Kokoro kara nani uramuramu tabigoromo tatsu hi o dani mo shirazugao nite

English Translation

Why should you complain,
when it was your own doing—
and you wore the look
of one who did not so much
as know the day I set out?

Meaning

Why complain, when it was your own doing? You wore the face of someone who did not even know the day I was to set out.

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.

After the twenty-second of the twelfth month of Koan 2 (1279), at Tsukikage-no-yatsu in Kamakura; her answer to the letter from the capital.

It answers the Mikushige-dono's "Hitokata ni sode ya nuremashi tabigoromo tatsu hi o kikanu urami nariseba," and the prose says that this time she replied only to the poem about not being told the day.

With this the exchange with the Mikushige-dono ends, and the prose moves to the letters sent at dawn to her sister and to her sister-in-law the nun.

A reproach is met by asking where the reproach came from. The first line means of one's own accord, the same word joined to the word for grievance in "Kokoro kara oritatsu Tago no amagoromo hosanu urami to hito ni kataru na" on the Suruga road; there she forbade anyone to call her own trouble a grievance, and here she asks after another's, so that the same pairing is turned about. The second line joins an interrogative adverb to a present conjecture and lets the complaint pass lightly. The third line sets the sent poem's third line back in place, where it serves to draw in the verb of the fourth. The fourth line takes over the sent poem's fourth line almost unchanged and adds a particle of extremity: not even the day. The closing suffix means wearing the look of something, so that the sense is, you were pretending not to know. The implication is that it was the lady herself who went off to see the maple leaves on the very day of the farewell visit; the reproach is not denied but turned into a joke, and no edge is left on it. As the prose says plainly that she answered only the poem about the day of departure, the habit of choosing one poem out of two to answer, which runs through the exchanges of this diary, appears here as well.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other