Hitokata ni sode ya nuremashi tabigoromo tatsu hi o kikanu urami nariseba

English Translation

Would one sleeve alone
have been wet, and only one,
if my grievance were
only this: that I was not
told the day your robe was cut?

Meaning

Would my sleeves have been wet in the ordinary way, if my only grievance were that no one told me the day you cut your travelling robe and went?

Commentary

Section 14 The Exchange with the Mikushige-dono of Shikken-mon'in

The lady known as the Mikushige-dono of Shikken-mon'in is a daughter of the Koga Chancellor Michiteru. She too has had many poems taken up, from the Shokusenzaishu onward and in the private collections of two or three houses, so that her name is well known. She now serves Anka-mon'in as one of her ladies. On the day before Abutsu-ni set out for the east, she went to the Kitashirakawa residence to take her leave, but the lady did not appear. From Kamakura she therefore writes: that the preparations of that one night were so hurried she could not even send word, and that even as she left in haste the lady was on her mind. Gathering together the forlornness of a year ending while she sleeps on the road, and the ceaselessness of the snow, she adds a poem. She had hoped for a reply by the first sure hand; and today, the twenty-second of the twelfth month, the letter comes, welcome and unlooked for. In it the lady says she would like to write of everything in detail, but that tonight she is caught up in an imperial progress made to avoid an unlucky direction and cannot say all she means, which she regrets; and that on the very day of the farewell visit she had gathered the younger women to go and see the autumn leaves at Minedono, so that she heard of it all only afterwards — why, she asks, was she not told? A poem comes with this. Then, guessing at what followed, that it was turning to snow, she adds another. Abutsu-ni this time answers only the poem about not being told the day of departure.

Abutsu-ni was a consort of Fujiwara no Tameie and the mother of Tamesuke and Tamemori, living at Tsukikage-no-yatsu in Kamakura. The Mikushige-dono served Shikken-mon'in and was a daughter of the Koga Chancellor Michiteru, a poet with many pieces in the imperial anthologies from the Shokusenzaishu onward and in the private collections of several houses; she now serves Anka-mon'in. Both Shikken-mon'in and Anka-mon'in were daughters of the retired emperor Go-Takakura. Kitashirakawa was Anka-mon'in's residence, and Minedono was the mountain villa of Kujo Michiie. The four poems of this section turn on a leave-taking in the capital that never took place, and the exchange is built so as to reach back in time.

The twenty-second of the twelfth month of Koan 2 (1279), a poem in the letter received in Kamakura from the capital.

On the very day of the farewell visit the Mikushige-dono had gathered the younger women to go and see the autumn leaves at Minedono, and heard of it all only afterwards. She writes to ask why she was not told, and adds this poem.

Abutsu-ni answers this poem alone. Another comes in the same letter, and she does not reply to it.

A reproach over a missed farewell is built up as a counterfactual. The first line means in the ordinary way, or on one side only; it is the word used in "Anakashiko yokonami kakuna hamachidori hitokata naranu ato o omowaba" among the parting poems, set down here so as to say from the other side that the case is not ordinary at all. The second line joins an interrogative particle to a counterfactual auxiliary, which answers the conditional at the end. The third line names the travelling robe, and it is placed there because the verb in the fourth line means both to set out and to cut cloth, so that robe and cutting belong together. The fourth line is the reproach itself, exactly as the prose gives it: that she was never told the day. The closing conditional is contrary to fact, and by inversion it turns back to the second line. Taken whole, the sense is that if the grievance were only about not being told, her sleeves would have been wet in the ordinary way; since it is not, they are not ordinarily wet. Reproach is voiced, and beneath it the grief of the parting itself is allowed to show.

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other