Uchishigure furusato omou sode nurete yukusaki tōki noji no shinohara

English Translation

Cold rain passing through,
my sleeve wet with thoughts of home—
and the way ahead
stretches far: the bamboo grass
plain of Noji in the dusk.

Meaning

The winter rain comes down, my sleeve wet with longing for the capital, and still the road runs far ahead—the bamboo-grass plain of Noji.

Commentary

Section 4 Setting Out on the Omi Road: from Awataguchi to Samegai

Casting off the parting exchanges, Abutsu-ni at last leaves the capital. The journey of the Izayoi Nikki begins here: at a place called Awataguchi she sends the carriage back, and from there the road is made on horseback and on foot. Before long she crosses the Barrier of Ausaka, and then, coming to Noji, she finds no one either behind or ahead; the day is drawing to its close, and just as she thinks how forlorn it all is, cold winter rain comes down as well. She had meant to reach a place called Kagami that night, but darkness fell before she could get there, and she stopped at Moruyama. Even there the rain followed after her. It was the night of the sixteenth, she notes, and being much wearied she lay down. In the faint remaining moonlight of daybreak she left Moruyama, and as she crossed the Yasu River only the hoofbeats of travellers going on ahead came clearly through a very deep mist. On the night of the seventeenth she stopped at the post station of Ono, where the moon came out and the gaps between the pines ranged along the ridge could be told apart, most beautifully. From there too she groped her way out through deep night mist, and came to the spring called Samegai. In summer, she thinks, one would hardly pass it by; and indeed those going on foot still stop and draw from it.

Every poem in this section is Abutsu-ni's own, with no one to answer her. She was a consort of Fujiwara no Tameie and the mother of Tamesuke and Tamemori. Left behind in the capital are the Jiju, that is Reizei Tamesuke, the Taifu Tamemori, and the daughter in service at the women's palace. Travelling with her is the Ajari no Kimi, whom the interlinear note names Keiyu, who had set out to escort her as guide, along with attendants and those going on foot. Since the carriage was sent back at Awataguchi, from here on the journey is made without it.

Dusk on the sixteenth day of the tenth month of Koan 2 (1279), on the road through Noji in Omi Province, in what is now the area of Kusatsu in Shiga.

At Noji no one was to be seen either behind or ahead; the day was drawing in, and just as she thought how forlorn it was, the cold rain came down. This poem belongs to that moment.

It is a solitary poem, with no one to answer. The rain keeps following the journey, and is carried straight on into the poem at Moruyama.

The first line is a verb meaning that the cold rain sweeps down, and it runs on into the second. In the second line the word for old home carries, from the line above, the sound of the verb to fall, so that the falling of the rain and the thought of the capital overlap within a single word. The third line, the wet sleeve, is at once wet with rain and wet with tears, another single phrase holding two senses. The fourth line takes up unchanged the words the Taifu had set down in his practice, "Harubaru to yukusaki tōku shitawarete ikani sonata no sora o nagamemu," so that the distance the child feared is now measured by his mother on the actual road. The poem closes on a noun, leaving the wide plain of bamboo grass standing as it is. What the prose says about the emptiness of the road is here replaced by the openness of that single closing word.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other