Naotanome umenotachiewa chigiriokanu omoinohokano hitomotounari

English Translation

Keep trusting, and wait
for when the plum lifts its boughs
one who promised naught,
one you never looked to see,
may come, they say, all the same

Meaning

Keep trusting, and wait. They say that where the plum lifts its high branches, even one who promised nothing, one you never looked for, will come.

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), at the other house in the capital to which the former stepmother had moved.

It was composed in reply to the author, who had sent a spray of plum blossom with her appeal, "Tanomeshio naoyamatsubeki shimogareshi umeomoharuwa wasurezarikeri."

Before the poem the stepmother wrote at length and with much feeling. 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 poem draws on a verse by Taira no Kanemori in the Shūishū, in which the high branches of the plum at his house seem to have caught someone's eye, and a guest he never expected has come.

The opening naotanome uses the imperative of the quadrigrade tanomu, "keep counting on it and wait." Where the author's tanomeshi was the lower bigrade form meaning to make another expect, the reply turns the same word into the quadrigrade meaning to expect oneself, and this pivot on a single word is the hinge of the exchange. The second line takes up the very plum branch the author had broken off and sent. From the third line to the close the poem simply borrows the conceit of the older verse: where the plum lifts its high branches, someone who promised nothing and was never looked for is said to come. The closing tou nari ends on nari, the auxiliary of hearsay and inference; she does not say that she herself will come, only that such things are said to happen. Pressed to make good on a promise, she answers not directly but by wrapping her reply in an old poem's conceit, and the contrast with the author's plainer urgency is sharp.

Source

Sarashina Nikki

Other