Uzumorenu kabaneonanini tazunekemu kokenoshitaniwa mikosonarikere

English Translation

Unburied, a corpse—
why did she go seeking one,
when she herself now
is the thing that has become
what lies beneath the green moss

Meaning

Why did she go searching for a corpse that was never buried? She herself has become the thing that lies beneath the moss.

Commentary

Section 14: The Death of the Sister

On the first day of the fifth month her elder sister died after giving birth. Even the deaths of strangers had struck her from childhood as bitterly sad; that this was her own sister left her grief past speaking. Her mother and the others were all in the room where the body lay, while the author lay down with the two small children left behind as keepsakes, one on either side of her. Moonlight came through a gap in the ruined boarding of the roof and fell on a child's face, and it seemed to her so ill-omened that she covered the child with her sleeve, drew the other close, and lay there sunk in thought.
When the forty-nine days had passed, a kinsman sent word: the dead woman had asked that this be found and sent to her without fail, and though it could not be found at the time, someone had sent it only now, which was a sad thing; and with the message came the tale called The Prince Who Sought the Corpse. It moved her deeply, and she wrote a poem in reply.
Her sister's nurse, saying that there was nothing to keep her there any longer, went weeping back to the house she had come from, and the author sent her a poem, adding that she wished she would stay as a keepsake of the dead. The nurse answered that the water in her inkstone had frozen and nothing could be set down; the author sent another poem, and the nurse replied.
This nurse visited the sister's grave and came away weeping. Hearing of it, the author composed a poem; the woman who had been her stepmother answered it, the kinsman who had sent the tale added one of his own, and her brother, seeing them, composed one too, remembering the night of the funeral.
When the snow had fallen for days on end, the author's thoughts went out to a nun living on Mount Yoshino, and she composed one more poem.

The author is known only as the daughter of Sugawara no Takasue. Her elder sister is the one with whom she read tales in the same house, and she died this year after childbirth; the small nieces left behind are the keepsakes spoken of. The nurse had served the sister. The woman who had been her stepmother is the former court lady who parted from her father and moved elsewhere. The brother attended the sister's funeral. The Prince Who Sought the Corpse is a tale no longer extant, said to have told of a nobleman who searched for the body of a woman he had visited, failed to find it, and took vows in despair of the world.

After the forty-nine days of mourning had passed, at the house in the capital.

A kinsman had sent the tale The Prince Who Sought the Corpse, which the dead sister had wanted while she lived and which arrived only now. This poem was written in reply.

After it comes the departure of the sister's nurse for her old home, and the exchange of poems on the sister's death begins.

In the opening line nu is the attributive of the negative auxiliary: not buried. Kabane in the second line is a corpse, taking up the title of the tale that had just arrived; nani ni asks why. Tazunekemu ends on kemu, the auxiliary of past conjecture: why should she have gone looking for it? To this point the poem asks why her sister, while she lived, sought out a tale about searching for a body that lay unburied. The fourth line turns to the grave, and the close binds the emphatic koso to the perfective-conditional narikere: the very one who searched has become what lies beneath the moss. Searching for a corpse in the tale, searching for the tale itself, and the author's own reaching after her sister now all fall together on the single word tazunu. The days the two sisters spent in pursuit of tales run straight into the sister's death, and the poem's pain is in that.

Author

Sugawara no Takasue no Musume

Source

Sarashina Nikki

Other