Kuchihateshi Nagara no hashi o tsukurabaya Fuji no keburi mo tatazu narinaba

English Translation

Let us build again
the bridge of Nagara, which
has rotted away—
now that even Fuji's smoke
has ceased to rise from the peak.

Meaning

I would build again the long-rotted bridge of Nagara, now that even the smoke of Fuji has stopped rising.

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), before Mount Fuji on the Suruga coast; the poem that closes the Fuji passage.

It is the second of the two poems made when the words of the Kokinshu preface came back to her before the smokeless mountain.

There is no reply. The prose says that she lodged that night at a place called Nami-no-ue and that the roaring kept her from closing her eyes, and then moves on to the Fuji River on the twenty-seventh.

The Japanese preface to the Kokinshu says that those who hear that Fuji no longer smokes and that the bridge of Nagara is being rebuilt console themselves with poetry alone. It names the smoke of Fuji and the bridge of Nagara together as the type of things long since lost, and this poem takes that pairing over whole.

The poem takes the two things the preface set side by side and exchanges them. The first line assumes that the bridge has long since rotted away. The second names a celebrated site in Settsu, cited in the preface, with Fuji's smoke, as something that no longer exists. The particle closing the third line expresses a wish: I would build it. The wish is to call a vanished thing back into the world, and it differs from the preface, which said that before such losses people console themselves with poetry; here she proposes to rebuild. The particle in the fourth line adds Fuji's smoke to the bridge, following the preface's pairing. The closing line is a conditional formed on a perfective, placed after the wish by inversion: now that it has ceased. The logic is that, both losses having fallen together, one of them at least should be made good; and the wish of a woman who set out on this journey so that a house's art of poetry should not be allowed to lapse lies exactly over it.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other