Tanomeshio naoyamatsubeki shimogareshi umeomoharuwa wasurezarikeri

English Translation

You bade me trust you—
must I go on waiting still?
Even frost-withered
plum, the spring remembered well
and did not forget to come

Meaning

You told me to trust you—must I go on waiting even now? Spring did not forget the plum, though the frost had withered it.

Commentary

Section 9: Longing for Tales, Parting from the Stepmother

Entering the capital in the twelfth month, the party settled in a house west of the Sanjō Palace. The grounds were wide and neglected, overgrown with trees as great and forbidding as any on the mountains they had crossed, so that the place hardly looked as though it stood inside the city at all. Unsettled as everything was, the author's mind was full of the tales she had been waiting for since before the journey, and she pressed her mother again and again to find some and show them to her. Her mother wrote to a kinswoman, the Emon no Myōbu, who served at the Sanjō Palace, and the lady, delighted and taking it as a rare request, sent over some fine bound volumes said to have been granted from her mistress's own collection, set upon the lid of an inkstone box. The author read them night and day in her joy, but each one finished only left her wanting the next, and among people still strangers to the capital there was no one who could find more tales for her.
Around that time the woman who had been her stepmother, her marriage to the author's father having gone badly, left the household. Taking with her the small children of about five years, she said that she would never forget how kind the author's heart had been, and pointing to the great plum tree that stood near the eaves, she promised to come when its flowers opened. The author wept in secret with longing, and the year turned. She waited with her eyes on the tree, wishing the plum would hurry into bloom and wondering whether the promise was true, but the flowers all opened and no word came. At last, unable to bear it, she broke off a branch and sent it with a poem.

The author is known only as the daughter of Sugawara no Takasue. Her father was a fifth-generation descendant of Sugawara no Michizane and had returned to the capital at the end of his term as Governor of Kazusa. Her mother was a daughter of Fujiwara no Tomoyasu and a younger half-sister of the author of the Kagerō Nikki. The woman who had been her stepmother had once served at court and had gone down to Kazusa with her father. The Sanjō Palace was the residence of Princess Shūshi, first daughter of Emperor Ichijō, and the Emon no Myōbu was the author's kinswoman in service there.

Early spring of Jian 1 (1021), when the plum had come fully into flower, at the house west of the Sanjō Palace in the capital.

The stepmother, who had left saying she would come when the plum bloomed, sent no word even after the flowers had all opened. Having waited to the end of her patience, the author broke off a spray of the blossom and sent this poem with it.

The stepmother wrote back at length and with feeling, and closed with "Naotanome umenotachiewa chigiriokanu omoinohokano hitomotounari." There is no record that the promise was ever kept. She is absent from the diary for some time after this, returning in the exchange of poems over the elder sister's death and appearing again in a later section.

The opening tanome is the continuative form of the lower bigrade verb tanomu, meaning to make another expect, to give someone something to count on. Shi is the attributive of the past auxiliary ki, and o is a concessive conjunctive particle: "though you gave me that to count on." In the second line, ya is an interrogative particle bound to the attributive beki, asking whether she must still go on waiting. Shimogareshi, "withered by frost," modifies the plum of the following line. In the fourth line o mo carries the force of "even that withered plum," and spring is personified as one who comes and does not forget. The closing wasurezarikeri ends on keri, the auxiliary of sudden recognition, leaving the unspoken half of the thought: even the spring did not forget. The plum, which had been the token of a promised return, is turned here into the instrument of a comparison between the spring that remembered and the woman who did not.

Author

Sugawara no Takasue no Musume

Source

Sarashina Nikki

Other