Ama obune kogiyuku kata o miseji to ya nami ni tachisou ura no asagiri

English Translation

Is it that they must
not let me see which way the
fishing boats have gone—
the morning mist of the bay
that rises up with the waves?

Meaning

Is it to keep me from seeing which way the little fishing boats are rowing, this morning mist of the bay that rises with the waves?

Commentary

Section 11 The Sagami Road: from Sakawa to Kamakura

Out of Izu the journey of the Izayoi Nikki enters Sagami, and with this section the record of the road from the capital to Kamakura comes to an end. She fords the Mariko River in deep darkness. That night she stops at a place called Sakawa, and word goes round that they are to enter Kamakura the next day. On the twenty-ninth she leaves Sakawa and goes on and on along the beach road. Over the sea, as the day breaks, a very thin moon comes out. Mist rises above the waves washing in and out at the water's edge, and the many fishing boats that had been there are lost to sight. That the capital should now be so utterly far away still seems to her like a dream. Three poems come of this; then the prose notes that the place where she is to live in the east is called Tsukikage-no-yatsu, and the record of the road is over.

Abutsu-ni was a consort of Fujiwara no Tameie and the mother of Tamesuke and Tamemori; she has come down 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 three poems of this section are her own, with no one to answer them. They belong to the fourteenth day after her departure from the capital on the sixteenth of the tenth month, the day she enters Kamakura. The one long gone in the last poem is her late husband Tameie, whom the diary calls by the same name in the section of parting poems.

The morning of the twenty-ninth of the tenth month of Koan 2 (1279), on the beach road in Sagami; the day she enters Kamakura.

Mist rose above the waves washing in and out at the water's edge, and the many fishing boats that had been there were lost to sight. The poem belongs to that moment.

There is no reply. The prose then gives her feeling that the capital has become utterly distant, and moves to the last poem of the road.

The mist's hiding of the boats is taken as the mist's own intention. The first line names the small boats of the fisherfolk, the many boats the prose had mentioned. The second line means the direction in which they are rowing. In the third line a negative-intentional auxiliary is followed by a quotative and an interrogative particle, so that the poem guesses at what the mist may be minded to do: is it meant that I should not see? To restate a plain disappearance as the work of something wishing to conceal is the whole action of the poem. In the fourth line the verb means both that mist rises and that it draws close alongside, describing the way the mist lay low over the water. The closing line ends on the name of the thing doing the hiding. In "Tabibito wa mina morotomo ni asa tachite koma uchiwatasu Yasu no kawagiri" on the Omi road a scene was likewise emptied by mist; that was the third day of the journey and this is the last, so that the same picture of moving through thick mist stands at the beginning and at the end of the record of the road.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other