Waga kokoro nagusamekanetsu Sarashina ya Obasuteyama ni teru tsuki o mite

English Translation

My heart is past all
comforting now — at Sarashina
watching the moon shine
down on the mountain where the
old woman was left behind

Meaning

My heart is past all comforting, at Sarashina, watching the moon shine on the mountain where the old woman was left.

Commentary

156 The Abandoned Aunt

A man lived at Sarashina in Shinano. His parents having died when he was young, an aunt had brought him up in their place; but his wife found her a burden, disliked her bent back, and spoke ill of her, so that he too ceased to care for her as he had. The aunt grew very old and bent, and the wife, hating the sight of her and wishing her dead, kept telling him to carry her off and leave her deep in the mountains, until at last he came to think there was nothing else for it. On a moonlit night he told her there was a service at a temple he would take her to see, and she was glad to be carried on his back; and he climbed from the foot of the mountain to a high peak from which she could not come down, left her there and fled. She called after him, but he did not answer and went home. When his wife had been angry he had been angry too; but she had raised him for years as a parent would, and a great grief came over him. Watching the moon rise red and immense over the peak of that mountain, he lay awake all night in his sorrow and composed this poem. Then he went back and brought his aunt home. Since that time the mountain has been called Obasute; and it is for this that Obasute is spoken of when anything is past comforting, the prose concludes.
Shinano is the modern Nagano prefecture, and Sarashina a district within it. Neither man, wife, nor aunt is named.
The setting is the man's house within sight of the mountain, on the night he left his aunt there.
What prompted the poem was watching the moon rise over the peak, unable to sleep for grief.
Having composed it he went back and brought her home. The section closes by explaining the name of the mountain and the saying that goes with it. The poem was later included in the Kokin-shū.

The opening says his heart cannot be comforted; the verb means to be unable to do a thing through to the end. The failure of comfort is set down before anything else.
The particle after the place name is one of exclamation, so that the place is addressed rather than merely named.
The mountain's name means the mountain where an old woman was left, and the prose says the name was fixed by this poem.
The closing gives the reason and stops there: because of the moon. The brightness that should have consoled him deepens the grief instead. The poem states only that a moon-viewing failed to console, and says nothing of what he did. But after composing it he went back up the mountain.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

Other