Inoru zo yo waga omou koto Narumigata kata hiku shio mo kami no manimani

English Translation

I pray, then, I pray:
let what I long for come true
at Narumi Bay—
the tide that draws off the flats
goes as the god wills it, too.

Meaning

This is my prayer: that what I long for may come to be, here at Narumi Bay, where even the ebbing tide runs as the god wills.

Commentary

Section 6 The Owari Road: from Ichi no Miya to Narumi Bay

The journey of the Izayoi Nikki passes out of Mino and onto the Owari road. After crossing the Sunomata by its floating bridge, she passes a shrine called Ichi no Miya and makes a poem there. On the twentieth she goes by the post station of Orito in Owari, and since the road did not take her out of her way she calls at the Atsuta shrine, brings out her inkstone, and writes out four poems to offer. Passing Narumi Bay, she finds the tide out and goes along the flats without hindrance. Just then a great many shore plovers went on ahead of her, looking for all the world as though they were showing her the way, and she made a poem. She had heard that the capital-bird was to be found only about the Sumida River, but the bird with the red bill and red feet was here on this shore as well, and seeing it she made one more poem; with that the Owari passage closes.

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 her guide, and her attendants. All seven poems of this section are her own, with no one to answer them. Four of them are votive poems, written out with her inkstone and offered at the Atsuta shrine; the other three are solitary poems of the road.

The twentieth of the tenth month of Koan 2 (1279): past the post station of Orito in Owari, at the Atsuta shrine.

Since the road did not take her out of her way, she called at the shrine, brought out her inkstone and wrote out four poems to offer; this is the first of them.

Being written and left before the god, the poem has no reply. After the four, the tide at Narumi Bay happened to be out, and the prose goes straight on to say that she went along the flats without hindrance.

This opens the four poems offered at Atsuta, and it begins from the word for praying itself. The first line piles an emphatic particle on an exclamatory one, giving the pitch of a voice raised before a god. Across the second and third lines the verb meaning to come true is folded into the name of the bay, so that the granting of the wish is already spoken inside the name of the place. The fourth line, the tide drawing off the flats, is set there as the figure that supports the prayer. The word for tidal flats appears in two lines running, and the ebb before her eyes becomes the frame of the poem. The closing phrase means at the god's will: as even the rise and fall of the tide is governed by that will, so she commits her own wish to it. The outcome of the suit is placed not with human judgment but with a god, in the line of prayer poems that began with "Mamore tada chigiri musubu no kami naraba tokenu urami ni ware mayowasade" on the Mino road.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other