Tsuyu ni te mo inochi kaketaru kumo no i ni araki kaze o ba tare ka fusegamu

English Translation

Though it be no more
than a dewdrop, the spider's
web has its life staked
upon it — and who is there
to keep the rough wind from it?

Meaning

Though it be no more than a dewdrop, the spider's web has its life staked on it; and who is there to keep the rough wind from it?

Commentary

72 Grief at the Bon Festival; The Yamato-Seeming Woman: The Exchange on White Paper

There was grief about the time of the Bon festival, and then a warning of death, after which she kept silence for a time. When the eighth month too had passed, Michitsuna, unable to believe that any of the woman's answers were in her own hand, sent her a poem in reproach. She answered on white paper, and he wrote again. From then on, whenever no answer came, he sent another poem.
The author was a daughter of Fujiwara no Tomoyasu. Michitsuna was her son. The woman is the one the text calls the Yamato-seeming person, and she is unnamed. At that period a woman's replies were often written for her by an attendant, so that whether a letter was in her own hand served as a measure of what she felt.
It is after the eighth month of the third year of Tenroku had passed, and the place is the woman's house at the foot of Mount Miwa.
It answers her poem, written on white paper, which called it strange that a spider should spin knowing the wind would scatter the thread.
No answer came — she said it had grown dark — and the next day, recalling the white letter, Michitsuna sent "Tajima no ya kugui no ato o kyō mireba yuki no shirahama shiroku te wa miji."

He takes back her spider and her wind. The opening means: though it be no more than dew, and it brings in as well the sight of dew caught on a web. The verb in the second line is the one she used for stringing a thread, moved over to the staking of a life, and that shift is the point of the reply: by carrying one verb from thread to life, he turns a frail act into a desperate one. The third line names the web itself, receiving her thread again. The fourth produces the rough wind she had made the cause of the scattering. The close is rhetorical: who would keep it off? — no one. To her statement that the spider spins although it knows the web will be undone, he answers by asking whether anyone will protect it, and so converts the exchange into a plea that he has no one but her. Trading the vocabulary of a spider's thread back and forth, he takes her recognition of frailty and rebuilds it as entreaty.

Author

Fujiwara no Michitsuna

Source

Kagero Nikki

Other