Tachihanare yo mo ukinami wa kake mo seji mukashi no hito no onaji yo naraba

English Translation

Parted from it all,
no bitter wave of this world
would have broken here,
if only the one long gone
were living in the same age.

Meaning

I would never have left the capital, nor let the bitter waves of this world break over me, had the one who is gone been living still in my own age.

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 twenty-ninth of the tenth month of Koan 2 (1279), on the beach road in Sagami; the poem that closes the record of the road from the capital to Kamakura.

That the capital should have become so utterly distant still seemed to her like a dream, and the poem came of that.

There is no reply. The prose then records that the place where she is to live in the east is called Tsukikage-no-yatsu, and with that the record of the road ends; from here the diary turns to the exchanges of her months in Kamakura.

Placed last in the record of the road, the poem states in five lines why the journey happened at all. The first line, having parted from the capital, answers the departure with which the diary began, when she cast it all off. In the second line the same syllables mean both bitter and floating, the pivot already used in "Kari no yo no yukiki to miru mo hakanashi ya mi o ukifune o ukihashi ni shite" in Mino and "Mizu no awa no ukiyo ni wataru hodo o miyo hayase no obune sao mo yasumezu" in Totomi, now a third time and within a scene of the sea. In the third line the verb means both that a wave breaks over one and that one takes something to heart, with a negative conjecture; the same negative that the Risshi used in "Ada ni nomi namida wa kakeji tabigoromo kokoro no yukite tachikaeru hodo" among the parting poems is used again at the journey's end. The fourth line names the dead Tameie by the phrase the diary has used since the scene of the pillow in "Todomeoku furuki makura no chiri o dani waga tachisaraba tare ka harawamu." The closing line is a counterfactual condition, and it stops there, leaving unsaid what would follow: had he only lived, none of this. The whole history of the suit set out in the preface is folded here into a single sigh, and the fourteen days of the road are closed.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other