Toshifureba yowaiwaoinu shikawaaredo hanaoshimireba monoomoimonashi

English Translation

The years have gone by
and my age has grown old now
yet even so still
when I look upon these blooms
no sorrow remains in me

Meaning

The years have gone, and age has come upon me; yet when I look on these blossoms, no sorrow is left in me.

Commentary

23 The Northeast Corner of the Seiryōden

The passage opens with the painted screen in the northeast corner of the Seiryōden, showing a rough sea and long-armed, long-legged creatures. By the balustrade stands a tall blue vase filled with branches of cherry blossom some five feet long, the flowers spilling out past the railing. Around midday the Major Counsellor arrives in a cherry-coloured court robe and speaks with the Emperor. Within the blinds the ladies have let their outer robes slip loose, their sleeves pushed out beneath the screens. Amid the sound of the imperial meal being carried in and the guards' warning cries on a soft, unhurried day, the Empress pushes aside her curtain of state and comes out to the threshold, softly reciting a line of old verse. She then folds a sheet of white paper and tells her ladies each to write down an old poem they can recall at that moment. Told to grind the ink, the author is too distracted to attend to it, and when pressed she flushes to the face in confusion.

The Major Counsellor is Fujiwara no Korechika, heir of the Regent Michitaka and elder brother of Empress Teishi by the same mother. The sovereign is Emperor Ichijō, and the Empress is Teishi. The original poem is by the Regent and Chancellor Fujiwara no Yoshifusa, whose daughter Akiko was consort to Emperor Montoku and mother of Emperor Seiwa.

The setting is the Seiryōden of the palace, on a spring afternoon with the cherry in full bloom.

The Empress commands that each lady write down whatever old poem comes to mind, and after a senior lady has set down two or three verses on spring and on the heart of the blossom, this poem is written out, with one phrase altered: "when I look upon these blooms" becomes "when I look upon you."

The Empress compares what has been written and says it was precisely these turns of mind she wished to see. From there she goes on to tell of the time Retired Emperor En'yū had his courtiers write poems in a booklet, and then of the Nyōgo of the Senyōden and her recitation of the Kokinshū.

The original poem is preserved in the spring books of the Kokin Wakashū under Fujiwara no Yoshifusa's name, composed before the Somedono Empress as she had cherry blossoms set in a vase.

The opening phrase states a settled cause: because the years have passed. The completive auxiliary in the second line closes the statement flatly — age has already come. The third line turns on a concessive: and yet, for all that. It takes the weight of the lament and swings it round toward the second half. In the fourth line an emphatic particle presses the condition: if only I look on these blossoms. The final line ends on a plain adjective, letting the sorrow of age dissolve into the beauty of the flowers without further comment.

In the text the word for blossom has been replaced by the word for you, so that a poem in praise of cherry flowers becomes, without changing anything else, a poem in praise of the sovereign present in the room. The original was composed before a vase of cherry; here that same frame is carried into the Seiryōden, where real cherry spills over the balustrade and the Empress herself is the object of the gaze. What is displayed is not only the memory that can produce an old poem on demand, but the wit that shifts a single word to fit the occasion — which is exactly what the Empress means when she says it was the turns of mind she wanted to see. The other altered poem in this same section, "Shionomitsu itsumonouranoitsumoitsumo kimiobafukaku omouhayawaga," works the same way, and the two anecdotes answer each other on the point that one changed word reveals a person's heart.

Author

Fujiwara no Yoshifusa

Source

Makura no Soshi

Other