Naozari ni mirume bakari o karimakura musubiokitsu to hito ni kataru na

English Translation

Carelessly I saw,
and no more than saw, this thing—
borrowed pillow, do
not tell anyone that we
bound ourselves, the two of us.

Meaning

Pillow I merely glanced at and borrowed for an hour: do not go telling anyone that we bound ourselves to each other.

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.

Midday on the twenty-sixth of the tenth month of Koan 2 (1279), at a house where she stopped on the road near the beach at Okitsu in Suruga.

There was a rough boxwood pillow at the house where she rested; feeling wretched she lay down, and seeing an inkstone she wrote this on the paper screen by the pillow without getting up.

There is no reply. The prose then goes on to the passing of the barrier of Kiyomi toward dusk. The closing phrase of this poem returns on the twenty-seventh, at the shore of Tago, in "Kokoro kara oritatsu Tago no amagoromo hosanu urami to hito ni kataru na."

The poem addresses a pillow met by chance and teases it in the language of love. The first line means carelessly, without seriousness. In the second line the word for glancing at something is also the name of an edible seaweed, chosen for a lodging by the sea, and the limiting particle marks how slight the acquaintance was: she only looked. The third line is the borrowed pillow of a traveller's rest, and the first syllables also carry the sense of harvesting that seaweed, so that it links with the word above. The fourth line uses the ordinary phrase for binding oneself in a vow, borrowing the convention that ties a traveller's pillow to a night's intimacy. The prohibitive particle at the end makes the poem an injunction to silence laid on the pillow itself. To pick such a quarrel with a rough boxwood pillow is a way of easing the discomfort of lying there unable to rise, and among the heavy poems of longing and grievance in this section, this one alone is light.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other