Tazunekite waga koekakaru Hakoneji o yama no kai aru shirube to zo omou

English Translation

I have sought you out,
and the road I am to climb
over Hakone—
I count it worth the mountain
to be given such a guide.

Meaning

I have come seeking you, and the Hakone road I am about to climb: I take it as a guidance that makes the mountain worth the crossing.

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, on the eve of the Hakone crossing.

It is the last of the three poems offered there, committing to the god the road she must travel next.

Being an offering, it has no reply. On the twenty-eighth she does exactly as the poem says, leaving the provincial seat and taking the Hakone road, so that the prayer and its fulfilment stand one after the other in the text.

As the close of the three, the poem comes down from an abstract claim to tomorrow's road. The first line means to have found and come to the shrine, using the phrase of "Hamamatsu no kawaranu kage o tazunekite mishi hito nami ni mukashi o zo tou" on the Totomi road, though there the seeking was of pines and here it is of a god. The second line means, that I am just about to cross, drawing into the poem a road not yet travelled. The third line names the pass she must take the next day. In the fourth line the word for the gap between mountains is also the word for a thing being worth doing, so that a hard climb is restated as a climb worth making. The closing line binds an emphatic particle to the verb and runs a syllable long, so that the act of holding it so is stressed. The word for guide means a leading of the way; a human guide, the Ajari, is already travelling with her, but what is asked for here is a god's. The poem stands in the same position as "Amekaze mo kami no kokoro ni makasuramu waga yukusaki no sawari arasuna," which closed the four at Atsuta with a prayer for a safe road.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other