Suminarenu nobenosasahara atohakamo nakunakuikani tazunewabikemu

English Translation

No one lives out there
on the bamboo grass, the moor,
and no trace at all—
weeping, weeping, how she must
have searched and searched there in vain

Meaning

On the bamboo grass of a moor where no one lives there is no trace at all; weeping, how she must have searched and searched in vain.

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 by the kinsman who had given the tale.

It was composed on hearing that the nurse had gone to the grave and returned weeping, and that the author and her stepmother had exchanged poems on it.

Seeing it, the author's brother composed "Mishimamani moeshikemuriwa tsukinishio ikagatazuneshi nobenosasahara," and with that the exchange over the sister's death comes to a close.

Suminarenu, "where no one has settled," modifies the moor of the second line, a burial ground overgrown with bamboo grass. Ato haka mo in the third line hides haka, a grave, inside the phrase for "not a trace remaining," carrying the same word on from the author's izuko o haka to and the stepmother's soko haka to, a third time. Nakunaku in the fourth line means weeping, and its sound picks up the naku that ends ato haka mo naku. In the close, wabu is to be at a loss, to search past one's strength, and kemu conjectures about the past: how she must have searched that traceless expanse of grass, weeping as she went. The poem stands with the nurse and imagines her difficulty. That the very person who had sent a tale about searching for a body should lay its title over a real search for a grave is the heart of this whole sequence.

Source

Sarashina Nikki

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