Kokoro ari to fumi kaesu tomo hamachidori ura ni nomi koso ato wa todomeme

English Translation

Though you tread it back
and send my letter to me,
saying it has heart,
the plover of the shore leaves
its traces on one bay only.

Meaning

Though you tread it back and return my letter, saying it has a heart, the shore plover leaves its traces on one bay alone.

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 spring in the first year of Tentoku, and the place is the author's dwelling.
Seeing the poem written on the paper in which his forgotten letter had been wrapped back, he answered promptly and with some address.
The author replied again with "Hamachidori ato no tomari o tazunu tote yukue mo shiranu urami o ya semu." After the scene in which the woman of Machi no Kōji bears a child, the account moves on to the exchange beginning "Ho ni idete iwaji ya sarani ōyoso no nabiku obana ni makasete mo mimu."

He takes back her letter, her bay, her traces and her plover, every one of them. The opening means: saying that it has a heart, referring to her act of returning the letter. The verb in the second line means both to tread back over the sand and to send a letter back, answering her own compound of treading and writing. The third line makes him the shore bird, and the fourth carries it to the single bay. That word bears for him, as for her, the double sense of a bay and the heart, so that to leave traces on one bay only is to give his heart to her alone. The close is bound by an emphatic particle and states the intention outright. Reproached as a bird that leaves no traces, he inverts the charge: the only shore where he leaves any is hers. It is a fine instance of an exchange built wholly on the passing back and forth of pivot words.

Author

Fujiwara no Kaneie

Source

Kagero Nikki

Other