Waga kokoro utsutsu to mo nashi Utsu no yama yume ni mo tōki mukashi kou tote

English Translation

My heart is not here,
and not in the waking world—
Mount Utsu, and I
long for a past that is far
even from me in my dreams.

Meaning

My heart cannot tell waking from anything else, here on Mount Utsu, longing for a past that stays distant even in dreams.

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), crossing Mount Utsu in Suruga.

Just as she was crossing, an ascetic known to the Ajari travelling with her met them on the road. It was as though the old story were being deliberately acted again, and she found it strange and delightful; since they were in haste she could write few letters, and sent word to one exalted household only. This is one of the two poems written with that letter.

A reply came later. After she reached Kamakura, the household to which she had sent word by the ascetic at Mount Utsu wrote back by a sure hand with the poem "Tabigoromo namida o soete Utsu no yama shigurenu hima mo sazo shigururamu," and that is the first of the exchanges of her Kamakura months.

The model poem is Ariwara no Narihira's, in the travel section of the Kokinshu, saying that by Mount Utsu in Suruga he could meet the one he loved neither in waking life nor in dreams; in the ninth episode of the Ise Monogatari it stands in the scene where the party meets an ascetic on that mountain and sends a letter by him to the capital. The prose here quotes a phrase from it and says that the moment felt like a deliberate imitation of the old story, which is the author's own acknowledgement of the parallel.

The poem is the surprise of finding a scene from the Ise Monogatari actually repeated. The first line puts her own heart forward as the subject. The second line says that what is happening cannot be told for waking life. The third line folds that word for waking into the name of the mountain, exactly as the model poem had done, and takes the pivot over whole. The fourth line answers the model's line about not meeting even in dreams, but shifts it: what cannot be reached is not a person but a past, and that shift is what is new here. The closing phrase gives the reason and breaks off. The word for the past reaches both to the age in which the model was written and to her own years with the man now dead, so that a chance meeting with an ascetic is at once the re-enactment of a story and an event that calls up all the lost years.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other