Meguriau sue o zo tanomu yukurinaku sora ni ukareshi izayoi no tsuki

English Translation

I trust in the end
to meet again—all unlooked
for, it drifted out
into the sky and floated,
the moon of the sixteenth night.

Meaning

I set my hopes on meeting again at last: this sixteenth-night moon, that drifted all unlooked-for out into the sky.

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; her answer to the two poems from the capital.

Since she had left the capital on the sixteenth of the tenth month, she felt that the lady could not have forgotten the lingering moon of that night, found it graceful and moving, and sent back this one poem only.

With this exchange the traffic of poems in the east begins, and there follow the exchanges with the Gon-Chunagon, with the Mikushige-dono of Shikken-mon'in, with her sister and her sister-in-law, and with her children.

Of the two poems she takes up only the one about the moon, and turns it toward the hope of meeting again. The verb in the first line means for two people to come together after long separation; it was the wish of "Sadamenaki inochi wa shiranu tabi naredo mata ōsaka to tanomete zo yuku" on the Omi road, and in "Machikeri na mukashi mo koeshi Miyajiyama onaji shigure no meguriau yo o" in Mikawa it was granted once, though only of a hill and a season; here for the first time it is used in its proper sense, of a person in the capital. The verb in the second line is likewise the one from that Omi poem, and an emphatic particle bound to it fixes everything on the act of setting one's hopes on what is to come. The third line lifts the opening of the sent poem unchanged. The fourth line restates the sent poem's verb of drifting away: the word here means a heart floating loose, and it turns that drifting from the ground toward the moon afloat in the sky. The closing line hands back the sent poem's noun. Where the sent poem saw the moon as a keepsake that never falls behind the traveller, this reply takes the moon as an image of herself, and so receives the other's kindness by making it her own condition.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other