Nao oramu kokoro tanomoshi ashitazu no kumoji orikuru tsubasa ya wa naki

English Translation

Still I would cross; and
that heart of mine is a stout one.
Has the reed-crane no
wings with which to come down along
the cloud-paths of the sky?

Meaning

Still I would cross, and that heart of mine is a stout one. Has the reed-crane no wings with which to come down along the cloud-paths?

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 whether he counts on the bridge of cloud without knowing how perilous it is.
With this poem they left off for the day, it having grown dark. The exchange resumes in the twelfth month.

He takes back her counting and her cloud-paths. The first two lines mean that the heart which would still cross is a stout one — he calls his own refusal to withdraw, after being told the way is perilous, a thing to be relied on. The third names the crane of the reed beds, a bird that flies high and therefore belongs with the cloud-paths. The fourth means coming down along those paths, receiving as a road passable by a bird what she had called a place with no trace on it. The close is rhetorical: has it no wings? — it has. If the bridge is perilous, then there is no need of a bridge; one may come down on wings. Twice she has denied him a footing, and he answers by producing a means that needs no footing at all. Passing from the bridges of Yatsuhashi to a bridge of cloud and then to a crane's wings, the successive changes in the means of crossing form the frame of all eight poems. The base text is disturbed here, and the reading of the first line is not settled.

Author

Fujiwara no Michitsuna

Source

Kagero Nikki

Other