Kari ni nomi kuru kimi matsu to furiidetsutsu naku Shigayama wa aki zo kanashiki

English Translation

Waiting for you who
come only as the hunt comes
only for a while
the hill of Shiga cries out
and autumn there is sorrow

Meaning

Waiting for you, who come only as the hunt comes and only for a while, the hill of Shiga cries out; and autumn there is a sorrow.

Commentary

137 The Hill of Shiga That Cries

At a place called Ihae, on the road over the hills to Shiga, the late Prince of the Ministry of Military Affairs had built himself a very fine villa, and came to it from time to time. He would stay there quietly and watch the women going up to Shiga temple. The situation was splendid and the house was splendid too. Toshiko, on her way to the temple, called at the house, and looking at the prospect and the villa was much moved, and wrote down this poem.
Toshiko was the wife of Fujiwara no Chikane and appears in the third, ninth, forty-first, sixty-sixth through sixty-eighth and hundred and twenty-second sections. The Prince of the Ministry of Military Affairs appears in the ninetieth, hundred and sixth and hundred and seventh sections, and again in the hundred and thirty-ninth and hundred and fortieth. Shiga temple stood in Ōmi province, and Toshiko goes there in the hundred and twenty-second section as well.
The setting is the villa at Ihae on the Shiga road, where she called on her way to the temple. The autumn in the poem tells us the season.
What prompted the poem was being moved by the house and the prospect around it. She wrote it down there.
The section ends with the poem; no response and no later event is recorded. It was later included in the Shinchokusen-shū.

The word in the first line means both a hunt and something temporary, so that coming for the hunting and coming only briefly are one word. It refers to the prince's occasional visits to the villa.
What follows is waiting for him, and the waiting passes over to the deer of the next line.
The verb means to send a voice out, to give tongue; the Lady of Higaki uses the same word in the hundred and twenty-seventh section, and it belongs with the belling of deer.
In the closing, the name of the hill of Shiga carries, from the verb just before it, the sound of a deer crying; and the word for autumn also carries the sense of being tired of someone. A deer that cries waiting for one who comes only briefly stands over a woman put aside — and the poem reads equally as waiting for the prince and as mourning him.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

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