Kari no yo no yukiki to miru mo hakanashi ya mi o ukifune o ukihashi ni shite

English Translation

A world of borrowed
time: to watch them come and go
is fleeting as well,
my self a floating, sad boat
made into a floating bridge.

Meaning

How fleeting it is, to watch this coming and going as the traffic of a borrowed world, crossing on sorrowing boats that float and are made a bridge.

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 nineteenth of the tenth month of Koan 2 (1279), crossing the Sunomata in Mino by a floating bridge of moored boats: the last scene of the Mino road.

At the Sunomata there was a bridge of boats set side by side and held fast, perhaps by ropes of vine; it was frightening, but she crossed. This is the second of the two poems she turned over on seeing the river.

There is no reply. The prose closes the pair with a phrase meaning, so she turned it over in her mind, and then, passing a shrine called Ichi no Miya, moves on to the Owari road of the twentieth.

The single act of crossing a precarious bridge is turned straight into a statement about impermanence, and with it the Mino road ends. The first line calls this world a borrowed one. The second takes the traffic of people over the bridge and reads it at once as the coming and going of human life, so that the view opens from what is in front of her to the world at large. The interjection in the third line breaks the poem there and puts the reason below. In the fourth line the same syllables mean both floating on water and bitter, so that a self weighed down and a boat afloat coincide in one word. The closing line describes the actual bridge of boats and at the same time repeats those syllables, drawing out the unsteadiness underfoot; boat, bridge and floating all hang together as words of water. The bitter world of "Musubu te ni nigoru kokoro o susuginaba ukiyo no yume ya Samegai no mizu," which closed the Omi road, is restated here as a borrowed world, and one can see the pattern by which each provincial border is marked off with a reflection on impermanence. Some manuscripts give the last lines with a slightly different particle.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other