Fuku kaze ni tsukete mo towamu sasagani no kayoishi michi wa sora ni tayu tomo

English Translation

I shall ask after
you, entrusting it even
to the blowing wind,
though the spider's travelled thread
breaks off midway in the sky.

Meaning

I shall ask after you, entrusting my word even to the wind, though the road the spider travelled breaks off midway in the sky.

Commentary

9 The Wild Rice Grass; Kaneie Grows Distant from the Other House

After the other lady had gone, the author's days became, as she had foreseen, a matter of lying down and rising alone. There was nothing in her circumstances out of the ordinary; only Kaneie's heart would not answer to her wishes, and that was the hardship. Hearing that his visits to the other house too had ceased, and since letters passed between them, she sent a poem there around the third or fourth of the fifth month, and an answer came. In the sixth month the long rains fell heavily from the first of the month, and gazing out she spoke a poem to herself. The seventh month came, and while she was still turning over whether it might not be better for the visits to stop altogether than to have him come so rarely, there was a day when Kaneie appeared. He said nothing and seemed at a loss. When one of her people happened to mention the matter of the lower leaves, he heard it and composed a poem. So his visits did not cease, and yet no night brought any easing of the heart; he came to a house growing more neglected, was out of temper, and sometimes turned back at once. A neighbor who knew how things stood addressed a poem to him as he was leaving, and they teased one another over it. About that time he stayed away particularly long, and after some ten days a letter came. The author untied the small bow's arrow it spoke of, took it down, and sent a poem with it. Then, in the ninth month, hearing that the visits to the house where she knew there were many children had ceased entirely, she felt for them the more and wrote, and a particularly warm reply came. Kaneie could not refuse her altogether and showed himself from time to time, and winter came on. Lying down and rising she had only the little child to play with, and a line of old verse came unbidden to her lips. The year turned, and in spring Kaneie left behind a letter he had been carrying about to read, and sent a woman to fetch it. The author wrote a poem on the paper in which she wrapped it back. A reply came by return, and when the messenger came again she sent one more.
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. The one called the house of long standing, and elsewhere the house where there are said to be many children, is the woman Kaneie had long visited; the text gives no name.
It is around the ninth month of the tenth year of Tenryaku, and the place is the author's dwelling.
Hearing that Kaneie's visits to the house where there were said to be many children had ceased altogether, and thinking how much harder that must be than her own case, she wrote at length and with feeling, adding this poem at the end.
A reply came, particularly warm, in the words "Iro kawaru kokoro to mireba tsukete tou kaze yuyushiku mo omōyuru kana." The correspondence with this same woman, begun in the fifth month with "Soko ni sae karu to iu naru makomogusa ikanaru sawa ni ne o todomuramu," deepens a stage here.

The first two lines mean that she will send word even by way of the blowing wind, acknowledging that theirs is not a connection in which the two can easily go back and forth. The word in the third line is an old poetic term for a spider and its thread; the spider's web was held to foretell a visitor, and the thread also served as a figure for a slender, precarious path of communication. The road of the fourth line is both the way the thread has spun across the air and the way Kaneie used to travel between the two houses, working in both senses at once. The close means even if it should break off midway in the sky, and the word for sky carries as well the sense of what is empty and not to be relied upon. It is an offer that though the man's road between them has failed, the correspondence between the women may still be carried by the wind; and it is the impulse to comfort rather than to complain that sets the tone of the whole.

Author

The Mother of Fujiwara no Michitsuna

Source

Kagero Nikki

Other