Kamome iru susaki no iwa mo yoso narazu nami no kakekosu sode ni minarete

English Translation

The gulls settle there
on the rocks of the sandspit—
not strangers to me:
my sleeves too have grown used to
waves that come washing over.

Meaning

The rocks of the spit where the gulls settle are no strangers to me; my sleeves know well enough what it is to have the waves break over them.

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), looking out over the water from the bridge at Hamana in Totomi.

From the bridge she saw great numbers of gulls crossing in flight, diving under the water and settling on the rocks; the poem comes from that sight.

There is no reply. The prose then turns to the night's lodging at the post town of Hikuma.

The poem pulls rocks out in the water into the same world as herself. The first line takes the prose description as it stands, and the particle in the second line ties those rocks to her. The third line says they are not other, not a stranger's business, and with that the distance between scene and self closes at a stroke. The fourth line states the fact that the waves break over the rocks. The closing line gives the reason: her sleeves are used to exactly that. Standing beside the words for wave and for washing over, the verb for being used to something also carries a faint sound of being at home in water. Following on "Waga tame ya nami mo Takashi no hama naramu sode no minato no nami wa yasumade," which made a harbour of her sleeves, this poem again treats sleeves and sea as one substance, and one sees that the coastal poems of Totomi form a single sequence.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other