Imawayoni arajimonotoya omouramu awarenakunaku naokosowafure

English Translation

That I am no more
in this world at all is what
you must think by now—
ah, and weeping, weeping on,
I am living even now

Meaning

Do you suppose I am no longer in this world at all? Ah—weeping and weeping, I am living on all the same.

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, sent from the old house in the capital to someone she had been close to.

That a friend she had been intimate with sent no word after she lost her husband is what drew the poem.

No reply is recorded. Afterwards, around the tenth month, weeping as she looked at a bright moon, she composes "Himamonaki namidanikumoru kokoronimo akashitomiyuru tsukinokagekana."

Ima wa yo ni is "in this world any longer." In the second line ji is the auxiliary of negative conjecture—that I am not—and ya is interrogative. Omouramu ends on ramu, the auxiliary of present conjecture, in its attributive form, guessing at the other's mind: is that what you think by now? Aware in the fourth line is an exclamation and the poem pauses there; nakunaku is "weeping as I go." The close binds the emphatic koso to fure, the perfective-conditional of fu: I am living on all the same. To say that one is thought dead while still alive is to reproach a friend for her silence, and the whole reproach is gathered into the single fact of still being alive. "Taezarishi omoimoimawa taenikeri koshinowatarino yukinofukasani" in Section 31 was likewise sent to a friend who had stopped writing, but that poem blamed the snow; this one carries the matter as far as the question of whether she is alive at all, and the depth of her isolation after her husband's death shows in that.

Author

Sugawara no Takasue no Musume

Source

Sarashina Nikki

Other