Omou hodo shirade wa kai ya arazaramu kaesugaesu mo kazu o koso mime

English Translation

If I cannot know
how much you think of me, what
use is there in it?
Over and over, I would
have the number shown to me.

Meaning

If I cannot know how much you think of me, what use is there in it? Over and over again, I would have the number shown me.

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 author's dwelling.
It answers the reply that, set beside a heart that thinks past counting, ten stacked eggs could seem no great thing.
With this exchange the section closes. In the fifth month the Emperor dies, and the account moves on to "Yo no naka o hakanaki mono to misasagi no umoruru yama ni nagekuramu ya zo."

She takes back the other's heart and her number. The first two lines mean: without knowing how much you think of me — seizing on the claim that it is past counting and answering that in that case there is no knowing. The interrogative particle keeps the second line from a flat assertion: what use would there be? The fourth line means over and over again, but placed in a scene of returning gifts and returning poems, the very word for returning sounds against the occasion. The close is bound by an emphatic particle: she would have the number shown her. A feeling declared to be beyond counting is met with a request that it be counted after all, and the comparison the other set up is turned neatly against her. An exchange that began with the pastime of stacking ten eggs is carried through to the end on the single word for number, and as a piece of exchange it is well matched throughout.

Author

The Mother of Fujiwara no Michitsuna

Source

Kagero Nikki

Other