Yukurinaku akugareideshi izayoi no tsuki ya okurenu katami narubeki

English Translation

All unlooked for, you
wandered out and away—but
the sixteenth-night moon:
is it not the keepsake that
has never fallen behind?

Meaning

That sixteenth-night moon, which drifted out so unlooked-for: is it not the one keepsake that has never once fallen behind 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 from the capital.

It is the second of the two poems in reply to the letter sent from Mount Utsu, written directly after the first.

Since she had left the capital on the sixteenth of the tenth month, Abutsu-ni felt that the lady could not have forgotten the lingering moon of that night, and found it graceful and moving; her answer is addressed to this poem.

In a single word for the moon, the lady shows that she has remembered the date of the departure. The first line means unlooked-for, out of nowhere, taking up the very phrase of the preface, where Abutsu-ni says that all unlooked-for she resolved to set out drawn by the lingering moon. The verb in the second line means that the heart leaves the body and drifts away, so that the abandonment of the capital is rendered not as a decision but as a floating of the spirit. The third line names the moon of the sixteenth night, the moon that hangs back and rises late. In the fourth line an interrogative particle binds to the end of the poem, and the verb is a negative attributive: never falling behind. The word for keepsake in the closing line is the one used in "Waka no ura ni kakitodometaru moshiogusa kore o mukashi no katami tomo miyo" among the parting poems; there it was a bundle of notebooks left behind, and here it is the moon in the sky itself. The wit of the poem lies in naming the date of the sixteenth not as a date but as a moon, and it is from that night of departure, and from the phrase in the preface, that this diary takes its name.

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other