Shigeriyuku yomogigatsuyuni sobochitsutsu hitonitowarenu neonomizonaku

English Translation

Soaked again, again
by the dew on mugwort that
grows ranker each day,
and no one comes to ask—so
I do nothing but cry out

Meaning

Soaked through by the dew on mugwort that grows ranker by the day, and with no one coming to ask after me, I do nothing but cry aloud.

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.

Years after her husband's death, at the old house in the capital, where everyone else had moved away and she alone remained.

Left alone in the old house, forlorn and grieving and unable to gaze the nights away any longer, she sent this to someone from whom she had long heard nothing.

The woman had taken vows, and the reply came: "Yonotsuneno yadonoyomogio omoiyare somukihatetaru niwanokusamura." This is the last exchange of poems in the diary.

Shigeriyuku is growing thicker by degrees, of a garden with no one to tend it. Yomogi in the second line is the plant that stands in poetry for a ruined house. Sobochitsutsu is being soaked through, with tsutsu marking repetition and continuance; what the dew soaks is the grass and also the woman in it, and dew shades into tears. In the fourth line nu is the attributive of the negative auxiliary: no one comes to ask after her. The close binds the emphatic zo to the attributive naku, and ne o naku is to weep aloud. Poems about no one calling recur from "Omoiidete hitokosotowane yamazatono magakinoogini akikazewafuku" in Section 22 onward, but there an autumn wind in the reeds was set opposite as the thing that does arrive; here nothing arrives at all, and what remains is the thickening grass and the sound of her own weeping. The author who in Section 13 longed for the plum at the eaves of a lost house in "Nioikuru tonarinokazeo minishimete arishinokibano umezokoishiki" has here let her own garden go to weeds.

Author

Sugawara no Takasue no Musume

Source

Sarashina Nikki

Other