Ikuchitabi mizunotaserio tsumishikaba omoishikotono tsuyumokanawanu

English Translation

How many thousand
times I gathered the water
parsley in the fields—
and not one thing I hoped for
has come to me, not a drop

Meaning

How many thousand times have I gathered parsley from the flooded fields—and not one thing I hoped for has come to me, not a drop.

Commentary

Section 25: Life in Court Service

On the twenty-fifth of the twelfth month the author was summoned for the Buddha-Names rite at the princess's residence, and went, thinking it would be for that night only. Some forty women sat there in white robes over deep-dyed glossed silk. Hiding behind the woman who had brought her in, she showed herself among them only faintly, and withdrew at daybreak. Snow was drifting down, and the moon of a bitterly cold dawn lay faintly on the deep-dyed silk of her sleeve, so that the sleeve looked truly like a face wet with tears. On the road home she made a poem.
Having once gone out like this, she might in time have grown used to service, lost herself in the world, and—so long as no one thought her perverse—come to be treated like anyone else; but her parents, understanding nothing of it, shut her up at home before long. Not that her circumstances turned brilliant on the instant; the outcome was as far from her groundless expectations as could be. She murmured one more poem to herself, and left it at that.
Afterwards, distracted by one thing and another, she forgot even the tales, and once her mind had turned wholly practical she came to regret the long years spent lying about to no purpose without devotions or pilgrimage. Is there a Shining Genji in this world? she thought; this is no age in which a Captain Kaoru hides a woman away at Uji; what madness, what a worthless turn of mind—and yet she could not live wholly by such practicality either. In time, drawn along by a young woman she had been obliged to send in answer to a summons for one, she began to attend from time to time. Beside those who were at ease with everything, she was neither one of the young women nor senior enough to be deferred to, and was kept at a distance like an occasional guest; but since she was not staking everything on service, she found the position easy enough.
Attending in the imperial palace, with the dawn moon very bright, she thought that Amaterasu Ōmikami, in whom she put her faith, must reside there, and on a bright moonlit night around the fourth month she went quietly to worship. The next night too the moon was bright, and as she and others sat by the opened eastern door of the Fujitsubo looking at it, the sound of the Umetsubo Consort going up to the emperor's apartments was full of quiet elegance; when the others said that had the late princess lived she would have gone up in just such a way, it moved her, and she made a poem.
In winter, on a night with no moon and no snow but the whole sky clear and cold with starlight, she talked until dawn with the women in the great lady's apartments, and at daybreak they parted and went their ways. Someone who remembered this sent a poem, and the author, feeling the same, replied. Lying before her mistress, she heard the birds on the pond crying and beating their wings all night, and murmured a poem, which a woman lying beside her heard and answered. And on a day when she and a friend passed the hours talking with the sliding door between their rooms pushed open, someone who kept calling that friend down said that if it were truly urgent she would come—and the author sent her a poem attached to a withered pampas stem.

The author is known only as the daughter of Sugawara no Takasue. She entered the service of Princess Yūshi, daughter of Emperor Go-Suzaku. The "late princess" is Yūshi's mother, already dead by this time. The Umetsubo Consort is the consort whose apartments were the Umetsubo, and the Hakase no Myōbu a lady in waiting at the hall of the sacred mirror. Of "the woman of the same mind," "the woman lying beside her" and "the friend," the text gives neither name nor station.

After the first period of service, at the time when her parents had her shut up at home; at the house in the capital.

That she had gone into service at last, only for her parents to understand nothing of it and shut her away, and that nothing in her circumstances turned bright either, so that everything fell out unlike what she had expected: that is the occasion of the poem.

As the prose says, she murmured it to herself and left it at that; there is no reply. With it she settles the account of all the years she spent longing after tales.

"Gathering parsley" is a set expression for labour that goes unrewarded, for a wish that never comes true. It is said to derive from a story of a man who conceived a hopeless love above his station and offered up parsley he had gathered for an empress's table, without ever gaining what he wanted.

Iku chitabi is "times beyond counting." The parsley of the second line grows in flooded paddies, and to gather it is by itself to labour for something unattainable. In the third line shika is the perfective-conditional of the past auxiliary ki, and ba gives a settled condition: for all that gathering. Omoishi koto no is what she had hoped for. In the close tsuyu mo, with a negative below it, means not in the least. The long-held wish to enter service had been granted, and then her parents shut her away, and nothing there went as she wished either. Where "Toshiwakure yowaakegatano tsukikageno sodeniutsureru hodozohakanaki" earlier in the section entrusts the frailty of her service to a scene, this one uses no scene at all and states a lifetime's futility through a single received phrase.

Author

Sugawara no Takasue no Musume

Source

Sarashina Nikki

Other