尋ぬらむかひやなからむ大空の
くもぢは通ふあとはかもあらじ
くもぢは通ふあとはかもあらじ
- Roma-ji
-
Tazunuramu kai ya nakaramu ōzora no kumoji wa kayou ato haka mo araji
- English Translation
-
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.
- Meaning
- 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.
- 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 the Assistant Master's poem saying that he counts upon the tracks he has already made.
With the look of a man who would not be beaten, he replied: "Ōzora mo kumo no kakehashi nakuba koso kayou hakanaki nageki o mo seme."
She takes his tracks and his counting and removes the footing from under them. The opening means: you would go seeking. The second conjectures that it will be to no purpose, telling him gently that the search is useless. The third moves the scene from the ground to the sky, and the fourth names the cloud-paths, roads within the clouds, the very type of what has no fixed shape and leaves no trace. Where he had built on a bridge and a footprint upon the earth, she lifts the stage into the air, to a place where no track could remain. The close names the trace or mark and denies that any exists. By treating the very tracks he relies on as things that were never there, she carries the refusal a step beyond the previous poem. From here the exchange moves from bridges on the ground to paths among the clouds.
- Source
- Kagero Nikki
- Other
-
- 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?
- 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.
- If the open sky had no bridge of cloud across it — then, and only then, might one grieve the frail grief of one who cannot cross.
- You tread it — you read it — and still, not knowing how perilous a thing a bridge of cloud can be, you go on counting upon it.