Kazuraki ya kamiyo no shirushi fukakaraba tada hitokoto ni uchi mo tokenamu

English Translation

Katsuragi — if the
sign that has come down from the
age of the gods runs
deep, then let one word alone
be enough to open you.

Meaning

Katsuragi: if the sign that has come down from the age of the gods runs deep, let a single word be enough to open you to me.

Commentary

100 Michitsuna and the Woman of Yatsuhashi

The Assistant Master was suddenly called on to dance at the special festival, and from the rehearsal to the day of the festival everything was in a rush. On the day itself the author went out in her carriage to watch, and among the ranks of nobles' carriages she saw with some embarrassment how splendid the party of a certain person appeared. Then someone took it upon himself to say that the Assistant Master ought not to go on as he was, and through that a correspondence was begun with a woman. She was perhaps someone about Yatsuhashi. He sent the first poem, but no answer came that time. He sent another, and this time she replied. After that the exchange continued, on the difficulty of the road, the cloud-paths of the open sky and the peril of a bridge of cloud, until eight poems had passed. That day it grew dark and they left off.
The author was a daughter of Fujiwara no Tomoyasu. The Assistant Master is her son Fujiwara no Michitsuna, appointed Assistant Master of the Right Stables that year. Of the woman the text says only that she was perhaps someone about Yatsuhashi, and gives no name. Yatsuhashi is a poetic place in Mikawa, where eight bridges were said to be laid across a stream, spread out like the legs of a spider.
It is about the eleventh month of the second year of Tenen, and the place is the woman's house about Yatsuhashi.
Someone having taken it upon himself to arrange matters, a correspondence began, and this is the first poem the Assistant Master sent.
No answer came that time, and he sent another: "Kazuraki no kumode wa izuko yatsuhashi no fumi mitekeri to tanomu kai naku."

The opening names Mount Katsuragi in Yamato, where a god was said to dwell who speaks only a single word. That tradition served two years earlier in the poem to the Yamato-seeming woman, "Samo koso wa katsuragiyama ni naretarame tada hitokoto ya kagiri narikeru," where it was used to reproach a woman who gave one word and no more. Here the same tradition is turned into a plea that one word would be enough — the same poet using the same allusion in opposite directions. The second line names the sign handed down from the age of the gods, and the third makes it a condition. The fourth means: with a single word, sounding the god's own name. The final particle of the close expresses a wish directed at another: let her open to him. As a first approach it asks for little, no more than a word; and the habit of summoning an allusion by way of a single place name is the family manner, found in his mother's poems and his grandfather's alike.

Author

Fujiwara no Michitsuna

Source

Kagero Nikki

Other