Omoiizuru miyako no koto wa Oigawa iku se no ishi no kazu mo oyobaji

English Translation

All that I recall
of the capital—not one
stone in all the shoals
of the wide Oi River
could come near to their number.

Meaning

The things I remember of the capital: not even the stones in all the shallows of the Oi River could match them for number.

Commentary

Section 9 The Suruga Road: from the Oi River to the Shore of Tago

Out of Totomi the journey of the Izayoi Nikki enters Suruga, and this section runs from the twenty-fifth to the shore of Tago on the twenty-seventh. On the twenty-fifth she leaves Kikugawa and crosses the river called Oi. The water is very low, and contrary to what she had been told the crossing gives no trouble; the bed of the river is said to run some miles, and it is vast, so that one can imagine what it must look like in flood. Just as she is crossing Mount Utsu, a mountain ascetic known to the Ajari meets them on the road. It is as though the old story were being deliberately acted over again, and she finds it strange and delightful and moving and graceful all at once. Since they are travelling in haste she cannot write many letters, and sends word to one exalted household only. That night she stops at a place called Tegoshi. On the twenty-sixth she crosses a river called Warashina and comes out on the beach at Okitsu. At the house where she rests at midday there is a rough boxwood pillow; feeling wretched she lies down, and seeing an inkstone there she writes on the paper screen by the pillow without getting up. Toward dusk she passes the barrier of Kiyomi, where the waves breaking over the rocks look like white robes thrown on, which is very fine. Night falls soon, and she stops in a village near the sea, where the wind is wild all night and the waves seem to rise over the very pillow. Looking at Mount Fuji she finds no smoke rising; when she asks in what year it stopped, no one can even answer clearly, and the words of the Kokinshu preface come back to her. That night she lodges at a place called Nami-no-ue, and the roaring keeps her from closing her eyes. On the twenty-seventh, after full daylight, she crosses the Fuji River; the morning water is bitterly cold, and by her count she forded fifteen channels. The day then turns bright and mild and she comes out on the shore of Tago, where the sight of the fisherfolk at work moves her to speak.

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; at Mount Utsu they meet an ascetic known to the Ajari, and by him she sends a letter back to the capital. All eleven poems of this section are her own, with no one to answer them. In the passage on the smoke of Fuji it is recorded that long ago her father had taken her as far as the province of Totomi, in the days when she composed the poem she quotes by its opening words.

The twenty-fifth of the tenth month of Koan 2 (1279): out of Kikugawa in Totomi and across the Oi River in Suruga.

The water was very low, so that the crossing gave none of the trouble she had been told to expect, and the river bed ran for miles. The poem was made before that prospect, with the flood one could only imagine.

There is no reply. The prose goes on to the meeting with the ascetic at the crossing of Mount Utsu.

The poem takes the number of stones across a whole river bed and uses it to state the sheer quantity of what she remembers. The first line means to call to mind, and puts the matter of the capital first. The particle in the second line marks that matter as the subject to be measured against the verb at the end. The third line names the river, and the first syllables of that name also carry the sense of many, so that the name itself echoes the point of the poem. The fourth line takes up the prose remark that the river bed ran for miles and was vast: in low water the stones lie bare, and that actual sight becomes the standard of measure. The closing line is a negative conjecture, quietly certain: they could not match it. Measuring one uncountable thing against another says that the quantity of feeling cannot be measured at all. The Suruga road opens here, and from now on, at Mount Utsu, at the barrier of Kiyomi and before Fuji, the thought of the capital returns place by place.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other