Nani ka sono kayowamu michi no katakaramu fumi hajimetaru ato o tanomeba

English Translation

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.

Meaning

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 I 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 answers her poem asking, since it is no road anyone travels, what he counts upon.
She replied with "Tazunuramu kai ya nakaramu ōzora no kumoji wa kayou ato haka mo araji."

He takes back her travelling, her road and her counting. The opening introduces a rhetorical question: why should that. The second and third lines mean: why should the road be hard? — it is not, denying flatly her assertion that there is no road. The verb in the fourth means both to begin treading a bridge and to begin writing a letter, and on it the poem turns; the word for tracks likewise covers footprints and a hand of writing, so that the step already taken and the letter already begun are laid over one another. The ground he stands on is simply the fact that he has started. The close means: because I count upon them — an answer to her question of what he counts upon, namely the mere fact of having begun. Two pivots carry the argument, which presses forward on the strength of an accomplished act; the refusal to withdraw after being refused is very plain in it.

Author

Fujiwara no Michitsuna

Source

Kagero Nikki

Other