Wakite nado io moru sode no shioruran inaba ni kagiru aki no kaze ka wa

English Translation

Why, of all the sleeves,
are those of the hut-keeper
so drenched and limp now?
Is it only on rice leaves
that the autumn wind will blow?

Meaning

Why should the sleeves of the one who guards the hut be so especially drenched and limp? The autumn wind does not blow on the rice leaves alone.

Commentary

Book Five Autumn Poems II 453

Headnote: "At the Hundred-Poem Contest held at the house of the Regent and Chancellor."
This is the first poem of a sequence on autumn fields and the autumn chill. The poet asks why the sleeves of the one guarding the fields should be so especially limp, when the autumn wind does not blow on the rice leaves alone. According to the headnote, it was composed for the hundred-poem contest at the house of the Regent and Chancellor Fujiwara no Yoshitsune.
The author was a son of Regent Fujiwara no Tadamichi and a younger brother of Kujō Kanezane. He served four times as head of the Tendai school and wrote the history Gukanshō.
The scene is autumn, at a hut set up to guard the rice fields.
The direct occasion was the hundred-poem contest held at Fujiwara no Yoshitsune's house, known as the Poetry Contest in Six Hundred Rounds.

In the first line, "wakite" means "especially," and "nado" is an interrogative adverb meaning "why."
The second line means "the sleeves of the one who stays in the hut guarding the fields." Following "the hut by the mountain paddy" in 448, the guard's hut appears again.
In the third line, "shioru" means to droop, soaked with dew or tears, and "ran," the attributive of the conjectural "ramu," answers "nado" in the first line. The poem breaks here.
The fourth line means "blowing only upon the rice leaves."
In the last line, "ka wa" is rhetorical: "Is the autumn wind one that blows only on the rice leaves? It is not." The autumn wind blows on everyone alike, so why should only the guard's sleeves be so drenched and limp? The logic heightens the guard's pathos. In 449 the wind in the rice leaves woke a villager; this poem takes up those same "rice leaves" and "autumn wind" and counters that the wind is not confined to the rice. The motif of wet sleeves continues into the next poem, 454, "how cold my sleeves have become, for the dew has settled there."

Author

Jien

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other