Sumiwabite tsuki no miyako o ideshikado ukimi hanarenu ariake no kage

English Translation

Weary of living,
I came away from the moon's
own capital—yet
this sad self has not escaped
the light of the dawning moon.

Meaning

Weary of living there, I left the capital of the moon; and yet the light of the dawn moon will not leave this sorrowing self.

Commentary

Section 8 The Totomi Road: from Takashi Hill to Kikugawa

The journey of the Izayoi Nikki leaves Mikawa for Totomi, and this section covers three days, the twenty-second to the twenty-fourth. At dawn on the twenty-second she sets out while it is still deep night, in the light of the lingering moon, and feels sadder than at any time before. Hearing one of her attendants say that even the dawn moon has put on a rain-hat, she makes another poem. She crosses Takashi Hill as well; the stretch where the sea comes into view is very fine. The wind off the water is wild, the roar of the pines is fearful, and the waves run very high. Black birds flocking on a brilliantly white sandspit turn out to be cormorants. Looking out from the bridge at Hamana, she sees great numbers of gulls crossing in flight, diving under the water and settling on the rocks. That night she stops at the post town of Hikuma; the whole district there was called Hamamatsu, and people she had once counted close had lived there. The faces of those who used to live there come back to her, and she is moved again and again by the span of life that has let her come round and see the place once more. On the twenty-third she boards the ferry at the Tenryu crossing, and remembering Saigyo's day she feels very forlorn; there is only one lashed boat for all the crowd going back and forth, and the pole never rests. That night she stops at the provincial seat of Mitsuke in Totomi, where the settlement is derelict and frightening, and there is a well of water beside it. On the twenty-fourth, around midday, she crosses Saya no Nakayama. Near the shrine called Koto-no-mama the autumn colour is at its height and very fine; being in the lee of the hills, it seems the storms do not reach it. As she goes deeper in, the ridges running away on either side are like no other hills, and she feels forlorn and moved. She stops at Kikugawa, a place in the village at the foot of the pass. Rising at dawn she sees that the moon has come out, and the sound of the river is terrible.

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; the second poem of the twenty-second is made in answer to a remark by one of those attendants. All eleven poems of this section are her own, with no one to answer them. The Hamamatsu poem recalls that people close to her had once lived in that district, and the prose says that she called out the children and grandchildren of those she had known there and spoke with them.

Dawn on the twenty-second of the tenth month of Koan 2 (1279): she leaves Watando in Mikawa while it is still deep night and goes on in the light of the lingering moon.

Setting out in the dark by the light of the dawn moon, feeling sadder than at any time before, she turned this over in her mind; the prose closes it with a phrase meaning, so she went on thinking.

There is no reply. Immediately afterwards, taking up a remark by one of her attendants, she makes a second poem on the same moon; and the dawn moon returns again after she crosses Saya no Nakayama on the twenty-fourth.

The poem lays a dawn departure guided by the moon over the whole condition of one who has left the capital. The first line means to find living somewhere no longer bearable, and it states the reason for the journey in a single word. The second line is an elegant name for the capital, and set in a scene where she is about to walk out under the moon's light, it binds the city she has left to the moon now overhead. The third line is concessive: I did leave it, and yet. In the fourth line the word for sorrowing self meets a verb of not parting, so that two senses work at once: one may leave a capital, but the sorrowing self and the light that falls on it will not be parted. The closing line ends on a noun meaning the light of the moon. Where "Sadamenaki inochi wa shiranu tabi naredo mata ōsaka to tanomete zo yuku" faced forward at the start of the road, this poem finds that what cannot be left behind travels with her, and it marks the reversal by which the capital presses closer the farther she goes.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other