Tachisou zo ureshikarikeru tabigoromo katami ni tanomu oya no mamori wa

English Translation

How glad a thing it is
to set out at your side—
the traveller's robe:
what we lean on, each on each,
is the watch a parent keeps.

Meaning

What gladness, to set out at your side in travelling robes; it is a parent's watch over us that we lean on, each upon the other.

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), at her house in the capital before departure, as the Ajari no Kimi, who was to travel with her, joins the writing on the practice sheet.

He was a mountain ascetic, older than the others, and he was making ready to escort her as guide for the journey. Since it was unthinkable that he should not join the others on this sheet, he wrote this poem down.

The prose sums up the whole chain of writing on the sheet as moving in many ways, and then turns to the letter sent to the one daughter.

This poem closes the four written in turn on the practice sheet. The opening verb means to set out alongside, and it contains the verb of standing that belongs to the imagery of the traveller's robe in the third line, taking up directly the words of "Ada ni nomi namida wa kakeji tabigoromo kokoro no yukite tachikaeru hodo," written just before it on the same sheet. The second line completes a bound construction begun by the emphatic particle in the first, and the attributive ending carries a note of exclamation. To say gladness outright at a parting is possible only for the one who is going too, as guide. The third line halts on a noun, letting the lower half of the poem stand on its own. The adverb in the fourth line means each toward the other, and it is a homophone of the word for keepsake in "Waka no ura ni kakitodometaru moshiogusa kore o mukashi no katami tomo miyo," so that within a sequence of parting poems the other sense sounds through it. The poem ends on a noun, and the gladness of the first line comes back to fill it, leaving the sense unclosed and resonant.

Author

Keiyū

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other