Itodo nao sode nurase to ya yadorikemu ma naku shigure no moruyama ni shimo

English Translation

Was it to wet them
still more, these sleeves, that I came
to lodge here tonight—
where cold rain leaks without end,
of all places, Moru Hill?

Meaning

Was it so that my sleeves should be wetter still that I came to lodge here of all places, at Moru Hill, where the rain leaks down without ceasing?

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.

The night of the sixteenth day of the tenth month of Koan 2 (1279), at Moruyama in Omi Province, in what is now the city of Moriyama in Shiga.

She had meant to reach a place called Kagami that night, but darkness fell before she could get there and she stopped at Moruyama, where, as the prose says, the cold rain still came following after her.

It is a solitary poem, with no one to answer. After it comes the note that this was the night of the sixteenth, fixing the date that gives the work its title. Then, much wearied, she lies down, and the scene moves on to the Yasu River at daybreak.

The opening phrase means still more than before, and it takes up the sleeve already wet at Noji, continuing directly from "Uchishigure furusato omou sode nurete yukusaki tōki noji no shinohara." In the second line a causative imperative is followed by an interrogative particle, so that the poem asks who it is that orders the sleeves to be wet, putting the question to heaven or to fate. The third line is a verb of conjecture about the past, closing the construction begun by that particle, and it asks why she should have come to lodge in such a place, as though her own act were another's. The fourth line means without ceasing, and governs the verb below. In the closing line the verb meaning to leak is a pivot with the place name Moruyama, binding the endlessness of the rain to the name of her lodging in a single word, and the final particle carries the sense that it should be this place of all places. Where the prose writes of the rain as something that followed after her, the poem receives it in the form of a question.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other