Harubaru to Futamurayama o yukisugite nao sue tadoru nobe no yūyami

English Translation

Far and far I came
over Futamura Hill,
and still I grope on
for an end I cannot see,
in the dusk across the moor.

Meaning

I have come far, over Futamura Hill, and still I am feeling my way toward some end, through the dusk over the open fields.

Commentary

Section 7 The Mikawa Road: from Futamura Hill to Watando

Past Narumi Bay and the shore of the capital-bird, the journey of the Izayoi Nikki enters Mikawa. Crossing Futamura Hill she found the hills and fields stretching far off, and the day went out altogether. They said they would stop at Yatsuhashi; it was dark, and the bridges could no longer be seen. On the twenty-first she left Yatsuhashi in very clear weather, making her way across an open plain with the hills far off. Around midday she came toward a hill thick with autumn leaves. Wherever the wind had not reached, the colour had turned to the brown of dead leaves; evergreens stood among them, and it was like looking at brocade on a green ground. When she asked, she was told it was Miyaji Hill. She felt she had seen this hill long ago, and the season too was the same, so she made another poem there. At the foot of the hill, where there was bamboo, a single thatched hut could be seen, and she wondered how, and on what, anyone could live in such a place. The sun had gone down entirely, and while she still could not tell one thing from another she stopped at a place called Watando.

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 her attendants. All five poems of this section are her own, with no one to answer them. In the Miyaji Hill poem she says that she had crossed this hill once before, and the later Suruga passage records that in the past she had been taken by her father as far as the province of Totomi.

Dusk on the twentieth of the tenth month of Koan 2 (1279), crossing Futamura Hill on the road from Owari into Mikawa.

Beyond the hill the hills and fields stretched far off and the day went out altogether. The poem belongs to that moment.

There is no reply. That night she stopped at Yatsuhashi, where the darkness made even the bridges invisible.

The poem holds the end of a day in which a hill has been crossed and nothing has been reached. The opening words are the same with which the Taifu began his writing-practice poem, "Harubaru to yukusaki tōku shitawarete ikani sonata no sora o nagamemu," so that the distance a child imagined from the capital is now the actual distance of a darkening road. The second and third lines set down the achievement of having got over the pass. The adverb in the fourth line, still and even so, turns that achievement over: the crossing is done and the journey is not; the noun there means the far end of the road, and the verb means to feel one's way along it. What the prose said, that the hills and fields lay far off and the day was gone, is transferred straight into the poem. The closing line ends on a noun, leaving the traveller in a darkness where neither the road ahead nor her own feet can be seen. This section goes on through Yatsuhashi and Miyaji Hill, places thick with poetic association, but the poem at its threshold names no famous site at all and speaks only of how far a road can run as the light goes.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other