Ama no sumu sono sato no na mo shiranami no yosuru nagisa ni yado ya karamashi

English Translation

I do not so much
as know the name of this place
where the divers live—
shall I ask for lodging here,
on this shore of breaking white?

Meaning

I do not even know the name of this village of fisherfolk; shall I ask for lodging here, on a shore where the white waves come in?

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.

Dusk on the twenty-eighth of the tenth month of Koan 2 (1279), on the coast below Yusaka; the scene that closes the Izu passage.

Coming out from Yusaka onto the shore she found the light going and any lodging far off. She asked the name of the stretch of sea from which even Oshima could be seen, and no one knew it; there was nothing there but the huts of the fisherfolk. The poem belongs to that moment.

There is no reply. The prose goes on to the fording of the Mariko River in the dark, and to lodging that night at Sakawa, with word that they should enter Kamakura the next day; and so to the Sagami road of the twenty-ninth.

The forlornness of asking for shelter in a place with no name takes shape here as a poem. The first line takes up the prose remark that there was nothing but the huts of the fisherfolk. The second line puts into verse the plain fact that she had asked and no one knew. In the third line the syllables meaning not to know are also the word for white, so that the namelessness and the breaking surf are folded into a single word; and wave, coming in and water's edge run together as words of the shore. The fourth line names the place where lodging must be sought, which could hardly be less reassuring. The closing line joins an interrogative particle to an auxiliary of hesitant intention, so that the poem ends undecided, between asking and not asking. In "Tabibito wa mino uchiharau yūgure no ame ni yado karu Kasanui no sato" on the Mino road the lodging had a name and the poem said it; here the night's shelter has no name at all, and the distance from the capital shows itself as the loss of place-names.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other