Nushi ya tare yama no susono ni yado shimete atari sabishiki take no hitomura

English Translation

Who can be the one
who has settled on this ground
at the mountain's foot,
and made a home where nothing
stands but a stand of bamboo?

Meaning

Who is the master here, who has taken this ground at the foot of the hill for a home, where nothing stands about but a single stand of bamboo?

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.

The afternoon of the twenty-first of the tenth month of Koan 2 (1279), at the foot of Miyaji Hill in Mikawa; the scene that closes the Mikawa road.

A single thatched hut was visible where bamboo grew at the foot of the hill, and she wondered how, and on what, anyone could live there. The poem belongs to that moment.

There is no reply. The prose goes on to say that the sun had set entirely and that, while she still could not tell one thing from another, she stopped at a place called Watando; with that the Mikawa passage closes and the Totomi road of the twenty-second begins.

Unusually for a poem of the road, this one touches neither on her own condition nor on the capital, and speaks only of a stranger's life glimpsed in passing. The interrogative particle in the first line opens the poem with the question of who lives there; the prose question, how and on what could anyone live in such a place, is set straight into the opening line. The second line gives the position, the meeting of hill and field, a place off the edge of any settlement. The verb in the third line means to take a place as one's own and to settle there. The fourth line describes not the house but the air about it. The closing line ends on a noun, gathering the whole of that life into one stand of bamboo. Coming directly after the reunion with Miyaji Hill, the poem sets a stranger's dwelling beside her own remembered past, and records the moment when a traveller's eye turns outward, away from herself.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other