Kirigirisu naku ya shimoyo no samushiro ni koromo katashiki hitori ka mo nen

English Translation

Crickets cry nearby—
on this frosty night, upon
a cold, narrow mat
spreading just one sleeve of robe,
must I sleep here all alone?

Meaning

The crickets cry on this frosty night; spreading a single sleeve of my robe on the cold straw mat, must I sleep alone?

Commentary

Book Five Autumn Poems II 518

Headnote: "When I presented a hundred-poem sequence."
This is the fourth poem of the late-autumn sequence. On a frosty night when crickets cry, the speaker laments having to sleep alone, spreading a single sleeve on a cold straw mat. According to the headnote, it was composed as part of a hundred-poem sequence.
The author was a son of Kujō Kanezane who rose to Regent and Chancellor and was called Go-Kyōgoku-dono. He wrote the kana preface of the Shinkokinshū.
The scene is a frosty late-autumn night, in a bedchamber where the speaker sleeps alone.
The direct occasion was Retired Emperor Go-Toba's First Hundred-Poem Sequences of 1200.
It takes as its sources the Kokinshū love poem "Spreading one sleeve on her narrow mat, does she wait for me again tonight, the Maiden of Uji Bridge?" and Kakinomoto no Hitomaro's Shūishū poem "Like the long trailing tail of the copper pheasant, this long, long night—must I sleep it alone?" The poem is included in the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu.

The first line, "kirigirisu," is the insect now called the cricket, its voice heard on a frosty night.
In the second line, "ya" is an exclamatory particle. It uses the same words as "cry out, cricket, on this night of hoary frost" in 517, but where that poem commands, this one listens to the cry already sounding.
In the third line, "samu" is a pivot word joining the frosty night being "cold" (samushi) with "samushiro," a narrow straw mat. It takes the first line of the Kokinshū source and uses the same pivot as in 489.
The fourth line, "koromo katashiki," means sleeping on a single spread sleeve, a sign of sleeping without a partner; it takes the Kokinshū source's second line directly.
In the last line, "ka" is interrogative and "mo" exclamatory, bound to "n," the attributive of the conjectural "mu." Taking Hitomaro's last line, the poem sings of the loneliness of sleeping alone amid frosty cold and the cricket's cry. It combines two sources—the Kokinshū poem of a waiting woman and Hitomaro's poem of a long night alone—and transfers them to a frosty late-autumn night. Hitomaro's poem is also the source of 487; there frost settled on the pheasant's tail, while here the same solitary sleep is depicted through the cricket's voice and a cold mat.

Author

Fujiwara no Yoshitsune

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other