Itsu no yo no fumoto no chiri ka Fuji no ne o yuki sae takaki yama to nashikemu

English Translation

From the dust of what
age, at the foot of the peak,
did Fuji arise
to be a mountain so high
that even its snow is high?

Meaning

From what age's dust at its foot did Fuji rise to become a mountain so high that even the snow upon it lies high?

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-sixth of the tenth month of Koan 2 (1279), looking up at Mount Fuji from the Suruga coast.

Seeing the mountain with its smoke gone, and finding no one able to answer her, she recalled the words of the Kokinshu preface. This is one of the two poems made then.

There is no reply. The prose sets the two poems together and then records that she lodged at a place called Nami-no-ue.

The dust at the foot of the mountain comes from the Japanese preface to the Kokinshu, which says that even a high mountain is built up from the dust and mud at its base until it grows to where the clouds trail.

A phrase from the preface is applied to the mountain in front of her, and the question it raises is one of sheer distance in time. The first line asks from what age. The interrogative particle in the second line binds to the auxiliary of past conjecture at the end. The image of dust accumulating into a mountain is the preface's, offered there as a figure for how the art of poetry grows from small beginnings; here it is taken over as a literal account of Fuji's height. The third line names the peak before her. The additive particle in the fourth line piles one height on another: not only is the mountain high, the snow upon it is high too. The closing auxiliary is a past conjecture, reaching for a beginning too far back to know. Where "Ta ga kata ni nabikihatete ka Fuji no ne no keburi no sue no miezu naruramu" just before had asked where a vanished thing had gone, this asks how an existing thing came to be, so that the two questions, of what is lost and what has grown, stand side by side. That the preface should come to mind is natural in one born into the house of poetry, and it is also of a piece with a journey undertaken for that house's sake.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other