Waga tame ya nami mo Takashi no hama naramu sode no minato no nami wa yasumade

English Translation

Is it for my sake
the waves run high at this shore,
Takashi, the high?
For the waves in the harbour
of my sleeves will not lie still.

Meaning

Is it for my sake that the waves run so high at Takashi, the shore whose name is height? For the waves in the harbour of my sleeves never settle.

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.

The twenty-second of the tenth month of Koan 2 (1279), beyond Takashi Hill where the sea comes into view. The wind off the water was wild, the roar of the pines fearful, and the waves very high.

The poem was made facing that prospect after the crossing of the hill.

There is no reply. The prose then turns to the black birds flocking on a brilliantly white sandspit.

The place-name is read straight over into the height of the waves. The interrogative particle in the first line opens with the question whether all this wildness is on her account. In the second line the word for high is at once the adjective and the name of the shore, and the prose remark that the waves ran very high becomes the centre of the poem. The verb of conjecture in the third line binds back to that particle. The fourth line calls her tear-soaked sleeves a harbour, setting the sea outside and the sea within side by side. The closing line breaks off with a negative connective: never settling. The waves of the sea belong to a place called Takashi; the waves in her sleeves have no such reason to be high, and no reason to stop. Wave, shore, harbour and wave again run through the poem as words of the sea, and the pattern of the travel poems in this diary, in which following the outward scene arrives at one's own tears, shows here at its clearest.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other