Onozukara tsutaeshi ato mo aru mono o kami wa shiruramu Shikishima no michi

English Translation

The traces we have
handed down are there to see—
surely the god knows
the way of Shikishima,
the way of our native song.

Meaning

The traces handed down are there, plain enough; surely the god must know it, this way of Japanese song.

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), before the god at the shrine of Mishima in Izu.

It is the second of the three poems offered there.

Being an offering, it has no reply. The claim it makes runs on into the Kamakura chapters, where she keeps up an exchange of poems with the capital, and the long poem at the end of the diary takes the same posture, appealing to the written traces handed down through the generations as the ground of her case.

Here, before a god, the inheritance of the house of poetry is claimed outright, and this is the centre of the three. The first line means of itself, as a matter of course, implying that the transmission was not contrived. The word for traces in the second line means what has been written down, the drafts and the hands of the generations, the same word entrusted to her child in "Waka no ura ni kakitodometaru moshiogusa kore o mukashi no katami tomo miyo." The particle closing the third line is concessive and carries its implication forward: they exist, and yet. The present conjecture in the fourth line says that though men may not know, the god must, which answers the way the prose has framed this journey as an appeal to the judgment at Kamakura. The closing line names the way of Japanese poetry and ends on the noun, setting last the thing that must be protected. In "Narumigata waka no urakaze hedatezuba onaji kokoro ni kami mo ukuramu" on the Owari road the art of poetry was also placed before a god, but there the prayer was that a poem be received; here she asks the god to bear witness that the way itself is rightfully hers.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other