaku ni". That is the whole of the section.
Of the Shōni Sanetō the prose gives nothing beyond the name; a shōni was second officer at the Dazaifu. Of the man who visited his daughter it says nothing at all.
Neither time nor place is given. All we are told is that the man was visiting her.
The prose records nothing of what prompted the poem.
She answered with a poem of her own, and the exchange closes the section.

The bamboo of the first line is a fixed epithet leading to the word that follows: the length between one joint and the next was called by the same word as a night.
A single night without her thus carries, from the line before, the sense of something as short as one joint of cane.
A thousand voices are the many sounds a flute can make, laid over the many ways of weeping.
The final verb is in the spontaneous voice — he cannot help it — with an emphatic particle governing it. Bamboo, joint and sound keep the flute in view throughout, and through them he states the grief of a single night apart.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

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