Karisome no yukikaiji to zo omoishi o ima wa kagiri no kadode narikeru

English Translation

A road for going
and coming back, I thought it —
no more than that, a
borrowed road. And it turns out
this was my last setting out

Meaning

A road for going and coming back, I thought it, and no more. And it turns out this was my last setting out.

Commentary

144 This Last Setting Out

As for this Ariwara Second: perhaps because his father the Ariwara Captain had once gone down to the east, he too travelled to the provinces from time to time. Being a man of feeling, he would compose poems and write them up in places in other provinces that struck him as beautiful or affecting. The post station of Obusa stood by the sea, and he wrote up there "Watatsumi to hito ya miruramu au koto no namida o fusa ni nakitsumetsureba". At the nearby village of Minowa he composed "Itsu wa to wa wakanedo taete aki no yo zo mi no wabishisa wa shirimasarikeru". At length, having wandered through many provinces, he came to live in Kai; and there, at the point of death from illness, he composed "Karisome no yukikaiji to zo omoishi o ima wa kagiri no kadode narikeru" and died. A man who had once been with him, coming up to the capital from Mikawa, found these poems at his lodgings and knew the hand for his, and was much moved. That is the whole of the section.
The Ariwara Second is Ariwara no Shigeharu, son of the Ariwara Captain, Ariwara no Narihira; he appears in the hundred and forty-third section. Obusa and Minowa were places in the eastern provinces; Kai is what is now Yamanashi prefecture, and Mikawa the eastern part of what is now Aichi.
The setting is the province of Kai, where he had come to live after wandering through many provinces.
What prompted the poem was that he was dying of illness. He composed it and died, the prose says.
The section then closes with the man who had once been with him finding these poems at a lodging on his way up from Mikawa, knowing the hand for his, and being much moved.

The first word means for the time being: a journey is a thing one comes back from, and that assumption is set down at the start.
The road for going and coming holds the place name Kai in its syllables, as the two earlier poems held Obusa and Minowa.
The particle after the verb is concessive: so he had thought, and yet.
The closing marks the recognition that this was his last setting out; the word for setting out belongs to a journey and equally to the journey of death. A road meant to be travelled both ways turns out to be one way only — and a poem of the traveller's kind, place name and all, becomes a poem of dying. The prose adds a second scene, in which what was written up is read long afterwards.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

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