Waga kodomo kimi ni tsukaemu tame narade wataramashi ya wa seki no Fujikawa

English Translation

Were it not that my
children are to serve their lord,
would I ever cross
a river such as this one—
Fujikawa at the gate?

Meaning

If it were not that my children must serve their lord, would I ever have crossed this river, the Fujikawa by the barrier gate?

Commentary

Section 5 The Mino Road: from the Fujikawa to the Sunomata River

The journey of the Izayoi Nikki leaves the Omi road and enters the province of Mino. On the eighteenth, crossing the Fujikawa by the barrier, Abutsu-ni first turns a poem over in her mind. The plank eaves of the barrier hut at Fuwa were still as they had always been. From the barrier onward the sky darkened and rain came down, more than a passing winter shower, falling the whole day, until the road grew so bad that against her intention she stopped at the post station called Kasanui before the light had gone. On the nineteenth she set out again. Because of the rain that had fallen all night, the road around a place called Hirano was so wretched that no one could pass along it, and they went straight across the surface of the paddy fields instead. As the day broke the rain stopped. Around noon a conspicuous shrine stood on the road she was passing, and when she asked, she was told that it was known as the god of binding; and to that god she addressed a poem. At the river called Sunomata there was a floating bridge of boats set side by side and held fast, perhaps by ropes of vine. It was frightening, but she crossed. Since the river was very deep on the embankment side and shallow on the other, she turned two more poems over in her mind there.

Abutsu-ni was a consort of Fujiwara no Tameie and the mother of Tamesuke and Tamemori, on her way from the capital to Kamakura to press her suit over the inheritance of the Hosokawa estate in Harima. With her went the Ajari no Kimi, the mountain ascetic who served as guide and who appeared in the section of parting poems, and her attendants. All six poems of this section are her own, and there is no one to answer them; but the first of them is spoken out of thought for the children left in the capital, the Jiju Tamesuke and the Taifu Tamemori.

The eighteenth of the tenth month of Koan 2 (1279): she passes out of Omi into Mino and crosses the Fujikawa near the barrier at Fuwa.

It is the poem she first turned over in her mind as she came to the crossing.

A solitary poem of the road, with no reply. It is the first to state outright, in verse, why the journey was undertaken, and the theme of going down for the children's sake and for the sake of the house of poetry returns from time to time in the later travel poems.

This is the first poem after the provincial border, and here for the first time the reason for the journey is set into verse. The opening names the children left in the capital, the Jiju and the Taifu. The word for lord in the second line means the sovereign they are to serve, and the verb form there depends on the noun that follows. The particle in the third line negates the condition: were it not for this. The fourth line joins a counterfactual auxiliary to a rhetorical interrogative, so that the sense is, would I cross? — never. The verb for crossing means both to cross a river and to make one's way through the world, and it stands for the whole journey down. The closing line ends on the name of the river, setting the answer to the rhetorical question upon the place itself. What is really a private matter, a lawsuit that has driven her to Kamakura, is restated in the public language of children serving their lord, and that substitution is the whole posture of the poem. Where "Sadamenaki inochi wa shiranu tabi naredo mata ōsaka to tanomete zo yuku" spoke the fear of the journey, this one speaks its reason.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other