Omoi araba hinamashi mono o ikadekawa kaesu koromo no tare mo nururamu

English Translation

Were there a fire of
longing, it would have dried by
now; so how can it
be that the robe turned inside
out is wet, on either side?

Meaning

If there were any fire of longing, the robe would have dried by now. How is it, then, that the robe turned inside out is wet for both of us?

Commentary

4 Exchanges with Kaneie

After the marriage was settled, the author stayed for a time at a temporary lodging. Kaneie visited her there and sent a letter the next morning. In the ninth month a run of days of abstinence kept him away for two nights together, and only letters passed. His visits then grew infrequent; on a rainy evening he sent word that he would come, and in the tenth month he pleaded abstinence as a reason for staying away. Poems were exchanged on each occasion, and the author's helplessness as the one who waits accumulates through them. While these exchanges continue, the day approaches when her father Tomoyasu must go down to Mutsu.
Kaneie was the third son of Fujiwara no Morosuke and at this time Assistant Commander of the Right Guards; he would rise to be regent and chancellor. The author was a daughter of Fujiwara no Tomoyasu, a man of the provincial governor class who would go down to Mutsu as its governor at the end of this year.
It is the tenth month of the eighth year of Tenryaku, and the place is the author's own dwelling.
It was composed in answer to Kaneie's poem, which had imagined her robe damp with tears and the sky adding its cold rain besides.
The narrative calls this reply very old-fashioned, so that the author herself acknowledges the antique cast of her manner. Soon after this exchange the account moves to her father Tomoyasu's departure for Mutsu, and to "Kimi o nomi tanomu tabi naru kokoro ni wa yukusue tōku omōyuru kana" and what follows.

She takes his robe turned inside out and sets against it the word for being wet. In the opening, the second syllable of the word for longing also means fire, an old and familiar play, so that the line reads: if there were any fire of feeling. The verb in the second line means it would surely have dried, and its sound answers the syllable in the word for longing. The particle that follows is adversative: it ought to be so, and yet. The third line is rhetorical in force, asking how such a thing can be when plainly it should not. The verb at the close means to grow wet, with the sense of lying down to sleep sounding beneath it. By widening the subject to include everyone, she implies that his robe must be wet as well, and turns his own image back on him: if the feeling were real, the tears would have dried. The reliance on pivot words is what earns the narrative's judgment that the poem is old-fashioned.

Author

The Mother of Fujiwara no Michitsuna

Source

Kagero Nikki

Other