Azumaji no sora natsukashiki katami dani shinobu namida ni kumoru tsukikage

English Translation

The sky of the east,
which I love, and the one thing
left to keep us joined—
even that is clouded now,
the moonlight, by my longing.

Meaning

I love that sky of the eastern road; and even the moonlight, the one keepsake we still share, is clouded over by the tears of my longing.

Commentary

Section 23 The Exchange on the Sky One Longs For

The Gon-Chunagon writes again, at length, saying that since Abutsu-ni went down she has had no friend to make poems with, and that now autumn has come she thinks of her more and more and lies awake alone gazing at the moon; and she sends a poem. Abutsu-ni answers, writing that she too longs for her old home, and returns a poem of her own. Many poems from the capital have accumulated since then, the prose adds; she means to write them down as well. With that the pen stops, and the record of the exchanges of her Kamakura months is closed.

Abutsu-ni was a consort of Fujiwara no Tameie and the mother of Tamesuke and Tamemori, living at Tsukikage-no-yatsu in Kamakura. The Gon-Chunagon is the daughter of Tamenori, the former Captain of the Right Watch, and serves in the household of Omiya-in; since Tamenori was a son of Tameie and a younger brother of Tameuji, she is a granddaughter of Abutsu-ni's late husband. After the enquiry at the beginning of winter, the exchange of practice poems in spring, the exchange during the fever and the exchange about the cuckoo, this is the last of their correspondence, and of all the correspondents in the Kamakura chapters she is the one with whom the most poems pass.

Autumn of Koan 3 (1280), a poem in a letter that reached Tsukikage-no-yatsu in Kamakura from the capital.

It came with a long letter saying that since Abutsu-ni went down she has had no friend to make poems with, and that now autumn has come she thinks of her more and more and lies awake alone gazing at the moon.

Abutsu-ni answers, writing that she too longs for her old home. With this exchange the poems recorded in the Kamakura chapters come to an end.

A poem of separation, in which even the one remaining bond is clouded over with tears. The first line names the eastern road and the country it leads to, the direction where the other now is. The adjective in the second line means, in the old language, that the heart is drawn toward something; it was used in "Ichinomiya na sae natsukashi futatsu naku mitsu naki nori o mamoru narubeshi" on the Owari road. Here it means that the sky is dear simply because the other is beneath it. In the third line the word for keepsake means whatever still joins two people who are parted, and the particle means, if only that much. Folded into it is the assumption that seeing the same moon from the capital and from the east is the single keepsake they have. To see the moon as a keepsake is exactly what was written to Abutsu-ni soon after her arrival, at the head of the Kamakura chapters, in "Yukurinaku akugareideshi izayoi no tsuki ya okurenu katami narubeki"; the record of her months in Kamakura opens with the moon as a keepsake, and here returns to the same word. The fourth line means, because of the tears of longing. The closing line ends on a noun: even that one keepsake cannot be seen. What the prose had said, that she lay awake gazing only at the moon, becomes the poem itself.

Source

Izayoi Nikki

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