Ōsakawa hitokoeyasuki sekinareba torinakanunimo aketematsutoka

English Translation

Ōsaka, they say
is a barrier easily crossed
and being that gate
before ever the cock has cried
it stands open, and waits there

Meaning

The Ōsaka barrier is an easy one to cross; they say it stands open and waiting even before the cock has crowed.

Commentary

136 The Head Chamberlain Comes to the Office

The Head Chamberlain and Controller came to the Office of the Empress's Household and talked until late in the night, then said that since he had to go into ritual seclusion the next day it would not do to still be there at the hour of the ox, and returned to the palace. The following morning a letter came: he had meant to sit up all night over old stories, but the cock's crowing had hurried him away. She wrote back asking whether the cock that crowed so deep in the night had been Lord Mengchang's. He answered that Lord Mengchang's cock had opened the Hangu barrier so that three thousand retainers barely escaped, but that his own concern was the barrier at Ōsaka. To this she replied with "Yookomete torinosoranewa hakarutomo yoniōsakano sekiwayurusaji," telling him that the Ōsaka barrier had a vigilant keeper.

The Head Chamberlain is Fujiwara no Yukinari, famous as a calligrapher, later Provisional Major Counsellor, and reckoned one of the three great brushes of his age.

The time is that morning of letters going back and forth; the places are the Office of the Empress's Household and the palace.

The immediate occasion is her flat declaration that the barrier would never let him through. Yukinari takes that declaration and answers that the barrier was never so strict a one to begin with.

With this the exchange ends. He showed the letter to the other courtiers, as she later found out.

The first line plants the barrier's name — the last word of her poem — at the very head of his, showing from the outset that he means to take her on. The second line calls it easy to cross, demolishing the premise of a firmly shut gate. Ōsaka lay on the main road out of the capital toward Ōmi and was in fact heavily travelled, and that plain fact is allowed to slide into the ease of meeting.

The third line gives the reason in a settled conditional: since that is the sort of barrier it is. The fourth removes the very condition her poem had rested on — the cock's crow — by saying that it opens before any cock has cried.

In the close, the verb for opening a gate carries the sense of night breaking as well, and a particle of hearsay lets the whole assertion be attributed to what people say rather than to the speaker. Answering a flat declaration with common report rather than his own opinion takes the edge off the rebuttal. Picking up every term the other has used and then swapping out only the premise: the construction is an exact counterpart to that of "Yookomete torinosoranewa hakarutomo yoniōsakano sekiwayurusaji."

Author

Fujiwara no Yukinari

Source

Makura no Soshi

Other