Naki hito wa otozure mo sede koto no o o tachishi tsukihi zo kaeri kinikeru

English Translation

The dead one neither
sounds nor comes; only the month
and day on which the
koto strings were cut have come
round again to us once more.

Meaning

The dead neither sound nor come; only the month and day on which the strings were cut have come round to us again.

Commentary

18 The First Anniversary of Her Mother's Death

So, in her unsettled way, she passed the autumn and the winter. In the same house there lived a brother of hers and a woman who seemed to be an aunt. She thought of that woman as a parent, and yet she still longed for the past and wept the nights through. The year turned to the second of Kōhō, and when spring and summer had passed it was time for the final rite, which this once was held at that same mountain temple. Remembering how it had been, she found it more painful still. When the officiant began by saying that he had not come there merely out of a wish to seek the autumn hills — that it was rather to expound the meaning of the sutra in the very place where the dead had closed her eyes — she could take in nothing more, and remembered nothing of what followed. When all that had to be done was finished, they returned. The mourning was then to be put off, and while the dove-gray garments, down to the fans, were being purified, a poem came into her mind; but it made her weep so bitterly that she said nothing of it to anyone. When the memorial days were over and she was as idle as ever, she wiped the koto and ran her hand over it, not so much playing as touching it, and thinking how the season of restraint was past, and how sad and fleeting it all was — and then a poem came from the other side of the house. There was nothing remarkable in it, but thinking of what it meant she wept the more, and made her reply.
The author was a daughter of Fujiwara no Tomoyasu. The one who died is her mother, whose name the diary does not give. In the same house lived a brother of hers and a woman who seemed to be an aunt, whom the author regarded as a parent. Who it was that sent the poem from the other side is not stated in the text.
It is the second year of Kōhō, after the memorial days for her mother were over, and the place is the author's dwelling.
It answers the poem sent by the person in the same house who had heard the koto. The narrative says that though there was nothing remarkable in that poem, thinking of what it meant made her weep the more.
With this exchange the section closes. Afterward the woman she most relied on is to go down to a distant province, and the account moves to "Hikitomuru mono to wa nashi ni ōsaka no seki no kuchime no ne ni zo sobotsuru."

She takes the koto and its sound from the other poem and reassembles the words. The opening makes her dead mother the subject and carries into the second line. The verb there means to visit, but it keeps its older sense of making a sound, and so meets exactly the poem about the koto: the dead neither sound nor come. The word in the third line is the string of a koto and also the thread of a connection, and the poem turns on it. The fourth line names the month and day on which that string was cut, that is, the day of her mother's death, and the verb for cutting also sounds the word for time elapsing. The close is bound by an emphatic particle: it has come round again. The frame of the whole is the contrast between a dead woman who never returns and an anniversary that returns with perfect regularity; and the other poem's opening on the sound of a koto is drawn over into the cutting of a koto's strings — an act of mourning — so that it is made over into a poem for the anniversary.

Author

The Mother of Fujiwara no Michitsuna

Source

Kagero Nikki

Other