Shigurekeri somuru chishio no hate wa mata momiji no nishiki iro kaeru made

English Translation

The showers have come,
and dyed and dyed a thousand
times, until at last
the brocade of crimson leaves
has turned another colour.

Meaning

So the winter showers have come, dipping the hillside again and again in dye, until even the brocade of red leaves has changed its colour.

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.

Around midday on the twenty-first of the tenth month of Koan 2 (1279), coming up to Miyaji Hill in Mikawa.

Approaching a hill thick with autumn colour, she found that wherever the wind had not reached the leaves had gone the brown of dead leaves, with evergreens standing among them, so that it was like brocade on a green ground; and when she asked she was told it was Miyaji Hill. The poem belongs to that moment.

There is no reply. The prose goes on to say that she felt she had seen this hill long ago and that the season too was the same, and another poem follows.

The poem reads a whole hillside of colour as a process of dyeing. The auxiliary in the first line marks the movement of noticing: so this is what the showers have done. That the winter rain dyes the leaves was a commonplace of the poetry of the time. In the second line the word means to dip cloth in the dye-vat again and again until the colour deepens, so that the repeated showers are converted directly into a count of dippings. The third line means, at the end of all that dipping, and leads down to the change of colour. The fourth line takes up the brocade of the prose, where evergreens make the ground and the red leaves the figure. In the closing line the last word is the particle meaning up to and even, spelt as it is because the base text does not mark voiced consonants. Dyeing, the thousand dippings, brocade and colour run through the whole poem as words of the dyer's craft, and the change to the brown of dead leaves, as the prose describes it, becomes the frame on which the poem is built.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other