Tabibito wa mino uchiharau yūgure no ame ni yado karu Kasanui no sato

English Translation

Travellers shake off
the rain from their straw rain-capes
at the fall of dusk,
and take shelter from the rain
at Kasanui village.

Meaning

Travellers beat the rain from their straw capes, and in the falling dusk they take lodging out of the rain at the village of Kasanui.

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.

Dusk on the eighteenth of the tenth month of Koan 2 (1279), at the post station of Kasanui in Mino.

The rain that had begun to darken the sky near the barrier at Fuwa fell all day, more than a passing shower, and the road grew so bad that, against her intention, she stopped at Kasanui before the light had gone. The poem belongs to that moment.

There is no reply. The prose goes on to the nineteenth, when she sets out again and finds the road so ruined by the night's rain that she must cross the paddy fields themselves.

Here the travel poem that folds a place-name into a pivot comes off most lightly in this section. The first line opens exactly as "Tabibito wa mina morotomo ni asa tachite koma uchiwatasu Yasu no kawagiri" had opened on the Omi road, setting her among travellers in general. In the second line the word for a straw rain-cape is also the name of the province she is walking through, so that the country she is in becomes the thing she wears; the verb carries a prefix that only lends it force. The third and fourth lines turn straight into verse what the prose had said, that she stopped before the light had gone, and they carry the whole wretchedness of the day. In the closing line the first syllables of the place-name are also the word for a rain-hat, and cape, hat and sewing hang together as words of rain-gear and clothing. The poem ends on the name of the village, and the rain-shut journey comes to rest inside it.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other