Tabigoromo namida o soete Utsu no yama shigurenu hima mo sazo shigururamu

English Translation

Your travelling robe,
with your tears added to it—
on Mount Utsu, when
no shower falls, even then
surely it must rain on you.

Meaning

Your travelling robe, and your tears with it: on Mount Utsu, even in the hours when no shower fell, surely the rain was falling on you.

Commentary

Section 12 The Exchange of the Sixteenth Night

The Izayoi Nikki has finished the record of the road and turns to the months in Kamakura. The place where she is to live in the east is called Tsukikage-no-yatsu. It is at the foot of the hills near the shore, and the wind is very rough there. Being beside a mountain temple it is quiet and desolate at once, and the sound of the waves and the wind in the pines never stops. Just when news from the capital has already begun to feel long in coming, a letter arrives by a sure hand from the household to which she had sent word by the ascetic met at Mount Utsu, evidently the reply to that letter. Two poems are written in it. Since she had left the capital on the sixteenth of the tenth month, she wonders whether the lady had not forgotten the lingering moon of that night, and finds it graceful and moving; and she sends back this one poem only.

Abutsu-ni was a consort of Fujiwara no Tameie and the mother of Tamesuke and Tamemori; she had come down from the capital to Kamakura to press her suit over the inheritance of the Hosokawa estate in Harima, and now stays on in the east. Her correspondent is the household to which she sent a letter by the ascetic at Mount Utsu; the text calls it only an exalted household and gives no name. Her lodging in Kamakura is called Tsukikage-no-yatsu, which the interlinear note places within the grounds of Gokurakuji. These three poems are the first exchange after her move east, and from here the exchanges with the people of the capital become the substance of the diary.

Winter of Koan 2 (1279), at Tsukikage-no-yatsu in Kamakura; a poem in the letter that came from the capital by a sure hand.

It is evidently the reply to "Waga kokoro utsutsu to mo nashi Utsu no yama yume ni mo tōki mukashi kou tote" and "Tsuta kaede shigurenu hima mo Utsu no yama namida ni sode no iro zo kogaruru," sent by the ascetic met at Mount Utsu, and it is the first of the two poems in that letter.

Abutsu-ni answers the two with a single poem. This is the first exchange after her move east, and from here the traffic of poems with the capital continues.

The reply gathers up the words of the poems sent and hands each of them back, and it is beautifully judged. The first line names the travelling robe, a word repeated through this diary since "Ada ni nomi namida wa kakeji tabigoromo kokoro no yukite tachikaeru hodo" among the parting poems, so that the traveller is first imagined in the shape of her clothes. The second line adds tears to that robe, widening to the whole garment what the sent poem had said of the sleeve alone. The third line puts the mountain's name back in the same position it held in the sent poem. The fourth line lifts whole the second line of "Tsuta kaede shigurenu hima mo Utsu no yama namida ni sode no iro zo kogaruru," and it is by that line that the poem shows itself to be an answer to that one. In the closing line the verb for the falling of a winter shower is turned to the shedding of tears, with a present conjecture about what cannot be seen and an adverb that answers it. Where the sent poem said that tears dyed the sleeve even when no rain fell, the reply says that even when no rain fell it must have been raining, keeping the whole thing within the vocabulary of the shower; and that willingness to stay in the other's key is itself a courtesy.

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other