Kaeru hi o kokoro no uchi ni kazoetsutsu tare ni yorite ka ajiro o mo tou

English Translation

Counting over in
my heart the days until your
return, I waited.
For whose sake, if not yours, would
I come to see a fish-weir?

Meaning

I waited, counting over in my heart the days until your return. For whose sake, if not yours, would I come to look at a fish-weir?

Commentary

28 The Return from Hatsuse: The Fish-Weir at Uji

She would have liked to stay a little longer, but at daybreak the household made a great noise and set her on her way. On the return she meant to travel quietly, yet at one place and another they entertained her and detained her, so that it went by in a bustle. On the third day she should have reached the capital, but as it had grown quite dark they stopped at a place called the imperial pasture at Kuze in Yamashiro. It was very uncomfortable, but since night had fallen there was nothing to do but wait for morning. Setting out while it was still dark, they were overtaken by a man in dark clothes on horseback. He dismounted at some distance and knelt. He proved to be one of the guard. When they asked what it was, he said that his lordship had reached the Uji lodge about the hour of the cock the day before, and had ordered him to go and see whether she had come back. The men ahead gave orders about setting the boats afloat. As they neared the Uji river, fog lay so thick that the way behind was invisible, and it was all very uncertain. While the carriage was being taken down and much fuss made over it, voices multiplied and someone called out to set the carriage down. Below the fog the familiar fish-weir came into view. It was lovely beyond words. He himself must be on the far bank. So she wrote this first and had it carried across. As the boat came in to the shore, an answer came. While they were reading it, the carriage was set aboard and rowed noisily across.
The author was a daughter of Fujiwara no Tomoyasu. The one waiting at the Uji lodge was Kaneie, third son of Fujiwara no Morosuke, who would rise to be regent and chancellor. The guard is an attendant who accompanies a nobleman for his protection.
It is the ninth month of the first year of Anna, on the return from the pilgrimage to Hatsuse, and the place is the far bank of the Uji river.
It answers the poem she wrote and sent across from the foggy bank, and came as the boat was drawing in to shore.
After this exchange the carriage was set aboard and rowed noisily across. Only the closing passage of the first book remains after this.

He takes back her weir unchanged. The opening names the day of her return, saying that he has been waiting for her to come back from the journey. The second line means inwardly, without saying it aloud, and adds the sense of a man waiting on a road where others could see him. The third describes counting the days off, the very gesture of one who waits. The fourth is rhetorical: on whose account, for whose sake — and there can be no other. The close asks whether he would come to look at a fish-weir, taking the weir she had offered as scenery and drawing it over to the reason for his own journey. Where she had folded a grievance into the bitterness hidden in the place name, he uses no pivot at all and answers with the bare fact that he had been waiting; and that plainness suits the scene of a river with the fog beginning to lift. As the last exchange of the first book, it is one of the few in this diary that close on a note of ease.

Author

Fujiwara no Kaneie

Source

Kagero Nikki

Other