Wataramu to omoi ya kakeshi Azumaji ni ari to bakari wa Kikugawa no mizu

English Translation

Did I ever think
that I would cross it one day,
the Kikugawa,
whose name I had only heard
as a water of the east?

Meaning

Did I ever set my heart on crossing it? The Kikugawa, of which I had heard only that it lay somewhere on the eastern road.

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.

Dawn on the twenty-fifth of the tenth month of Koan 2 (1279), at the Kikugawa lodging in Totomi; the scene that closes the Totomi road.

She had risen at dawn, and the sound of the river was terrible; the poem comes from hearing it.

There is no reply. The prose closes Totomi here and moves into Suruga: on the twenty-fifth she leaves Kikugawa and crosses the river called Oi.

The poem holds the feeling of standing at a river she had known only by name. The auxiliary in the first line expresses intention: that I should cross. The interrogative particle in the second line is rhetorical, cancelling the past: did I ever set my heart on it? Never. The phrase means to fix one's hopes on something. The third line names the road east, a place far off as seen from the capital. The limiting particle in the fourth line marks how thin her knowledge was: she had heard only that it existed. In the closing line the first syllables of the river's name are also the verb meaning to hear, so that a river once merely heard of is now a sound pressing on the ear. The poem ends on the noun for its water, and the prose remark that the sound of the river was terrible remains as its resonance. The Totomi road opened with the grief of leaving the capital in "Sumiwabite tsuki no miyako o ideshikado ukimi hanarenu ariake no kage," and it closes with the plain fact of standing beside an eastern river whose name was all she once knew.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other