Aki fukaki kusa no makura ni ware zo naku furisutete koshi suzumushi no ne o

English Translation

Deep in autumn now,
on this grass pillow, I cry
for the bell-cricket
whose voice I turned away from
and left behind me, and came.

Meaning

Deep in autumn, on this grass pillow, it is I who weep — for the bell-cricket's voice I turned my back on and left behind.

Commentary

Section 21 Tamesuke's Fifty Poems and the Replies to Them

Through the summer, letters stopped coming to a strange degree, and her uneasiness was more than ordinary. News that waves were rising on the shore of Shiga and that there were disturbances at the Mountain and at Miidera made her more anxious still. At last, on the second of the eighth month, a messenger arrived, and she gathered up and read the letters that had been accumulating from various people. From the young lord, the Jiju and Consultant, came fifty poems, sent down without even a fair copy made, saying that he had composed them. His poems had grown very fine. That eighteen of the fifty should have earned her mark seemed to her strange, and doubtless her parent's blind love was at fault. Among them she found one poem, and taking it to have been written out of thought for her under a traveller's sky, she was moved, and beside that poem, in small characters, she wrote an answer and sent it back. Beside another poem on the same travel topic she likewise added an answer. Then, at the end of the fifty, she wrote a note, setting down her general remarks on the poems, and at the very end she added a poem of her own.

Abutsu-ni was a consort of Fujiwara no Tameie and the mother of Tamesuke and Tamemori, living at Tsukikage-no-yatsu in Kamakura. The young lord, the Jiju and Consultant, is her son Tamesuke, called the Jiju since the section of parting poems, who on the day of her departure answered her with "Tsui ni yomo ada ni wa naraji moshiogusa katami o miyo no ato ni nokoseba." This section takes an unusual form for an exchange: she marks his fifty poems, and writes her replies in small characters beside them. The one long gone, named in the poem at the end, is the dead Tameie, the person to whom she would above all have liked to show these fifty.

After the second day of the eighth month of Koan 3 (1280), at Tsukikage-no-yatsu in Kamakura, over the fifty poems that had come from the capital.

It is the answer written beside Tamesuke's "Karisome no kusa no makura no yonayona o omoiyaru ni mo sode zo tsuyukeki."

Having written in these two replies, Abutsu-ni added a note at the end of the fifty, set down her general remarks on the poems, and placed one more poem last of all.

The one who was being thought of turns the roles around and does the thinking. The first line names the deep autumn of the eighth month, adding a season the sent poem had not. The second line takes over the sent poem's grass pillow and restates it from the side of the person actually lying on it rather than the side of the person imagining it. In the third line the verb means to weep, and beside the cricket below it also carries the sense of an insect's cry; an emphatic particle binds it, so that she insists it is rather she who weeps. The fourth line uses the very phrase of the preface, where she said that such weakness would not do and cast it all off, acknowledging again that the leaving was her own act. The closing line ends on a noun and, by its final particle, turns back by inversion to the verb in the third; the bell-cricket stands for the children left in the capital, and the word after it is their voice. The child wrote of the mother's nights on the road, and the mother writes back of the child in the capital as an insect's cry, so that the direction of the exchange is exactly reversed. Grass, autumn and the cry of insects belong to one field, carrying over the grass and dew of the poem answered.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other