Hima ōki Fuwa no sekiya wa kono hodo no shigure mo tsuki mo ikani moruramu

English Translation

Full of gaps it stands,
the guard hut at Fuwa now—
how they must leak through,
both the showers of these days
and the moon, in through its eaves.

Meaning

The barrier hut at Fuwa is all gaps; how the showers of these days must come leaking through it, and the moonlight too.

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): having crossed the Fujikawa, she passes the barrier at Fuwa in Mino.

She saw that the plank eaves of the barrier hut were still there, unchanged, and made this poem.

There is no reply. Beyond the barrier the rain set in in earnest, the road grew bad, and she stopped at the post station of Kasanui before dark.

The model poem is Fujiwara no Yoshitsune's, in the miscellaneous section of the Shinkokinshu, which says that the barrier hut at Fuwa, where no one lives now, has nothing but the autumn wind since it fell into ruin. When the prose speaks of the plank eaves of the hut, it is taking its words directly from that poem.

The poem leans on a famous poem of ruin and slips into it the felt experience of the road. The first line, full of gaps, plays against the very name of the place, written with a character meaning unbroken, and the discrepancy states the ruin of the hut by itself. The second line sets down the words of the model unchanged. The third line, of these days, pulls the scene toward the rain actually falling now, where the model had left its time vague, at some point after the ruin. The fourth line names two things that leak, the shower and the moonlight, where the model had let a single autumn wind stand for the whole desolation. The final verb is a present conjecture about what cannot be seen, answering the interrogative earlier in the line: how much it must be. The verb for leaking is the same word as in "Itodo nao sode nurase to ya yadorikemu manaku shigure no moruyama ni shimo" on the Omi road, and it runs on through this rain-soaked stretch of the journey.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other