Sasagani no kumode ayauki Yatsuhashi o yūgure kakete watarinuru kana

English Translation

Spider-legged and frail,
the eight bridges branch and cross,
and I have crossed them
at Yatsuhashi, hung out
over the falling of dusk.

Meaning

Frail as a spider's legs where the water branches, the eight bridges of Yatsuhashi—and I have crossed them, out into the falling dusk.

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), at Yatsuhashi in Mikawa, where she lodged that night.

They spoke of stopping at Yatsuhashi, and by then it had grown too dark to see the bridges. The poem belongs to that moment.

There is no reply. The prose goes on to the twenty-first, when she leaves Yatsuhashi in very clear weather and comes toward Miyaji Hill.

The word for the branching shape comes from the ninth episode of the Ise Monogatari, which explains that at the place called Yatsuhashi in Mikawa the water divides like the legs of a spider, so that eight bridges are laid across it and the place is named from them; it is the celebrated scene of the poem on irises.

A famous site is treated here only in terms of darkness and unsure footing. The first line names the spider and serves to draw in the word that follows. The second line uses for the branching of the water the very term the Ise Monogatari gives as the origin of the place-name, and spider and branching hang together by association. The third line sets down the name itself, so that within the poem one sees how the number of the bridges became the name. In the fourth line the verb means both to hang a bridge and to extend into a given hour, and bridge and hanging belong together. The poem closes with a perfective and an exclamatory particle, leaving something between relief and surprise at having got across such a place. Where the Ise Monogatari binds Yatsuhashi to irises, here the season and the hour are different and only the frailty of the bridges is taken up, which is the eye of someone who has actually gone over them.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other