Todomeoku furuki makura no chiri o dani waga tachisaraba tare ka harawamu

English Translation

The old pillow left,
even the dust upon it—
once I have set forth,
who will there be to brush it
away, when I am not here?

Meaning

Once I have gone, who will brush away even the dust that gathers on this old pillow I leave behind?

Commentary

Section 3 The Parting Exchange of Poems

After the death of her husband Fujiwara no Tameie, Abutsu-ni fell into dispute with Tameie's heir Tameuji over the inheritance of the Hosokawa estate in Harima Province, and when her suit in the capital came to nothing she resolved to appeal directly to the shogunal court in Kamakura. As she made ready to leave, the garden and the brushwood fence, already grown wild even while she had kept them under her eye, seemed certain to grow wilder still in her absence, and the tears on the sleeves of those who clung to her could not be consoled. The Jiju and the Taifu in particular sank into such dejection that it pained her, and after talking them round she looked into the sleeping chamber and found the old pillow of the departed lying just as it had always lain. From there the parting exchanges follow one upon another: the poem written beside the pillow; the poem sent with the notebooks of verse handed down in the house, sealed with a colophon and dispatched to the Jiju; the Jiju's reply; the poem the Taifu set down in his writing practice and the answer added on the same sheet; the poem of the Risshi, the elder brother who came down from the mountain to see her off; the poem of the Ajari no Kimi, who was to travel with her as guide; and the poem sent to her only daughter, in service at the women's palace, together with her reply. Abutsu-ni records that she has written out the poems of her five children without leaving any out, admitting that to a parent's heart every one of them seemed moving, and then, telling herself that such weakness will not do, she casts it all off and sets out.

Abutsu-ni was a consort of Fujiwara no Tameie and the mother of Tamesuke and Tamemori. Tameie was a poet of the Mikohidari house and a son of Fujiwara no Teika. The Jiju is her son Reizei Tamesuke, founder of the Reizei house, seventeen by the old count at this time; the Taifu is his younger brother Tamemori, then fifteen. The Risshi is a son in holy orders, called in the text the Jiju's elder brother, whom the interlinear note names Gensho. The Ajari no Kimi is a mountain ascetic, described in the text as elder than these, whom the note names Keiyu. There was only one daughter, in service at what the text calls the women's palace close by, which the note identifies as Shin'yomeimon'in. Abutsu-ni gathers all five together under the phrase 'her five children'.

The scene is the sixteenth day of the tenth month of Koan 2 (1279), the very day of departure, at her own house in the capital. It follows the moment when she has looked round at the garden and the fence and then stepped into the sleeping chamber.

Looking into the sleeping chamber, she found the pillow of the departed still lying unchanged. The sight brought grief on her afresh, and she wrote this poem down beside it.

No one answers this poem, and no reply is recorded. From here the prose moves on to the scene in which she sorts out the notebooks of verse handed down in the house and sends them to the Jiju, beginning the current in which what Tameie left behind is entrusted to his children.

This is the poem that opens the parting exchanges of the Izayoi Nikki. The opening phrase means to leave a thing behind, and it answers the fourth line, once I have set forth. The old pillow is the pillow of the departed, still lying in the sleeping chamber as it always had, and the word old carries both the sense of having aged and the sense of being a remnant of one now gone. The particle in the third line means even so much as, and by fixing on the dust rather than on the pillow itself the poem states the coming desolation in its most extreme form. The fourth line is a conditional clause. The closing line is a question formed with an interrogative particle and a verb of conjecture, and it verges on rhetorical question: there will be no one at all. The forlornness of the prose, which says that the garden and the fence would be wilder still, is here narrowed down into the dust on a single pillow.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other