Oboro naru tsuki wa miyako no sora nagara mada kikazarishi nami no yoruyoru

English Translation

The moon is hazy,
and it hangs in the same sky
as the capital—
but these are nights I never
heard before, of waves coming.

Meaning

The moon is hazy in the same sky that hangs over the capital; but these nights of waves coming in are something I never heard before.

Commentary

Section 16 Spring Comes: The Exchange on the Moon of the Capital

Before long the year ended and spring came. The view was clouded over with haze and hard to make out; the door of the valley was next door, and yet not even the first note of the warbler came to visit her. The spring sky she had known so long was hard to bear, and just when she was most homesick for the past, someone came to say there was a courier for the capital again. Among the letters she wrote to her usual correspondents, she sent a poem to the lady who had written to her of the lingering moon, and added other unremarkable things besides. The reply came by way of a sure hand, before very long, and she received it as one who had been waiting for it. The section consists of that exchange of two poems.

Abutsu-ni was a consort of Fujiwara no Tameie and the mother of Tamesuke and Tamemori, living at Tsukikage-no-yatsu in Kamakura. Her correspondent is the exalted lady who, soon after her arrival in Kamakura, had answered the letter sent by the ascetic from Mount Utsu with the poem "Yukurinaku akugareideshi izayoi no tsuki ya okurenu katami narubeki." The text gives no name, and here too she is called only the lady who wrote of the lingering moon. These two poems are the exchange of the first spring Abutsu-ni spent in Kamakura.

Early spring of Koan 3 (1280), a poem in a letter sent from Tsukikage-no-yatsu in Kamakura to the capital; the first spring of the new year in the east.

The spring sky she had known so long was hard to bear, and just when she was most homesick, someone brought word of a courier for the capital; among her letters she sent this to the lady who had written of the lingering moon.

The reply came by a sure hand before long, and its poem takes back the closing line of this one unchanged.

The poem joins her to the capital at the one point of a shared moon and then states the distance in terms of what reaches the ear. The first line describes the blurred spring moon, following on the prose about a view clouded with haze. The second line says that the moon she is looking at is the same one that hangs over the capital, resting on the fact that this correspondence has turned on the moon from the beginning. The concessive particle in the third line folds the poem back: the same sky, and yet. The fourth line means never heard until now, and here the poem's centre moves from seeing to hearing. In the closing line the same syllables mean both night and the coming in of waves, so that wave and night hang together, and the doubled word means night after night. The moon can be shared with the capital and the sound of the waves cannot: that is the division. It also tells us that the nights broken by the noise of surf, sung in "Narawazu yo yoso ni kikikoshi Kiyomigata araiso nami no kakaru nezame wa" on the Suruga road, have gone on since she settled here. Some manuscripts give a slightly different form of the closing word.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other