Arashi fuku makuzugahara ni naku shika wa uramite nomi ya tsuma o kouran

English Translation

Where the tempest blows
across the kudzu meadow
the stag calling there—
is it only with reproach
that he yearns after his mate?

Meaning

The stag crying on the kudzu meadow swept by the storm—as the wind turns the kudzu leaves to show their undersides, does he long for his mate with nothing but resentment?

Commentary

Book Five Autumn Poems II 440

Headnote: "Topic unknown."
This is the fourth poem of the deer sequence. On the kudzu meadow where the storm turns up the undersides of the leaves, the poet wonders whether the stag longs for its mate only with resentment. The headnote gives no topic, and the circumstances of composition are not recorded.
The author was a son of Minamoto no Toshiyori who became a monk of Tōdaiji and named his lodging in Shirakawa, Kyoto, the Karin'en, where he gathered many poets for poetry meetings.
The scene is autumn with a storm blowing, on a meadow overgrown with kudzu. Makuzugahara is also known as a place name at the foot of Higashiyama in Kyoto.
The direct occasion is not recorded.
The conceit of linking "seeing the underside" with "resentment," because kudzu leaves flip in the wind, has a precedent in a poem by Taira no Sadafun in the fifth book of love poems of the Kokinshū.

The first line, "arashi fuku," means that a violent wind blows down from the mountains, continuing the winds of the two preceding poems.
In the second line, "ma" is an honorific prefix, and the phrase denotes a meadow thick with kudzu.
The third line presents the deer that is the subject of the poem. The deer that cried alone in the earlier poems is here made clear as a stag longing for its mate.
In the fourth line, "urami" is a pivot word combining "seeing the underside" of the wind-tossed kudzu leaves with "resentment," and it is associatively linked with "storm" and "kudzu." "Nomi" is a restrictive particle and "ya" an interrogative one. The heart of the poem is this fusion of a visual "underside" and an emotional "resentment" in one word.
In the last line, "ran" is the attributive of the conjectural "ramu," bound to "ya." The stag's cry in the storm is heard as the voice of one who longs for its mate while resenting her. The next poem, 441, opens with "longing for his mate," taking up this last line in a chain. The conceit of wind flipping kudzu leaves is used again in "the wind that turns the kudzu leaves" in 450.

Author

Shun'e

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other