Himamonaki namidanikumoru kokoronimo akashitomiyuru tsukinokagekana

English Translation

Even to a heart
clouded over by the tears
that never let up,
it shows itself as brightness—
this light of the moon tonight

Meaning

Even to a heart clouded over with tears that never let up, this moonlight shows itself as brightness.

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.

A night of very bright moonlight around the tenth month, at the old house in the capital.

Weeping as she gazed at the brightness of the moon is what drew the poem.

It is a solitary poem, and no reply is recorded. After it the text says that even with the years passing she still cannot clearly recall the time of her husband's death, and goes on to her days alone in the old house.

Hima mo naki, without a break, modifies the tears of the second line. Namida ni kumoru is clouded with tears, holding together eyes blurred by weeping and a mind that will not clear. The mo of the third line adds "even to such a heart as that." Akashi to miyuru is "appears bright." In the close kage means light, and kana is exclamatory. The poem states one thing only: that to a heart wholly clouded with grief the brightness of the moon still gets through. It is neither praise of the moon nor an account of sorrow, but astonishment that both should hold at once. Moons run all through this diary, from "Madoromaji koyoinaradewa itsukamimu kurotonohamano akinoyonotsuki" in the first part to "Yukuenaki tabinosoranimo okurenuwa miyakonitemishi ariakenotsuki" in Section 30, always as something that reaches her; the moon of this poem reaches even a heart too grieved to want it.

Author

Sugawara no Takasue no Musume

Source

Sarashina Nikki

Other