Shirahama ni sumi no iro naru shimatsudori fude mo oyobaba e ni kakitemashi

English Translation

On the white beach there,
birds the colour of ink stand—
island cormorants;
if only my brush could reach,
I would paint them as they are.

Meaning

Ink-black birds on a white beach, the cormorants of the islands; if only my brush were equal to it, I would set them down in a painting.

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), on the coast beyond Takashi Hill, where black birds were flocking on a brilliantly white sandspit.

Seeing them, and finding that they were cormorants, she made this poem.

There is no reply. The prose goes on to the view of the gulls from the bridge at Hamana.

Built out of nothing but white against black, this is the most pictorial poem of the section. The first line takes up the prose phrase about the brilliantly white sandspit, and the second sets down the black, so that the pair of colours is complete within two lines. The word for that black is the word for ink, which also draws in the brush and the painting below, so that what the eye saw is named in the vocabulary of the painter. The third line uses an old name for the cormorant, where the prose had plainly identified the bird. The fourth line is a conditional: if the brush were equal to it. The closing auxiliary is counterfactual, so that the wish to paint rests on the settled knowledge that she cannot. Ink, brush, painting and the verb for drawing bind the poem together as words of the painter's art, and the whole poem is the sigh of one unable to take down a contrast of colour exactly as it stands.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other