Tare ka kite Mitsuke no sato to kiku kara ni itodo tabine no sora osoroshiki

English Translation

Who came here, and found
the village named Mitsuke?
At the name alone
the sky above my night's rest
grows more fearful still to me.

Meaning

Who came and found this place, that it should be called Mitsuke, the Found? No sooner do I hear the name than the sky over my traveller's bed grows more fearful still.

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-third of the tenth month of Koan 2 (1279), at the provincial seat of Mitsuke in Totomi. The settlement was derelict and frightening, and there was a well of water beside it.

Lodging there, unnerved by the desolation of the place, she made this poem on hearing its name.

There is no reply. The prose goes on to the twenty-fourth, when around midday she crosses Saya no Nakayama.

The name of a place is taken up as a question and made to deepen the unease of the night. The interrogative particle in the first line raises the question of who can have come. In the second line the place-name is also the verb meaning to find, so that the opening question and the name work together: is it called that because someone came and found it? The particle in the third line means, the instant one hears, and marks how fast the unease follows the name. The adverb in the fourth line means all the more, piling on a forlornness already there. The prose remark that the settlement was derelict and frightening is here joined to a speculation about the name's origin. The closing line breaks off in an attributive form, and the word for sky means both the sky over a traveller's bed and a vague, groundless dread. Like "Itodo nao sode nurase to ya yadorikemu manaku shigure no moruyama ni shimo" on the Omi road, it is the pattern of taking the name of one's lodging as a pivot and making a single night's unease out of it.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other