Fune mo inu makaji mo mieji kyō yori wa ukiyo no naka o ikade wataramu

English Translation

The boat has gone too
and no oars are to be seen —
from today, how am
I to make my crossing of
this floating, wretched world

Meaning

The boat has gone, and there are no oars to be seen. From today, how am I to cross this floating, wretched world?

Commentary

157 The Horse Trough

A man and a woman were living in Shimotsuke. After they had lived together for years the man took a new wife, his affections changed, and he carried off to her everything in the house they had shared. The woman bore it and let him. He took everything, down to the last scrap, until only the horse trough was left; and when a boy in his service called Makaji came for that too, she asked whether he would not be coming again; and he said that he would surely come whether his master did or not. So she said to tell his master — not in a letter, but by word of mouth — and gave him this poem. The servant delivered it, and before long the man brought back everything he had taken, and from then on kept to her and did not stray again.
Shimotsuke is roughly the modern Tochigi prefecture. Neither the man nor the woman is named. Makaji is the name of the boy in his service. The horse trough, in which fodder was put, was the least valuable thing in a house.
The setting is the emptied house, with only the trough left.
What prompted the poem was the boy's coming for it. She would not write; she told him to carry it by word of mouth.
When it was delivered the man brought everything back and never strayed again. A single poem reverses the whole situation, and the section closes there.

The word for boat is also a word for a horse trough, so that the trough being carried out and a boat departing are the same word.
The word in the second line means the paired oars of a boat, and is also the name of the boy who came for it, so that the servant's name becomes the boat's gear.
With neither boat nor oars, there is no means of crossing at all.
The word in the fourth line means wretched and also floating, and the verb that follows covers crossing water and getting through life. She states the loss of her household as the loss of a boat, and conveys her plight without a word of reproach. That the man brought everything back is the measure of it.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

Other