Kazu shirazu omou kokoro ni kurabureba tō kasanuru mo mono to ya wa miru

English Translation

Set beside a heart
that thinks of you past counting,
can ten of them, stacked
one upon another, seem
any great thing at all?

Meaning

Set beside a heart that thinks of you past all counting, can ten of them stacked one upon another seem any great thing?

Commentary

24 Ten Goose Eggs Stacked and Sent

Autumn ended, and since in winter, what with the first day of the month and the last, high and low alike seem to be in a bustle, she passed the season as if sleeping alone. About the end of the third month she saw some goose eggs, and thinking she would somehow manage the trick of stacking them ten at a time, she idly knotted a long thread of raw silk, tying one and then another and another, and when she stood them up they stacked beautifully. Rather than leave them so, she sent them to the lady of the Kujō house, and attached them to deutzia flowers. There was nothing particular about it, only the usual letter, with a line at the edge saying merely that these ten, stacked up, had come through well enough even so. An answer came, and she replied to it in turn.
The author was a daughter of Fujiwara no Tomoyasu. The lady of the Kujō house is a daughter of Fujiwara no Morosuke and therefore a sister of Kaneie; she is taken to be Fujiwara no Tōshi, though the text gives no name. The eggs are goose eggs, which it was a pastime to knot together and stack with fine thread.
It is about the end of the third month of the fourth year of Kōhō, and the place is the residence of the lady of the Kujō house.
It answers the author, who had stacked ten goose eggs with raw silk thread, attached them to deutzia flowers, and written at the edge of her letter only that these ten, stacked up, had come through well enough even so.
The author replied with "Omou hodo shirade wa kai ya arazaramu kaesugaesu mo kazu o koso mime."

She takes the number ten from the other's note and returns it. The opening means past counting, setting against the definite ten that was sent something that cannot be numbered, and so building a comparison. The second line names the heart that thinks of the other, and the third weighs the two together. The fourth means: even the ten stacked one on another — pointing straight at the ingenuity of the gift. The close is rhetorical in force: could it seem any great thing? — it could not. To say that the cleverness of a present falls short of the depth of one's feeling is a conventional posture for a poem of thanks, but the verse stands on the single opposition of a number that can be counted against one that cannot, and it carries the pastime of stacking eggs straight over into the frame of the poem.

Source

Kagero Nikki

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