Mayowamashi oshiezariseba hamachidori hitokata naranu ato o sore tomo

English Translation

I would have gone astray,
had you not taught me the way,
plover of the shore—
these tracks that are not common,
that I should know them for such.

Meaning

Had you not taught me, I would have lost my way, and never known those far from ordinary tracks of the shore plover for what they are.

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, as the Jiju answers on the spot the notebooks and the two poems that have come from his mother.

It replies to "Anakashiko yokonami kakuna hamachidori hitokata naranu ato o omowaba," and is the second of the two poems he returned.

Abutsu-ni was moved that the reply should be so grown-up, and wept again, wishing the departed could have heard it.

The poem takes over the sent poem from its third line onward, keeping even the order of the words. The first two lines form a counterfactual: had you not taught me, I would have lost my way, which implies that, since he was in fact taught, he did not. By placing the verb of going astray first, in inversion, the poem sets down the losing of the way and then moves toward its cancellation. The shore plover, the phrase for far from ordinary, and the word for tracks are all lifted straight from the sent poem, and the chain of shore associations, wave and plover and track, is preserved. The closing line breaks off, leaving unsaid the verb of recognising, and in doing so it answers in form the conditional that had likewise been left hanging at the end of his mother's poem. Where she warned him not to let the tracks be erased, he replies that it is her teaching that lets him know the tracks for what they are, accepting the warning and turning it into thanks.

Author

Reizei Tameuji

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other