Wataraneba ochikatabito ni nareru mi o kokoro bakari wa fuchise ya wa waku

English Translation

Since I do not cross,
I have become one who stands
on the farther shore;
yet does my heart divide deep
water from shallow? It does not.

Meaning

Since I do not cross, I have become one who stands on the farther shore; but does my heart divide the deep water from the shallow? It does not.

Commentary

26 Exchanges with the Lady of the Jōganden

Toward the end of the twelfth month the lady of the Jōganden withdrew to the house on the west. On the last day of the month there was a sudden earthquake, and from midday on it went on rumbling and rattling while she sat watching it alone; and so the year turned to the first of Anna. About midday on New Year's Day, since no men were about among the guest's household, all was quiet. Hearing that the lady was still next door, they laughed together over what one waits for on such a day; and while they were at it, someone idly fetched a little figure of a man made of millet, pressed it against the leg-end of the pheasant from before, wrote on it, and sent it in to the lady. She dried some seaweed, tore it into short pieces, tied them together, shifted the load to the end of the pole, carved a calf onto the leg that had been thin, and sent it back larger than it had come. When the day was well up the festival food was served; the same was done in this house, and the fifteenth also passed in the usual way. The third month came. A letter that seemed meant for the guest's household was misdelivered here. It read that he could not leave things as they were and thought of calling before long, but that there might be someone who would rather it were not he. Since the lady had long been used to seeing such things, the author supposed this was how it went; even so she did not let it pass, but wrote a few words very small, and sent it back saying that it should be taken to that lady. When the lady had read it a reply came at once. Since this lady attended the Crown Prince almost as a mother, she was bound to go to the palace. She said again and again that she could not stay as she was, and so the author called on her in the evening. Just then voices were heard on the other side; the lady kept saying so, so, but the author would not attend to it, and the lady seemed to be growing drowsy as one does in the early evening. Then someone came walking up and made an announcement, and the author went home without any ease of mind. The next evening the lady went to the palace. In the fifth month, when she withdrew to put off mourning for the Emperor, it had been arranged that she should come here as before; but saying she had seen something inauspicious in a dream, she withdrew to the other house. Since portents kept coming in dreams, and she wished there were some way of averting them, in the seventh month, on a night of very bright moon, she sent a poem. Four poems on dreams follow, and then an exchange on a river.
The author was a daughter of Fujiwara no Tomoyasu. The lady of the Jōganden was a daughter of Fujiwara no Morosuke and a consort of the late Emperor Murakami, and Kaneie's sister; the text gives no name, and she is taken to be Fujiwara no Tōshi. At the end of the previous year she had withdrawn to the house immediately west of the author's, and the exchanges that follow depend upon that nearness. The writer of the misdelivered letter is Kaneie, third son of Fujiwara no Morosuke, who would rise to be regent and chancellor.
It is a night of very bright moon in the seventh month of the first year of Anna, and the place is the author's dwelling.
It answers the lady's reproof that to speak of words running out was ill-omened.
The narrative closes the section by saying that so they went on the whole night through. Afterward the author resolves on the pilgrimage to Hatsuse that she had long intended.

She takes the other's river and keeps the water imagery. The opening means that since she does not cross it, and begins by admitting the fault on her own side, that she has not gone. The second line names one who stands far off, on the other bank of the water between them. The particle in the third line is adversative: such is my condition, and yet. In the close, the deep pool and the shallow belong to the river and at the same time figure degrees of distance and intimacy; the verb means to divide or distinguish, and the interrogative particle makes it rhetorical: her heart, at least, draws no such distinction. Where the other had produced a river as a barrier, she receives it by saying that what is separated is the body and not the heart — withdrawing the word that had been called ill-omened while shifting the reason for the distance onto the body. It is a softened poem, and fitting as the close of an exchange that lasted a whole night.

Author

The Mother of Fujiwara no Michitsuna

Source

Kagero Nikki

Other