Tamakushige Hakone no yama o isogedomo nao akegataki yokogumo no sora

English Translation

Comb-box: Hakone,
and though we hurry to cross
that mountain, the sky
is slow to open, barred still
with a bank of level cloud.

Meaning

However we hurry over the mountain of Hakone, the sky is slow to open, still barred with its long bank of cloud.

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 twenty-eighth of the tenth month of Koan 2 (1279): she leaves the provincial seat of Izu while it is still deep night and takes the Hakone road.

She had set out on the Hakone road and it was still deep night; the poem belongs to that hour.

There is no reply. The prose adds that they took the Hakone road because Ashigara was said to be long, and another poem follows.

A pillow-word draws in a place-name, and the vocabulary of the comb-box then supplies the language of daybreak; the workmanship is conspicuous. The first line names a fine comb-box, whose first syllable gives the mountain of the second line. The third line is concessive: for all their hurrying. In the fourth line the verb means both that the day breaks and that a box is opened, so that the pillow-word of the first line comes alive again as an associated word, and the adjective means hard to do. The closing line ends on the noun for a long bank of cloud, set there as the thing that covers the dawn sky and keeps it from growing light. The frustration of a sky that will not open however one hurries is itself the forlornness of a dark pass. Since "Tabibito wa mina morotomo ni asa tachite koma uchiwatasu Yasu no kawagiri" on the Omi road this journey has kept setting out before dawn, and this poem belongs to that line.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other