Aware to ya Mishima no kami no miyabashira tada koko ni shimo megurikinikeri

English Translation

Did the god think me
worth pity, at Mishima,
where the shrine posts stand?
For I have come round at last
to this place and no other.

Meaning

Was it that the god of Mishima looked on me with pity? For here, of all places, my wandering has brought me at last.

Commentary

Section 10 The Izu Road: from the Provincial Seat of Izu to Yusaka

Past the shore of Tago, the journey of the Izayoi Nikki turns into Izu. She stops at the provincial seat of Izu, and while the evening sun still lingers she goes to the shrine of Mishima and offers three poems. On the twenty-eighth she leaves the provincial seat and takes the Hakone road; it was still deep night. It was because the Ashigara road was said to be long that they went by Hakone. She comes down a very steep mountain, where it is hard to keep one's footing; the place is called Yusaka. When at last the crossing is over, there is a river at the foot called Hayakawa, and it truly runs fast. Seeing a great deal of timber floating down it, she asks what it means, and is told that it is salt-wood the fisherfolk are floating down to the shore. Coming out from Yusaka onto the coast, she finds the light going and any lodging still far off. She asks the name of a stretch of sea from which even Oshima in Izu can be seen, but there is no one who knows it. There is nothing there but the huts of the fisherfolk.

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. All seven poems of this section are her own, with no one to answer them. Three of them are votive poems offered at the shrine of Mishima in Izu, matching the four offered at the Atsuta shrine on the Owari road.

The evening of the twenty-seventh of the tenth month of Koan 2 (1279): she reaches the provincial seat of Izu and, while the sun still lingers, goes to the shrine of Mishima.

Lodging at the provincial seat, she went to the shrine before the light failed and offered three poems; this is the first of them.

Being an offering, it has no reply. With these three she prays for the third time on the road, after the god of binding in Mino and the shrine at Atsuta in Owari.

The poem begins by stating the single fact of standing before a god. The interrogative particle in the first line frames the question: was it because the god pitied her that she was brought here? and it reaches forward to the auxiliary that closes the poem. The second line names the deity of the great shrine of Izu. The third line means the pillars of the shrine, standing for the building itself, and by the notion of going round a pillar it also leads into the verb below. The emphatic particle in the fourth line fixes the place: here and nowhere else. In the closing line the verb means both the actual road she has travelled and the way a life comes round at last to a given point, and the final auxiliary marks the recognition of it now. The verb of coming round had already appeared in "Machikeri na mukashi mo koeshi Miyajiyama onaji shigure no meguriau yo o" on the Mikawa road; there it was a reunion with the past, and here it is a meeting with a shrine never seen before, so that the sheer distance travelled is taken as a bond with the god.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other