Sokohakato shiriteyukanedo sakinitatsu namidazomichino shirubenarikeru

English Translation

Not knowing for sure
that this and no other place—
yet the tears that rose
before her along the way
were the guide that led her there

Meaning

She did not go knowing for certain that this was the place, but the tears that rose ahead of her were the guide along the road.

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.

When word of the nurse's visit to the grave had gone round; sent from the woman who had been the author's stepmother.

It answers the author's "Noborikemu nobewakemurimo nakarikemu izukoohakato tazunetekamishi."

After it the kinsman who had sent the tale offered "Suminarenu nobenosasahara atohakamo nakunakuikani tazunewabikemu," and the author's brother joined in as well.

Soko haka to, "that this and nowhere else," takes up the haka of the author's izuko o haka to and keeps the word intact. Shirite yukanedo is "though she did not go knowing it," nedo being the perfective-conditional of the negative auxiliary with the concessive do. Saki ni tatsu, "rising before anything else," modifies the tears of the fourth line, where the emphatic zo binds to the attributive narikeru of the close, and keru gives the note of recognition: without any mark to go by, it was the tears that led the way. The reply meets the question head-on and answers it. There is wit in inverting the familiar phrase sokohaka to nashi into sokohaka to shiru; and this is the one place where the stepmother, absent from the diary since the exchange over the plum, appears again in a poem.

Source

Sarashina Nikki

Other