Watatsuumini oyaoshiirete kononushino bonsurumiruzo awarenarikeru

English Translation

Into the wide sea
having pushed his father down
this man, even so
keeps the Bon — and to see it
is a moving thing indeed

Meaning

Having pushed his own father into the sea, this fellow now performs the Bon offering — a touching sight indeed.

Commentary

307 A Man Who Had Been a Lieutenant of the Gate Guards

A man who had been a Lieutenant of the Right Gate Guards, ashamed to have others see his father's unseemly condition, pushed him into the sea while they were travelling up to the capital from Iyo. Everyone was appalled at such wretched behaviour. Then, on the fifteenth of the seventh month, the Ajari Dōmyō saw the same man busy with preparations for the Bon offering, and composed this poem.

Dōmyō was a monk known also as a poet, a son of Fujiwara no Michitsuna. The former Lieutenant is not named.

The time is the Bon festival on the fifteenth of the seventh month, and the place the capital; the father had been thrown overboard on the sea journey up from Iyo.

The immediate occasion is the sight of the very man making ready for the Bon offering.

The text gives the poem and nothing further — no reaction from the man, no sequel.

The first line sets the place of the deed: into the sea. The second uses the blunt verb for shoving something in, and presents the fact without a scrap of decoration. By this point the hearer has the whole episode in mind.

The third line points at the man without naming him — this fellow, this one here — which produces the flat, distancing gaze of the poem. The fourth names the Bon observance, with an emphatic particle that binds the final auxiliary into its attributive form.

Everything rests on the close. The adjective there means moving, admirable, the sort of thing that touches one deeply, and on the face of it praises the man for keeping the rite. Placed on top of the fact that he drowned the father he is now praying for, the praise turns into the sharpest possible irony, and the exclamatory auxiliary sharpens the reversal further.

Not one word of abuse is used; the appearance of commendation is maintained to the last line. Given to a monk, the poem borrows the language of a religious observance in order to strike at a man in the middle of one.

Author

Dōmyō

Source

Makura no Soshi

Other