通ふべき道にもあらぬやつはしの
ふみ見てきとてなに賴むらむ
ふみ見てきとてなに賴むらむ
- Roma-ji
-
Kayou beki michi ni mo aranu yatsuhashi no fumi miteki tote nani tanomuramu
- English Translation
-
Yatsuhashi is not
a road that anyone travels;
and though you say you
trod it, and that it was seen,
what is it you count upon?
- Meaning
- Yatsuhashi is no road that anyone travels; and though you say you trod it and that it was seen, what is it you count upon?
- 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.
It is the first answer she gave, after the Assistant Master had written twice.
He replied with "Nani ka sono kayowamu michi no katakaramu fumi hajimetaru ato o tanomeba."
She takes back his Yatsuhashi and his treading. The first two lines mean that it is not a road anyone would travel, dismissing at once the notion that there is any traffic between them. The third resets his place name and hands on to the fourth, where the word means, as in his poem, both treading a bridge and a letter, so that having crossed and having been read are said together. What follows means: and on that account — showing how little such a thing can be relied on. The close asks what he can be counting upon, taking over his own complaint that it was to no purpose and returning it: there is nothing here worth counting on. The argument is that a bridge does not make a road; and for a first reply it shows no sign whatever of yielding. Declining by reassembling every one of the other's words, without discarding one, is the practice that has governed the exchanges of this diary since the first book.
- Source
- Kagero Nikki
- Other
-
- 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.
- Where are they, those spider- legged bridges of Katsuragi? At Yatsuhashi I trod, I sent, and it was seen — and to no purpose at all.
- Why should that road be hard to travel? I have set out on it — I have begun to write — and it is those first tracks that I count upon.
- Whatever you seek will be sought in vain; for on the cloud-paths of the open sky there is no trace, no mark of anyone's passing.