Nagekitsutsu hitori nuru yo no akuru ma wa ikani hisashiki mono to ka wa shiru

English Translation

Sighing through the night,
lying alone until the
door of dawn is opened —
do you know at all how long,
how very long, that is?

Meaning

Do you know how long the night is, until it opens into dawn, for one who lies alone and sighing? No — I think you do not.

Commentary

7 Sighing Through the Night Alone; The Faded Chrysanthemum

In the ninth month, while Kaneie was out, the author idly opened a box that lay there and found in it a letter he had meant to send to another woman. Astonished, she resolved to let him know at least that she had seen it, and wrote a poem there. While she was still turning it over, at the end of the tenth month he failed to appear for three nights running. She watched a while without letting anything show, and there were signs. Toward evening he said there was business at the palace he could not avoid and went out; she had someone follow him, and word came back that he had stopped at such and such a place in Machi no Kōji. So it was true, she thought, and the wretchedness of it was great, but she did not know how to speak of it. Two or three days later, near dawn, someone knocked at the gate. She was sure who it was, but it was too painful, and she did not have it opened; Kaneie went off to the house that must have been the other woman's. The next morning, resolved not to let it pass, she wrote with more than usual care and sent the poem fixed to a chrysanthemum whose color had faded.
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, and had borne Michitsuna only at the end of the eighth month of this year. The woman of Machi no Kōji is named by that designation alone, her family never disclosed, and she appears repeatedly in the diary hereafter.
It is the end of the tenth month of the ninth year of Tenryaku, and the place is the author's dwelling.
It was composed on the morning after she had refused to open the gate before dawn and Kaneie had gone off to the other woman's house. She wrote it with more than usual care and sent it fixed to a chrysanthemum whose color had faded.
Kaneie answered with "Geni ya geni fuyu no yo naranu maki no to mo osoku akuru wa wabishikarikeri," adding that he had meant to wait for her reply until daybreak but that an urgent summons had come. The narrative records that for a time he kept his other visits discreet, and that her wretchedness went on without end.
The poem is included in the Shūi wakashū, book fourteen, among the love poems. Its headnote there gives a different account from the diary's, saying that the gate was slow to be opened when Kaneie came. It is also poem fifty-three of the Ogura hyakunin isshu.

The opening means sighing on and on, and carries not one night but all the accumulated nights behind it. The second line, lying alone, states the position of the one who waits. The third line means the interval until day breaks, but the verb for breaking also means to open, so that it sounds against her own refusal to have the gate opened. The whole poem turns on that double sense, which folds into a single word the length of the wait she imposed on him and the length of the night she passed alone. The final particle is rhetorical in force: do you know? — no, you cannot. The faded chrysanthemum to which it was fixed works as a quiet emblem of a heart whose color has changed. By asking rather than accusing, the poem carries its reproach the more strongly for never stating it.

Author

The Mother of Fujiwara no Michitsuna

Source

Kagero Nikki

Other