Tsui ni yomo ada ni wa naraji moshiogusa katami o miyo no ato ni nokoseba

English Translation

Never shall it come
to nothing in the end, this
seaweed for the salt—
for the keepsake you leave here
as the tracks of three ages.

Meaning

It will never come to nothing, this salt-weed, since you leave the keepsake behind as the trace of three generations.

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 tenth month of Koan 2 (1279), in the capital, in the scene where the notebooks and the poems arrive from his mother and the Jiju answers on the spot.

It is one of the two poems he sent back, very quickly, in answer to "Waka no ura ni kakitodometaru moshiogusa kore o mukashi no katami tomo miyo," which had come with the notebooks of verse.

Because the reply was so grown-up, Abutsu-ni felt reassured and moved, and wept again, wishing the departed could have heard it. This impression of a son fit to carry on the house of poetry underlies the later passages in which she sends her comments from Kamakura on his drafts.

The reply takes up almost every word of his mother's poem and reassembles it, and it is beautifully judged. The first line sets up a strong negative conjecture, never at all. The second line denies head-on the vanishing that the sent poem had feared. The third line puts the salt-weed back in exactly the position it held in the sent poem, so that even the shape of the line is answered. In the fourth line the word for three ages echoes in sound the imperative look upon it that closed his mother's poem, while also naming the three generations of Shunzei, Teika and Tameie. The word for tracks likewise answers hers, here in the sense of what has been written down. The closing line is a causal clause: because they truly have been left, and it props up from beneath the negative conjecture of the opening.

Author

Reizei Tameuji

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other