Yukashisa yo sonata no kumo o sobatatete yoso ni shinuru Ashigara no yama

English Translation

How I long to see!
But we have set its clouds up
off to one side there
and made a stranger of it,
Ashigara, that mountain.

Meaning

How I should have liked to see it: Ashigara, whose clouds we have left standing off to one side, made a stranger to us.

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), on the Hakone road, looking off toward the Ashigara they had chosen not to take.

They had taken the Hakone road because Ashigara was said to be long, and the poem is her thought of the road not travelled.

There is no reply. The prose then turns to the descent of a very steep mountain.

It is an unusual conceit: the poem regrets the road not taken. The adjective in the first line means that the heart is drawn toward something one wants to see, and an exclamatory particle opens the poem on that note. The word for that direction in the second line is the same the Taifu used in "Harubaru to yukusaki tōku shitawarete ikani sonata no sora o nagamemu"; there it meant the east as seen from the capital, and here it means the way the road did not go. The verb in the third line means to make something stand up steeply, so that the mountain is left standing beyond its clouds. The fourth line says plainly what the decision amounted to: it has been made a thing of no concern to her. The closing line ends on the name of the mountain not visited. Ashigara is a famous site on the old road east, and in knowing only a name one may compare "Wataramu to omoi ya kakeshi Azumaji ni ari to bakari wa Kikugawa no mizu" and "Narawazu yo yoso ni kikikoshi Kiyomigata araiso nami no kakaru nezame wa"; but there she came at last to stand in a place known only by name, and here she never stands there at all.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other