Hakanashi ya tabine no yume ni mayoikite samureba mienu hito no omokage

English Translation

How fleeting it is—
he came astray into my
dream on the road, and
when I woke there was nothing:
the face of the one long gone.

Meaning

How fleeting: he wandered into my dream on the road, and when I woke there was nothing left of that face.

Commentary

Section 20 The Exchange with the Shin-Chunagon of Watoku-mon'in

The lady known as the Shin-Chunagon of Watoku-mon'in is a daughter of the Kyogoku Middle Counsellor Teika; her father placed her in the service of the former Ise Priestess of Fukakusa, and there she has remained through the years. Since that Priestess adopted the present retired empress as her child, the lady has passed with her and serves her still. She is a sister of the Mimbukyo no Suke who composed the lines about a sorrowing self and a seaweed-gathering boat. Being the child of such a man, she used to hide her own poems and insist that no one should hear them; but troubled by the uncertainty of Abutsu-ni's far-off journey, she wrote at length of moving things and set down a poem, running it on into the words of the letter so that it hardly looked like a poem at all. That seems to Abutsu-ni no ordinary attention. Abutsu-ni answers her. Then, taking the occasion, and thinking that this lady alone would be moved by it, she writes out and sends two poems about how the late Lay Novice Major Counsellor comes and stands beside her even on her grass pillow, appearing to her in dreams. The lady goes to great trouble to find a courier and answers again. That she had hidden her poems so strictly was, after all, a matter of the occasion. Two poems come from her.

Abutsu-ni was a consort of Fujiwara no Tameie and the mother of Tamesuke and Tamemori, living at Tsukikage-no-yatsu in Kamakura. The Shin-Chunagon is a daughter of the Kyogoku Middle Counsellor Teika, placed by her father with the former Priestess of Fukakusa and grown old in that service; since the Priestess adopted the present retired empress, she passed with her and serves her still. Teika was the father of Abutsu-ni's late husband Tameie, so that the Shin-Chunagon is Tameie's sister and Abutsu-ni's late husband's sibling. The late Lay Novice Major Counsellor is Tameie himself, and the four poems in the second half of this section turn on dreams of him. It is because of that kinship that Abutsu-ni thought this lady alone would be moved.

Around the beginning of summer in Koan 3 (1280), a poem written from Tsukikage-no-yatsu in Kamakura to the capital.

It is the second of the two poems on dreams of the dead Tameie sent to the Shin-Chunagon.

The reply is "Izuku yori tabine no yuka ni kayouramu omoiokitsuru tsuyu o tazunete," which takes up the dream on the road and asks where it comes from.

The poem states plainly the event of one night: a face seen in a dream and gone on waking. The exclamatory particle in the first line opens on the sigh of how frail, how quickly over. The second line names the sleep of a journey, taking up the prose remark that he stands beside her even on her grass pillow. The third line means to come as one who has lost the way, so that the dead man is the one who arrives; she did not summon him. The fourth line is a causal clause on an established condition: whenever she wakes, he is not there — the repetition is in the grammar. The closing line ends on a noun, and the person named is Tameie. The longing that on the road had been given to outward things — asking the pines about the past in "Hamamatsu no kawaranu kage o tazunekite mishi hito nami ni mukashi o zo tou," asking where the smoke of Fuji had gone — now takes the form of a dream: what was entrusted to landscape while she travelled appears in sleep once she has settled in Kamakura.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other