Yonotsuneno yadonoyomogio omoiyare somukihatetaru niwanokusamura

English Translation

Yours is the mugwort
of an ordinary house—
think, then, rather of
the thickets in the garden
of one who has left the world

Meaning

Yours is the mugwort of an ordinary house. Spare a thought instead for the thickets in the garden of one who has turned her back on the world altogether.

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; sent back to the author at the old house in the capital by the woman who had taken vows.

It answers the author, who had written "Shigeriyuku yomogigatsuyuni sobochitsutsu hitonitowarenu neonomizonaku."

With this poem the verse of the Sarashina Nikki ends. The diary closes on someone else answering the author, so that a poem lamenting that no one comes is itself answered after all.

Yo no tsune no is "of the ordinary sort," placing the other woman's house among the houses of the world. Yado no yomogi o takes over the author's own word for the weeds about a dwelling. Omoiyare in the third line is the imperative of omoiyaru, to turn one's thoughts toward something. Somuki hatetaru is having turned one's back on the world entirely, that is, having fully taken vows. The poem closes on a noun, and the order is inverted, so that the object of the imperative stands at the end. Rather than deny the other's grief, she lays her own more overgrown garden beside it, consoling by a kind of competition in desolation. The author remains in her old house with something of the world still holding her, while this woman has renounced it altogether, so that the same thickets mean different things. That the last poem of the diary should be spoken by a woman who has left the world, and should be about leaving it, sounds together with the figure of an author who has nothing left to live by but her hope for the life to come.

Source

Sarashina Nikki

Other