Waketetou kokoronohodono miyurukana kokageoguraki natsunoshigerio

English Translation

Parting the branches
your heart shows itself in that
and I see it now
as once through the summer's growth
and the dark beneath the trees

Meaning

I can see how deep your feeling is, that you should part the way to reach me—as you did once through the summer growth, under the dark of the trees.

Commentary

Section 21: The Pilgrimage of the Mirror to Hatsuse; Amaterasu Ōmikami

The author's mother had a mirror a foot across cast, and since she could not take her daughter herself, sent a monk in her stead on pilgrimage to Hatsuse. He was to keep vigil three days and pray that the girl's future be shown in a dream, and while he was gone the author too was made to observe abstinence. On his return the monk reported this. Unwilling to come away without a dream, he had prayed with all his strength and lain down, and from the direction of the curtained altar a woman of the utmost dignity and purity appeared, holding out the mirror that had been offered, and asked whether a written petition had come with it. He answered respectfully that there had been none, only instructions to present the mirror. Strange, she said; a petition should have been added—and then: look at the image reflected on this side, it is a grief to see. Looking, he saw a figure flung down weeping and lamenting. She showed him the other side: blinds rolled up brightly, the hems of many-coloured robes spilling from beneath a curtain of state, plum and cherry blooming in the garden and a warbler calling among the branches; and she said that this was a joy to see. At the time the author gave no thought to what the dream might mean for her, and let it pass.
There was also someone who kept telling her to put her faith in Amaterasu Ōmikami. Where does such a deity reside, she wondered, and is it a god or a buddha; and as her understanding grew she asked, and was told: a god, residing at Ise; the deity the provincial governor of Kii serves is this same one; and the deity kept as a guardian at the Naishidokoro is the same. Ise being out of the question, and the Naishidokoro no place she could go to worship, she supposed vaguely that she must simply pray to the light of the sky.
When a kinswoman took vows and entered Shugakuin, the author sent her a poem in winter, and an answer came back.

The author is known only as the daughter of Sugawara no Takasue. Her mother was a daughter of Fujiwara no Tomoyasu and a younger half-sister of the author of the Kagerō Nikki. Her father was at his post in Hitachi at this time. Of the kinswoman who took vows and entered Shugakuin the text gives neither name nor station. Hatsuse is the Hasedera in Yamato, the Naishidokoro the hall where the sacred mirror is kept in the palace, and Shugakuin a temple northeast of the capital.

In winter; the reply from Shugakuin.

It answers the author, who had sent "Namidasae furihaetsutsuzo omoiyaru arashifukuramu fuyunoyamazato."

The section closes with this exchange. Nothing more of this woman is recorded in the diary.

Wakete in the first line is a pivot: parting the grass and branches to make a way, and also "especially, above all." Kokoro no hodo is the depth of that feeling. In the third line kana is exclamatory. Kokage oguraki, dark under the shade of the trees, modifies natsu no shigeri at the close, so that the poem both ends on a noun and reverses its natural order. That she answers a poem about winter storms with the growth of summer is because she is remembering an earlier visit, when the author came through the hills in the summer; the wakete carries both that journey and the deliberateness of the letter that has come now, and says that the two are the same heart. Where the author wrote omoiyaru, of thinking toward someone far away, the reply uses tou, of actually coming, and joins the thinking and the coming together.

Source

Sarashina Nikki

Other