Nagusamuru katamonagisano hamachidori nanikaukiyoni atomotodomemu

English Translation

No way to be soothed—
no shore for the tide-plover
upon the beaches—
why should I leave any trace
behind me in this sad world

Meaning

There is no way left to be comforted, no shore for the plover on the tideland; why should I leave any trace of myself in this bitter world?

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 back to the author from the nurse at her old home.

It answers the author's "Kakinagasu atowatsurarani tojitekeri naniowasurenu katamitokamimu."

With this the nurse made plain that she would not stay. Afterwards she visited the sister's grave and came away weeping.

Nagusamuru is to console. The second line carries two pivots at once: kata is both the means of consoling and the tidal flat of a shore, and nagisa is both the water's edge and the word for "none," so that "no way to be consoled" and "the edge of the tideland" stand up together. The third line sets the plover on that shore, and from there the speaker lays her own case over the bird's. Nani ka in the fourth line is rhetorical, and the uki of ukiyo is the bitterness of the world with the floating of a bird on water sounding through it. In the close, ato is both the plover's footprints and the trace of a life left in the world: like a bird whose prints the waves erase, why should she leave any mark in a world that offers no consolation? Kata, nagisa, uki and ato run together as associated words in a poem of considerable artifice, and it takes up the ato of the author's poem and sends it back. That grief should be expressed through such a weave of pivots and associations says much about the household these women lived in.

Source

Sarashina Nikki

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