Izuku yori tabine no yuka ni kayouramu omoiokitsuru tsuyu o tazunete

English Translation

From what place does he
come to the bed of your rest
there upon the road?
Seeking, I think, the dew he
left behind him when he went.

Meaning

From where does he come, night after night, to your traveller's bed? Seeking, surely, the dew of the thoughts he left behind.

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), the second of the two poems in the reply that came to Kamakura from the capital.

It answers "Hakanashi ya tabine no yume ni mayoikite samureba mienu hito no omokage."

With this poem the exchange with the Shin-Chunagon ends. The prose goes on to say that through the summer letters stopped coming to a strange degree and she was uneasy, and that news of disturbances in the capital made her more anxious still, until at last, on the second of the eighth month, a messenger arrived.

The reply answers from the dead man's side, giving the reason why the dream comes. The first line asks from where, taking the form of a question that the lower half of the poem then answers itself. The second line, the bed of a traveller's rest, restates the sent poem's dream as a specific place. The verb in the third line means to come and go continually, so that where the sent poem had a single straying visit this receives it as a repeated coming, with a present conjecture. The fourth line means to have left one's thoughts behind, of what the dead man left in this world. The word for dew in the closing line is chosen for its association with the verb of leaving something in place; it is the type of what is fleeting, and it also means tears. The whole says that he comes in dreams because he is seeking what he left behind. Where the sent poem grieved at the frailty of a face that comes and vanishes, this answers that the visit has a purpose, receiving the dream not as an accident but as the dead man's will — a consolation that only this lady, Tameie's own sister, was placed to offer.

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other