Asamashi ya nodoka ni tanomu toko no ue o uchikaeshikeru nami no kokoro yo

English Translation

How astonishing —
that a wave should turn clean over
the bed I trusted
to lie quiet; what a heart
that wave of yours must have.

Meaning

How astonishing that a wave should turn clean over the bed I trusted to lie quiet. What a heart that wave must have.

Commentary

53 Setting Out for the Western Hills

When the abstinence was over she moved back to her own house, and was more at a loss there than ever. The long rains had brought up the weeds, and between her devotions she had them dug out. There was a day when that shameless man drove past the very gate of her house, clearing the way before him in his usual splendid style. She was at her prayers when they set up a cry that he was coming, and her heart lurched; but he drove straight past, and everyone sat staring at her face and saying nothing. She herself could not speak for two hours and more. On the first of the sixth month a letter came, saying that although he was in abstinence, it was from beneath the Emperor's own roof. Thinking it strangely rare, she read: was the pain now over? how long was she to be in that lodging? it had seemed so inconvenient that he had not been able to come; he had gone on a pilgrimage and been kept away by a defilement. Her bitterness grew, but she bore it and wrote an answer. Then, thinking that even to be remembered like this was a nuisance, and that there might well be more to regret as there had been before, she resolved to remove herself for a while: there was the temple in the western hills where she usually went, and she would go there before his abstinence was over. So she set out on the fourth. Since his abstinence would end that very day, she was in an anxious hurry as she gathered her things; and under the upper matting she found the morning medicine, tucked inside a folded paper, still lying where it had been all the time she had been away and back. When someone found it and asked what it was, she took it and wrote on that same folded paper. In the letter she wrote: they say one cannot change one's very body, and yet there may be a world where you do not drive past my gate, and so I go today; and this too has turned into a strange piece of unasked-for telling. She sent it by the boy, who was going to report on the days of seclusion. If he should be asked, she told him, he was to say that she had written it, gone out at once, and directed that it be left and that he withdraw. Kaneie, reading it, must have felt the haste of it. His answer said that all of it was reasonable enough, but where was she going? the season would be inconvenient even for devotions; let her think of it as doing him this one favor; there were things to be talked over in any case, and he would come at once. Then came a poem, and the words: it is very hard. Reading it, she hurried the more and set out.
The author was a daughter of Fujiwara no Tomoyasu. Kaneie was the third son of Fujiwara no Morosuke and would rise to be regent and chancellor. The boy is her son Fujiwara no Michitsuna. The temple in the western hills is the one at Narutaki, the setting of the seclusion that follows. A folded paper is one carried in the breast of the robe, used for wrapping things or for writing on.
It is the fourth day of the sixth month of the second year of Tenroku, and the place is Kaneie's residence.
The poem the author had written on the paper holding the medicine, together with her letter, was carried to him by the boy. He must have been much put out on reading it: all of it was reasonable enough, he wrote, but first, where was she going? Let her humor him this once, since there were things to be discussed; he would come at once. And with it came this poem.
Seeing it, she only hurried the more and was gone. From here her retreat at the temple in the western hills begins.

He takes her matting and restates it as a bed. The opening means: how astonishing — beginning from his surprise at a woman who meant to leave without a word. The second means that he had trusted it to be quiet, that is, had taken the connection for something that would not alter. The word in the third means a bed and also what is constant, so that it is the bed that ought never to change. The verb in the fourth means both that a wave breaks over a thing and that a thing is turned inside out, and the poem turns on it: a wave has come over a bed that should have lain calm and turned it clean over, and the sudden departure is that wave. The close ends on a noun, leaving her heart named as a wave and saying no more. Where she had moved from a mat to the want of a place for herself, he restates the same mat as a bed and brings a wave over it, so that on the axis of that one word the want of a place is converted into a change of heart.

Author

Fujiwara no Kaneie

Source

Kagero Nikki

Other