Ta ga misogi yūtsuke tori ka karakoromo Tatsuta no yama ni orihaete naku

English Translation

Whose purification
is this cock with its streamers
that on Tatsuta —
where the Chinese robe is cut —
goes on and on with its crying

Meaning

Whose purification is this streamered cock, that on Tatsuta — where the Chinese robe is cut — goes on and on with its crying?

Commentary

154 The Cock with Streamers

A man from the capital caught sight of a very beautiful girl living in Yamato, and, struck by her beauty, carried her off, took her up on his horse and fled. She was terrified. At nightfall they took shelter near Tatsuta mountain, and he spread a mudguard for bedding and forced himself on her, and she was overcome with fear. Emptied of everything, she would not answer whatever he said, but wept; and when he said "Ta ga misogi yūtsuke tori ka karakoromo Tatsuta no yama ni orihaete naku", she composed "Tatsutagawa iwane o sashite yuku mizu no yukue mo shiranu waga goto ya naku" and killed herself. In his desolation he held her and wept. That is the whole of the section.
Yamato is the modern Nara prefecture. Tatsuta mountain lies on the road from Yamato into Kawachi and appears in the hundred and forty-ninth section; the Tatsuta river runs nearby and is the subject of the hundred and fifty-first. Neither the man nor the girl is named.
The setting is the shelter near Tatsuta mountain, where the man from the capital had brought the girl at nightfall.
What prompted the poem was that she would not answer him but only wept.
She answered with a poem and killed herself. The section closes with his holding her and weeping. This poem was later included in the Kokin-shū.

The opening asks whose purification it is; at such rites a cock was hung with mulberry streamers and released.
That streamered cock was used in the ritual and appears in poetry as a bird that calls.
The Chinese robe of the third line is a fixed epithet: the verb for cutting cloth leads by sound into the place name Tatsuta.
The closing means to go on and on without stopping. The weeping girl is compared to the crying bird. Asking whose rite the bird serves amounts to asking whom her weeping is for — and the man says nothing of having caused it.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

Other