Tsukimoidede yaminikuretaru obasuteni nanitotekoyoi tazunekitsuramu

English Translation

No moon has risen
and Obasute lies in dark—
so why, on this night
of all nights, have you come here
to seek me out, I wonder

Meaning

No moon has risen, and this Obasute of mine lies in darkness—why, of all nights, have you come looking for me tonight?

Commentary

Section 35: The One Hope for What Comes After

Life, for all that, did not break off under its own bitterness but went on; and since this world was as it was, she was uneasy that the next would not go as she wished either. Yet there was one thing she could rely on. In a dream on the night of the thirteenth day of the tenth month of Tenki 3, the Amida Buddha stood in the garden by the eaves of the house where she was living. She could not see him clearly—he showed through as if a single layer of mist lay between—and forcing herself to look through a gap in it she saw the lotus pedestal raised three or four feet above the ground, the Buddha some six feet in height, shining with golden light, one hand spread open and the other forming a mudra. No one else could see him; she alone was looking, and even so it was so awesome that she could not go close to the blind to worship. Then the Buddha said that he would go back for this time and come later to fetch her; the voice reached her ear alone and no one else caught it, and with that she woke, and it was the fourteenth. That dream alone she took as her hope for the life to come.
She had been living in one house with her nephews and seeing them morning and evening, but after that grief they scattered into separate houses and she seldom saw anyone. On a very dark night the nephew who was the sixth son came to call, and she was so struck by the rarity of it that a poem came out of her.
A person she had been close to sent no word after all this, and she sent her a poem. Around the tenth month, weeping as she looked at a very bright moon, she made another.
The years turn and pass, but remembering that dreamlike time confuses her mind and darkens her sight, so that she still cannot recall it clearly. Everyone had gone to live elsewhere, and alone in the old house, forlorn and grieving and unable to gaze the nights away any longer, she sent a poem to someone from whom she had long heard nothing. The woman had taken vows, and a reply came back.

The author is known only as the daughter of Sugawara no Takasue. "That grief" is the death of her husband, Tachibana no Toshimichi. The nephew who was the sixth son is her nephew, unnamed in the text; the woman from whom she had long heard nothing had taken vows and is likewise unnamed. Obasute is a mountain in Shinano, famous as a place for viewing the moon and also for the story of an old woman abandoned there.

After her husband's death, on a very dark night at the old house in the capital.

After his death the nephews with whom she had shared a house morning and evening scattered into separate homes and she seldom saw anyone. On a very dark night the sixth-son nephew came to call, and the rarity of it drew the poem.

The prose says the words came out of her, so it was spoken on the spur of the moment, and no reply is recorded.

In the first line de is a negative conjunctive particle: the moon has not even risen. Yami ni kuretaru is fully given over to darkness. Obasute in the third line is the mountain in Shinano, known both as a place for viewing the moon and as the site of the tale of an abandoned old woman; the one place name holds together her moonless house and her own old and set-aside self. Nani tote asks why. In the close ramu is the auxiliary of present conjecture. Obasute is precisely where one goes to see the moon, and the argument of the poem is: why come on a night when there is no moon? The gladness at his coming is wrapped inside a question. Poems about no one calling run through this diary from "Omoiidete hitokosotowane yamazatono magakinoogini akikazewafuku" in Section 22 onward; unlike those, this one is addressed to someone who has come.

Author

Sugawara no Takasue no Musume

Source

Sarashina Nikki

Other