Mimakusao moyasubakarino harunohini yodonosaenado nokorazaruramu

English Translation

Fodder for the horse
and fire enough to burn that
on a day of spring —
how is it the sleeping room
too was not left standing there

Meaning

On a spring day with fire enough only to burn a little fodder, how is it that not even the sleeping chamber was left standing?

Commentary

314 The Nurse of the Bishop, and Others

While the nurse of the Bishop and others were gathered in the apartments of the Mistress of the Wardrobe, a man came in saying he had suffered a terrible misfortune. Asked what had happened, he explained that a fire had broken out at a house where fodder for the imperial stables was stored, that his own house had burned with it, and that his wife, asleep in the inner chamber, had barely escaped being burned to death.

The Bishop is Ryūen, younger brother of Empress Teishi. The Mistress of the Wardrobe is the Empress's younger sister, who held that office. The man is not named.

The time is spring; the place is the apartments of the Mistress of the Wardrobe.

The immediate occasion is that the Mistress of the Wardrobe laughed heartily at the man's account, whereupon the author composed this.

She wrote it out and tossed it over, saying it should be handed to him. The ladies laughed and told him that the lady here felt sorry for him over the burning of his house, and gave it to him. He opened it, looked at it, and asked what sort of paper this was supposed to be, and how much he would be getting.

The first line names the horses' fodder, the source of the fire, and puts it at the very head of the poem. The second limits it — fire only enough to burn that much — and passes judgement in passing: a trifling blaze.

The third line supplies a spring day, a season that ought to be mild, and thus a setting wholly unsuited to a conflagration. By this point the picture assembled is of a small, drowsy spring fire in a heap of hay.

In the fourth line a particle meaning even, as well marks the unexpectedness of the fire reaching the sleeping quarters, and an interrogative adverb asks how. The close pairs a negative with an auxiliary of present conjecture: how is it that it was not left standing?

The house did burn, and the wife came near to dying. By insisting that the fire was only ever the sort that singes a little fodder, the poem converts a report of disaster into a piece of illogic to be laughed at. Not a word of sympathy is offered; only the mismatch between the smallness of the fire and the size of the damage is pointed out.

And the man does not take it for a poem at all — he asks what the paper is and what he will be paid. That it was composed for someone to whom poetry means nothing pairs it with "Tsumedonao miminagusakoso awarenare amatashiareba kikumoarikeri" in the hundred and thirty-first section, which was never spoken aloud precisely because it would not have been understood; the interest lies in how differently the two encounters end.

Author

Sei Shōnagon

Source

Makura no Soshi

Other