Yukifurite marenohitomemo taenuramu yoshinonoyamano minenokakemichi

English Translation

Now the snow has come
even the rare passing soul
must have ceased to pass—
there on Mount Yoshino's peaks,
the path along the cliff face

Meaning

With the snow come down, even the rare visitor must have ceased to pass along the cliff path over the peaks of Mount Yoshino.

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.

During days of unbroken snowfall, at the house in the capital, with her thoughts on a nun living on Mount Yoshino.

Watching the snow come down day after day, she found her thoughts going out to the nun on Mount Yoshino, and the poem followed.

It is a solitary poem, and no reply is recorded. The section closes with it; the next takes up her father's disappointment over the appointments and the days spent in the Eastern Hills.

The first line opens the scene with the snow. In the second, hitome is a person's coming, the sight of anyone at all, and mare no is "the merest few": on a mountain where visitors were already rare, now even those. Taenuramu ends on ramu, the auxiliary of present conjecture, imagining how things stand for someone far off at this very hour. The fourth line names the place, and the poem ends on a noun, leaving only the shape of that steep road. Coming after the long exchange over her sister's death, it turns the gaze away from a household emptied by loss toward the life of someone living alone in the mountains. Yuki, tayu and kakemichi pile up words of closing and narrowing, and the mood that hangs over the whole section is carried out into a distant landscape.

Author

Sugawara no Takasue no Musume

Source

Sarashina Nikki

Other