Ōzora mo kumo no kakehashi nakuba koso kayou hakanaki nageki o mo seme

English Translation

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.

Meaning

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.

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 saying that no trace of passing remains on the cloud-paths; the narrative says he wrote it with the look of a man who would not be beaten.
She replied with "Fumi miredo kumo no kakehashi ayaushi to omoi shirazu mo tanomu naru kana."

He takes her open sky and her cloud-paths, and throws a bridge across them. The opening means: the open sky as well, receiving the ground she had chosen. The second names a bridge of cloud, the word for a plank bridge slung across a ravine, carried up into the air. Where she had produced the cloud-paths as a place that keeps no trace, he refashions the very clouds into a bridge, and on that word the poem turns. The third means: if there were none, its emphatic particle governing the close and setting the whole in the conditional. The fourth names the frail grief of one who tries to cross and cannot, and the close completes the construction. The argument is that if there were no bridge one might grieve, but since there is a bridge of cloud there is no cause for grieving. She had shifted the stage to the sky and taken away his footing; he answers that it is precisely in that sky that the bridge stands, so that the imagery of bridges, begun at Yatsuhashi, is carried on. It is exactly the reply of a man who, as the narrative says, would not be beaten.

Author

Fujiwara no Michitsuna

Source

Kagero Nikki

Other