Koto towamu hashi to ashi to wa akazarishi waga sumu kata no miyakodori ka to

English Translation

Let me ask you, then:
your bill and your feet are red,
and I have not had
my fill of them—are you the
capital bird of my home?

Meaning

Let me put the question to you: red of bill and red of foot, and I have not had my fill of the place—are you the capital-bird of the city where I lived?

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), on the shore near Narumi Bay in Owari; the scene that closes the Owari passage.

She had heard that the capital-bird was to be found only about the Sumida River, yet here on this shore was the bird with the red bill and red feet. The poem comes from seeing it.

There is no reply. The prose closes Owari here and moves on through Futamura Hill and Yatsuhashi into Mikawa. The pattern of retracing the eastward journey of the Ise Monogatari returns on the twenty-fifth at Mount Utsu, in the poem "Waga kokoro utsutsu to mo nashi Utsu no yama yume ni mo tōki mukashi kou tote."

The model poem is Ariwara no Narihira's, in the travel section of the Kokinshu: in the ninth episode of the Ise Monogatari the travelling party at the Sumida River is told that a white bird with red bill and red feet is called the capital-bird, and the poem asks the bird whether the one left behind in the capital is alive or not.

The poem draws the eastward journey of the Ise Monogatari straight into her own road. The opening takes up Narihira's phrase for putting a question, borrowing whole the form of addressing a bird. The second line lifts into verse the prose of the Ise Monogatari, which describes the capital-bird as red of bill and red of foot, and it matches the prose here, which says the same. In the third line the word for red is also the word for not having had one's fill, so that a word of colour turns directly into a word of longing for the capital. The fourth line names the city where she lived: where Narihira thought of a person left behind, she thinks of the place itself. The closing line holds the question in a quotative particle and breaks off, ending exactly as the model ends, unfinished. Narihira sang at the Sumida, far from the capital; she meets the same bird on a shore in Owari, still near the beginning of her journey, and by taking up the pattern of the eastward road so early she anticipates the loneliness of the distance yet to come.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other