Aki no yo wa haya nagatsuki ni narinikeri kotowari nari ya nezame seraruru

English Translation

The long autumn nights
have become the Long Month now—
so it has turned out;
no wonder, then, that I find
myself waking in the night

Meaning

The autumn nights have already reached the Long Month; no wonder I find myself waking in the night.

Commentary

Book Five Autumn Poems II 490

Headnote: "Near the end of the Ninth Month."
This is the fifth and final poem of the sequence on the moon and autumn nights. Autumn nights have already reached the Long Month and grown long—no wonder one wakes in the night. According to the headnote, it was composed near the end of the Ninth Month.
The author was a son of Emperor Reizei who took Buddhist vows less than two years after taking the throne.
The scene is a night near the end of the Ninth Month, in a bedchamber where the speaker has woken.
The direct occasion was feeling the length of the nights at the end of the Ninth Month, the close of autumn.

The first line, "aki no yo wa," sets the autumn night as the topic; it is the same opening as the preceding poem, 489.
In the second line, "haya" means "already." "Nagatsuki" is a pivot word joining Nagatsuki, the Ninth Month, with "long" nights.
In the third line, "ni" is the continuative of the perfective "nu" and "keri" exclamatory, expressing the realization that the Long Month has come. The poem breaks here.
In the fourth line, "kotowari" is reason and "ya" an exclamatory particle: "small wonder." The poem breaks here as well.
In the last line, "raruru" is the attributive of the spontaneous auxiliary "raru": "I find myself waking," giving by inversion the content of the "reason" in the fourth line. Linking the month's name to the length of the nights, the poem reasons that frequent waking is only as the name implies. In 447 and 449 the causes of waking were the deer's cry and the wind in the rice; here the name of the month itself becomes the reason, attributing it to the long nights at autumn's end.

Author

Retired Emperor Kazan

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other