Nanamagarini magarerutamano oonukite aritōshitowa shirazuyaaruramu

English Translation

Through the sevenfold
winding of the jewel's channel
the cord was drawn through —
that the ant is what passes
do they not know it, even now

Meaning

The cord was drawn through the jewel that winds seven ways — do they not know, then, that this is the ant that passes through?

Commentary

244 The Deity of Aritōshi

Long ago there was a sovereign who cared only for the young and did away with anyone who reached forty, so that people fled and hid themselves in distant provinces and not one such person remained in the capital. A man who was then a Middle Captain had two parents near seventy, and since he could not bear to have them live far off, nor to pass a day without seeing them, he secretly dug into the ground of his house, built a chamber there, hid them in it and went to see them. To the world and to the court it was given out that they had vanished. Young as he was, he had a great reputation for wisdom and was much regarded — because of what his parents knew.

The sovereign of China, meaning to take the country by outwitting its ruler, kept sending difficult tests. Asked which end of a smoothly rounded length of wood was the base and which the tip, the parents said to cast it sideways into a swift river and mark as the tip whichever end went first. Asked which of two snakes of equal length was male and which female, they said to bring a slender switch near the tails and know the one whose tail did not move for the female. Each time the Middle Captain presented the answer as his own, and each time it was right.

Then came a small jewel, coiled in seven turns, pierced through with an opening at either end, and a demand that a cord be drawn through it — a thing anyone in their country could do. When every noble and courtier declared it impossible even for the finest craftsman, the Middle Captain asked his parents, and was told to catch two large ants, tie fine thread about their waists, attach a slightly thicker thread to that, and smear honey at the far opening. It was done, and the ants, catching the scent, came out at once at the other end. After the threaded jewel was sent back, the sovereign of China said that Japan was clever after all, and sent no more such tests.

The sovereign thought the Middle Captain a remarkable man and asked what he wished, what rank he should be given. He answered that he wanted neither office nor rank, only permission to seek out his aged parents, who were living hidden, and let them live in the capital. The sovereign said it was an easy thing and granted it, and parents everywhere rejoiced to hear of it. The Middle Captain rose to the highest offices of state.

The speaker of the poem is the deity of Aritōshi, whom the text supposes may be that same man become a god. Neither the Middle Captain, nor his parents, nor the Chinese sovereign is named.

The place is the shrine of Aritōshi, and the time is a night when the god appeared to someone who had come to worship there.

The threading of the coiled jewel by means of an ant is retold as the origin of the god's name, spoken by the god himself to a worshipper.

The text closes by saying that someone reported the god had spoken thus, placing the whole thing at one remove as hearsay. The passage stands within a list of shrines, which also mentions that Tsurayuki once composed a poem for this deity when his horse fell ill.

The first line gives the sevenfold winding, rendering the difficulty of the channel as a plain number. The second names the object, and the third the act of drawing a cord through it. Between them the whole episode of the jewel is reproduced without a word to spare.

Everything turns on the fourth line, where the phrase for passing an ant through is also the name of the shrine, and where the sense of insisting that something exists sounds beneath it as well, so that origin and assertion fold into one word. In the close, an interrogative particle and an auxiliary of present conjecture put the matter to the worshipper: do they not know it, even now?

The memory of the wisdom that solved the riddle survives as a divine name, and the god declares that name's origin himself — the standard shape of a legend explaining how a place or shrine came to be called what it is. Having told at length of a cruel policy toward the old and of a country saved by an old couple's knowledge, the passage sets this poem at the end so that the whole narrative contracts into a single word of the god's name.

Source

Makura no Soshi

Other