Hamamatsu no kawaranu kage o tazunekite mishi hito nami ni mukashi o zo tou

English Translation

I have come to seek
the unchanged shade of the pines
at Hamamatsu—
and, those I knew being gone,
I ask the trees of the past.

Meaning

I have come seeking the unchanging shade of the pines of Hamamatsu, and since those I once knew are gone, it is the trees I ask about the old days.

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 night of the twenty-second of the tenth month of Koan 2 (1279), at the post town of Hikuma in Totomi; the district was called Hamamatsu.

People she had counted close had once lived there. The faces of those who used to live there came back to her, and she was moved again and again by the span of life that had let her come round and see the place once more. The poem belongs to that moment.

There is no reply. The prose says that she called out the children and grandchildren of those she had known there and spoke with them. This turning back to the past continues from "Machikeri na mukashi mo koeshi Miyajiyama onaji shigure no meguriau yo o" on the Mikawa road, and leads on to the Suruga passage where she asks after the vanished smoke of Fuji.

The poem asks the pines of the place-name to stand in for people who are gone. The first line is at once the name of the district, which the prose records, and the actual pines growing there, so that name and thing coincide in one word. The second line speaks of unchanging shade, the constancy of an evergreen, set against the changeableness of human life. The third line means to come deliberately in search of something. In the fourth line the word after the phrase for those I once saw is understood as meaning that they are no longer there, while by the association with the shore it also sounds like the word for waves. The closing line binds an emphatic particle to the verb, insisting on the act itself: it is the trees, not people, that she questions about the past. On the Mikawa road a hill was said to have been waiting; here the pines are asked; and one can follow the way in which, as the journey goes on, things that are not human become the ones she speaks to.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other