Machikeri na mukashi mo koeshi Miyajiyama onaji shigure no meguriau yo o

English Translation

It was waiting, then—
Miyaji Hill, that I crossed
in a year gone by—
waiting for the turning world
to bring the same showers round.

Meaning

So it had been waiting: Miyaji Hill, which I crossed once long ago, waiting for the season to come round again and meet the same winter showers.

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), at Miyaji Hill in Mikawa.

She felt she had seen this hill long ago, and the season too was unchanged; the poem was made from that.

There is no reply. The prose goes on to the single thatched hut visible among bamboo at the foot of the hill, and another poem follows.

The poem records the one reunion of the whole journey: the same hill met again in the same season. The first line joins the auxiliary of sudden recognition to an exclamatory particle, and takes the view that it was the hill that had been waiting. The second line says that she had crossed here before; the later Suruga passage records that in the past her father had taken her as far as Totomi, and that is the journey meant. The third line stands as a bare noun, so that the hill itself becomes the one who waits. The fourth line takes up the prose remark that even the season was unchanged: not only the same hill but the same time of year. The verb in the closing line is one properly used of people meeting again after long parting, turned here to the meeting of a hill and a rain; and the particle at the very end marks the object of the waiting in the first line, so that the syntax is inverted. The wish for meeting again in "Sadamenaki inochi wa shiranu tabi naredo mata ōsaka to tanomete zo yuku" on the Omi road is here granted once, though not with a person: with a hill and a season.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other