Kakinagasu atowatsurarani tojitekeri naniowasurenu katamitokamimu

English Translation

The traces you wrote
the ice has sealed them all up
and closed them away—
then what am I now to take
for a keepsake, not forget

Meaning

The traces of your brush have been sealed shut by ice, you say. Then what am I to look on as the keepsake that will not let me forget?

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.

Winter, when the water in an inkstone freezes; sent from the house in the capital to the nurse at her old home.

The nurse had written that the water in her inkstone was frozen, so that everything was closed up and nothing could be set down. This poem answers that.

The nurse replied with "Nagusamuru katamonagisano hamachidori nanikaukiyoni atomotodomemu," giving her to understand that she could not stay.

Kakinagasu is to let the brush run across the page. In the second line ato means the marks of a brush, with the tracks left by water birds sounding behind it, and tsurara is ice; the nurse's own excuse is taken up bodily into the poem. Tojitekeri ends on keri, in wonder: so they have been sealed shut. Nani o wasurenu in the fourth line, "what, that will not be forgotten," modifies katami in the close, where the interrogative ka is bound to the attributive mimu: then what am I to look on as the keepsake? The nurse's excuse about the frozen inkstone is turned back on her—if your writing is sealed away, there is nothing left for me to keep—and the wish to hold her there takes the form of wit. Nagasu, tsurara, tozu and ato run through the poem as associated words.

Author

Sugawara no Takasue no Musume

Source

Sarashina Nikki

Other