Mamore tada chigiri musubu no kami naraba tokenu urami ni ware mayowasade

English Translation

Guard me, only guard—
if you are the god who binds
the vows we have sworn,
do not let me lose my way
in a grievance never loosed.

Meaning

Only guard me: if you are indeed the god who binds our vows, do not let me wander in a grievance that will never come untied.

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.

Around noon on the nineteenth of the tenth month of Koan 2 (1279), on the Mino road out of Kasanui, as she passes the shrine of the god of binding.

A conspicuous shrine stood on the road she was passing, and when she asked, she was told it was known as the god of binding. The poem was made on hearing the name.

There is no reply. Poems of prayer at shrines continue later on the road: in Owari she writes out and offers at the Atsuta shrine the poems beginning "Inoru zo yo waga omou koto Narumigata kata hiku shio mo kami no manimani," and in Izu she offers poems to the deity of Mishima.

On the spot, hearing the name of the shrine, she binds her petition to that one word. The poem opens with an imperative, and the adverb beside it asks for protection and nothing else; addressing a god in the imperative is the standard form of the prayer poem. The second line lays the phrase for binding a vow over the name of the shrine itself, taking straight into verse what the prose had reported. The third line has the shape of a condition, but it is really an insistence: if that is what you are called. In the fourth line the word for not untied belongs by association with binding, and stands for a suit tied up and never released; the word for grievance means both resentment and a sorrow that will not be settled. The closing particle is a negative connective, and by inversion the imperative of the first line returns to complete it, so that the poem ends without closing, leaving only the plea. Here for the first time the purpose of the whole journey, the suit over the Hosokawa estate, takes the form of a prayer.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other