SOURCE: An introduction to The Izumi Shikibu Diary: A Romance of the Heian Court, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969, pp. 3-125.

[In the following excerpt, Cranston offers background on early Japanese court literature (including the different varieties of nikki and their position relative to other genres of literature), and discusses the work of Izumi in the context of her predecessors and her peers.]

… Description

The Izumi Shikibu nikki¹¹⁰ is a work in one kan purporting to describe the beginning of Izumi's relationship with Prince Atsumichi. It is fairly short, occupying forty-six and one-half pages in the Iwanami Nihon koten bungaku taikei edition. It covers a time span of about nine months. The opening scene, when Izumi receives her first message from Prince Atsumichi, takes place shortly after the tenth of the fourth month of Choho 5 (1003); the last—the day when the Prince's consort leaves him—is in the first month of the following year. The work, though brief, abounds with waka poetry. In the Sanjonishibon version there are 144½ poems, counting each of two renga"' as one complete poem, and another seventeen-syllable utterance of the Prince (see translation, note 227) as one half.

Despite its title, the Izumi Shikibu nikki is not what we ordinarily understand as a diary. Questions of authorship and formation will be discussed later, and an attempt will be made to see the work in relation to the trends of early Japanese literature. Here the discussion will be limited to what is obvious on a first reading of the Nikki: whoever the author may have been, and regardless of whether or not the work is reliable as a true account, it has characteristics alien to those of a simple journal. The narration is in the third person, and the point of view is not limited to that proper to a diarist. There are simultaneous or almost simultaneous scenes in different places, imagined conversations, and descriptions of the thoughts and feelings of different people. The work is at least partially one of imaginative fiction.

Considering the work as imaginative fiction, it is proper to speak of a plot. The plot of the Izumi Shikibu nikki is simple, repetitious, and slow to develop.¹¹² The story line follows a wave-like pattern of alternate ardor and indifference on the part of the Prince, and timidity and yearning on the part of Izumi. She waits in her house for his visits and his messages. After his storming of the fort has overcome her initial reluctance, she longs for him to come again. He, on his part, his passion somewhat cooled, has second thoughts. At last he comes, but she, vexed by his neglect, ignores him. She goes off to visit a mountain temple, and on her return is too exhausted to hear his knock. After this series of frustrations he finally takes her away in his carriage one night to a deserted gallery of his mansion; thereafter they have other midnight excursions. By this time she seems completely in love with him, but when he presses her to come and live in his palace, her resolution wavers. He protests at the difficulties he encounters going to visit her. Despite, or perhaps because of, his high position, he cannot always do as he pleases. Furthermore, the Prince's feelings for Izumi are unstable. Each new rumor casts new suspicion over his mind, suspicion which vanishes in renewed tenderness whenever he sees her again. Finally, after months of hesitation on both sides, the Prince decides to take matters into his own hands, prepares a place for Izumi to live, and simply takes her away one night without telling her where she is going.

Up to this point the plot has been a series of vacillations, visits, and periods of seemingly endless waiting. Gradually the intimacy of the lovers increases, along with their commitment to each other, but the process is not notable for its momentum. In all, eighteen visits or attempted visits by the Prince to Izumi are described. Their greatest frequency comes in the first two months, and in the two months immediately preceding Izumi's entrance into the Prince's mansion. In between, and throughout, are the long days of forlorn waiting. What should be the climax of the whole work, the Prince's removal of Izumi to his mansion, is passed over in a strangely offhand fashion. The Prince's final resolution is never stated, but is simply assumed at the end of a long compound-complex sentence, the bulk of which is devoted to his despair and contemplation of early death (see translation, note 348). The Prince has promised Izumi that in his mansion she will be subjected to no unpleasantness, but the situation turns out quite differently. Her arrival causes a scandal in the household, culminating in the departure of the Prince's legitimate wife. Peered at, whispered about, and surrounded by sharp-fanged female jealousy, Izumi soon regrets the loss of the lonely but independent life she led in her former residence. Throughout most of its length as static as the existence it depicts, the work achieves an ultimate balance, ending as it began, with a sigh.

The characters of Prince Atsumichi and Izumi Shikibu, which are the only ones treated at any length in the Nikki, cannot be said to be of great complexity. But they are far from completely flat. The dominant traits of the lovers are amorousness, wit, melancholy, and indecision; in their frailties they are very human. The Prince, who seems rather adept at night-roving, protests his inexperience and his quiet, retiring nature. Izumi, already tinged with scandal and guilt, struggles to be faithful to the memory of her dead lover, Prince Tametaka. But not for long. She reproaches herself for her infidelity, but it is clear that the new love affair is not unwelcome. The first mention of Prince Atsumichi by the page draws from her the exclamation "Ito yoki ioto ni koso anare!" (I'm sure that must be splendid!). It is obvious that her interest is aroused. She tries to tell herself that she will do nothing more than talk with the Prince for a little while, but it is difficult to believe that she could have been surprised at the outcome.

Their jealousies, suspicions, hesitancies, and witty exchanges make the two an engaging pair. The characterization is not fully rounded because the work is brief and centered solely on one aspect of their lives. Their other concerns and activities are mostly ignored, and the background is hazy to the point that they both seem sometimes to exist almost in a vacuum. Only toward the end, after Izumi has been introduced into the Prince's mansion, do we get a glimpse of the workings and intricacies of a slightly larger world.

The tone of the Nikki, as of much of Heian literature, is basically one of melancholy. Outside her relationship with the Prince, the lady seems to be always alone—psychologically, if not physically. She is stirred to long, long thoughts by the rain, by the sight of the growing grasses, by the moon, the crying of the wild geese, the falling of the autumn leaves—in short, by nearly every natural phenomenon which impinges on her consciousness or comes to her knowledge in the restricted world under the eaves of her dwelling. It is mono-no-aware, the sigh-producing sadness occasioned by a world of poignant beauty and transient love. The first sentence is the keynote: "Yume yori mo hakanaki yo no naka o nagekiwabitsutsu …" (Frailer than a dream had been those mortal ties for which she mourned … with sighs of melancholy). At the last Izumi realizes that she is one "whose melancholy thoughts will never end." It is a world of waiting, where "gazing" and "long rains" merge into the same word. The Prince too is subject to fits of melancholia, and seems to have a prescience of his early death. The tone of subdued sadness is broken by occasional joys—the receipt of a longed-for letter—and by frequent flashes of wit. But often the lady weeps even when she is with her lover. Fears oppress her. The gentle melancholy of the surface conceals an undercurrent of anxiety; for both lovers the dread of censure and wagging tongues is very real. Their world is small and compact, and its judgements are inescapable. There is one way, however—to "abandon the world" and take the refuge offered by the Buddhist temples. Both Izumi and the Prince toy with the idea; it must have had a powerful appeal to people sick of society. But as far as is known, neither of the lovers ever took the step. (Note however the traditions about Izumi Shikibu mentioned in the previous section.)

In its prose style the Izumi Shikibu nikki is relatively simple and easy to read, at least as compared to such other Heian classics as the Genji monogatari and Kagero nikki. Obscurities and special problems have been taken up in the notes to the translation. In general these are such as obtrude on the notice of the translator rather than of the reader. Sentences tend to be reasonably short and straightforward for a text in classical Japanese prose, and the small number of characters helps to reduce confusion. The prose is soft and mellifluous, and when describing natural scenes of strong emotional content it occasionally rises to lyric intensity. A particularly admirable feature is the skill with which the poetry and prose are interwoven, often through syntactical devices unfortunately not available to the English translator.¹¹³ The poems vary in quality; some are rather trite, but others are successful in matching thought or emotion with expression. A great many, typical of their age, are examples of verbal dexterity, admirable or not according to one's taste.

The prose makes extensive use of honorific verbs, which often distinguish between the two principal characters, as in obosu for the Prince and omou (both meaning "think") for Izumi. A noticeable characteristic of the style is the abundance of causatives, the vast majority of which are applied to actions of the Prince or other characters of exalted station. They are in fact used mostly as honorifics. The context usually makes clear whether an honorific or a causative function is intended. But in the case of verbs of speech this is not always true. In this connection it may be noted that Izumi and the Prince each has a characteristic verb expressing the idea "to say"—notamau for the Prince, and kikoyu for Izumi. Forms of the verb notamau are used with the Prince as subject seventy-one times. Izumi is the subject of this verb only four times, when the Prince, addressing her, refers to her speech. On the other hand, forms of the verb kikoyu, including a few instances of its use as an auxiliary verb, have Izumi as subject eighty-three times, and the Prince only eighteen times, mostly when the Prince refers to his own speech or messages. In most instances the verb notamau is used in its causative form notamawasu. In over a fourth of the cases the equivalent is true of kikoyu.

The question then arises as to whether the speech or communication is to be considered direct or indirect. There is much employment of messengers to carry poems to and fro in the Nikki, and it is a well known fact that ladies in the Heian age often sat concealed behind screens. High nobles too might be expected to communicate their wishes through intermediaries. It would be convenient if the causative or noncausative form of verbs of communication reflected the presence or absence of intermediaries, but such is not the case: there seems to be no discernible rationale for their use. In a particular confrontation causative and noncausative forms will be mixed in together, and this is so whether the situation is one in which a third party might conceivably be serving as go-between speaker, or whether it is of such an intimate nature that two people are obviously speaking directly to each other. The same is true of messages—sometimes the text of a poem will be followed by "to kikoetari" or "to notamaeba"; in other instances a causative form such as "to kikoesasetareba" or "to notamawasetari" will be used. There seems to be no reason for the difference. One is forced to the conclusion that simple variety was the effect sought. Since people of exalted station did often communicate through subordinates, the causative form would naturally come to be commonly used in reporting their speech. This habitual association of causatives with the elite might quite naturally evolve in the direction of the use of such forms as honorifics even in the reporting of direct speech.

The Question of Genre

The foregoing pages have described the uncertainties surrounding the authorship, formation, and date of the Izumi Shikibu nikkl. It may now be helpful to consider the work against its natural background of early Japanese court literature.

Varieties of Nikki

The term nikki,²⁵⁶ literally "day record," in its earliest Japanese²⁵⁷ usage refers to official records of events at court rather than to anything that can be identified as literature. Thus geki nikki and naiki nikki were records kept by the Geki and the Naiki, document-drafting officials of the central bureaucracy.²⁵⁸ The first reference to such nikki dates from 821.²⁵⁹ Another species of writing classified as nikki, though usually not so titled, consists of the privately kept journals of court nobles. These become quite numerous from the Heian Period onward. They are written in true diary form, with a separate entry for each day, and have as one of their main purposes the minute recording of correct ceremonial. Such examples as Teishinkoki, Ouki, Gonki, Mido Kampaku ki, and Sakeiki are important sources for the history of the Heian court.²⁶⁰ All these documents, both official and private, are written not in Japanese but in a peculiar Chinese known as kiroku kambun (record Chinese). The authors of the private journals sometimes attempted and achieved a stylistic elegance which nevertheless is not generally considered sufficient in itself to qualify these works as literature.

A third group of writings described as nikki is composed of records of poetry competitions²⁶¹ held at court or in the homes of the nobles. Such competitions, beginning apparently in the ninth century, became and remained very popular throughout the middle and late Heian and early Kamakura periods.²⁶² The spirit of rivalry in fact was highly cultivated, especially among the court ladies, and took an extraordinary variety of forms. Not only were poems matched, but fans, shells, paintings, iris roots, chrysanthemums, songbirds, short stories, and a great variety of other living things, inanimate objects, and products of manual and verbal skill. Sei Shonagon (fl. last decade of the tenth century) listed victory in such contests among the things which gave her pleasure,²⁶³ and readers of the Tale of Genji will recall the furious preparations and high excitement occasioned by the picture competition. Contestants were grouped into teams of the left and right, judges were appointed, and records kept of their decisions. Since the writing of verse often accompanied the matching of objects, such a document as "The Shell-Matching Held on the Sixth Day of the Fifth Month of the First Year of Chokyu [1040] in Honor of the Ise Shrine Virgin Princess Ryoshi"²⁶⁴ is an item in the history of Japanese poetry. If written in Chinese, the prose portions of such records were called simply nikki; if in Japanese, kana nikki. These kana nikki are often lively and detailed in their descriptions, dwelling on the circumstances leading up to the competition and painting a picture of the setting with its carefully wrought decorations and the contestants in their costumes of various colors. They are written with obvious literary intent.²⁶⁵

To Heian court society then the concept of nikki was that of a record of actual event, whether public or private, written in Chinese or Japanese, either carefully styled or baldly factual. From the tenth century onwards it came to refer more specifically to a type of personal memoir, a genre now knownas nikki bungaku—"nikki literature"—to which, according to the traditional view, the Izumi Shikibu nikki belongs. These memoirs, examples of which will be discussed below, are expressions of a fundamental and persistent urge motivating the creation of much of Japanese literature. All writing, to begin with, partakes of a felt need to preserve the past, and there is nothing specifically Japanese about this. The early chronicles and songs have their counterparts in other countries. Along with the development of a literary consciousness however there began to appear in Japanese writings an interest in a personal as well as a national past, a tendency for an author to collect and set down certain incidents of his own life which seemed to him worth recording. This bias toward the autobiographical, or in broader terms the factual, forms one current running through the sea of Japanese literature. It is a wide and meandering stream, whose boundaries are ill-defined and whose waters have often mingled with and colored other literary currents. Its origins are involved with the peculiarly fluid nature of Japanese verse.

Lyricism and Prose Contexts

The lyric impulse in Japan, as in other countries, antedates the beginning of literacy; Japanese literature is unusual however for the dominantly lyric tone it preserves throughout its history. Personal writings—journals, jottings, and reflective essays—and the old fictional tales constantly merge into poetry as the author, the hero, or the heroine expresses his or her thoughts in a well turned verse. The plays of the no, the puppet, and the kabuki theaters are fabrics of interwoven prose and verse, and are recited, declaimed, or sung in ways which mark them off from ordinary speech. Travel records and the travel scenes in drama are series of lyric evocations of the qualities and associations of places and their names. The lyric tradition continues through the various genres of popular literature of late traditional Japan, and in significant ways into the work of some of the best modern authors.

Why this should be so constitutes one of the most interesting problems in the history of Japanese letters. Japanese poetic forms are short compared to those traditional in the West. Primitive poetry had a concept of long and short lines, but no fixed length or number of lines. With the emergence of consciously literary creativity in the seventh century—a flowering from native roots but nourished by Chinese example—alternate lines of five and seven syllables became the norm, and poems were grouped into types by number of lines. The most prevalent form, the tanka, consists of thirty-one syllables in subdivisions of five, seven, five, seven, and seven. The choka, the second most common form during the first literary period—roughly, the seventh and eighth centuries—is made up of an indefinite number of alternating five- and seven-syllable lines with an extra seven-syllable line at the end. It was theoretically capable of practically unlimited development, but in fact the Manyoshu contains no choka longer than 149 lines—not very long by Western standards. Despite narrative elements the impulse of the poetry is basically lyrical, and therefore relatively short-winded. There was also a tendency for the choka poets to write in very long syntactic units, or even to make the whole poem one unit. This was a triumph of language, and some of the best effects in Japanese poetry were achieved by means of such long, tightly integrated structures, but there are obvious practical objections to unlimited extension or addition of the prepositional modifying clauses which are a fundamental feature of the syntax. After the eighth century the choka in any case was abandoned as a serious literary vehicle, leaving the tanka to dominate poetry for the next several centuries. Eventually an even briefer form developed, the seventeen-syllable haiku.²⁶⁶

From earliest times then most Japanese poetry was of a length to fit easily into longer prose settings. Of at least equal importance to the evolution of mixed forms was the role of verse in Japanese society. The view of poetry as a lofty and serious art can be traced in its development through the works of gifted poets and critics; but poetry had always been, and remained, something else as well. It was a means of communication, a mode of speech and later of writing. When the primordial creators of the earth, the male and female deities Izanagi and Izanami, met to begin their divine procreation beneath the Floating Bridge of Heaven, they exchanged ritual greetings: "Ana ni yashie otome o! Ana ni yashie otoko o!" (Truly what a fine girl! Truly what a fine man!).²⁶⁷ These exclamations were treated as the beginning of the Japanese poetic tradition, and Ki no Tsurayuki (ca. 868-945) could claim in the Kana Preface to the Kokinshu, "Our poetry has existed from the beginning of heaven and earth." This enshrinement of the poetic exchange reflects a social reality in early Japan. As indicated by the Izanami-Izanagi myth, singing back and forth between young men and maidens may have played a part in ancient courtship practices.²⁶⁸ In later times, in any case, exchange of poems was the standard procedure in initiating a love affair, and one cannot but be intrigued by a vision of the Heian capital constantly alive with messengers carrying that lightest of burdens, a lover's note. Since poetry was such a common and essential adjunct of polite existence, it was composed by practically everyone of culture—universally, in Tsurayuki's view²⁶⁹—and naturally had a highly cultivated occasional aspect. Poetry was part of everyday discourse, and a knowledge of situation is often needed in order to understand what is meant in a given poem. Even formal verses written as deliberate acts of poetic creation and designed to be read by a wide public are usually prefaced by an explanatory headnote or at least an indication of the topic. The celebrated poem by Princess Nukata (fl. ca. 660-690) on the relative charms of spring and autumn, for instance, is introduced by the following: "When the Emperor commanded the Great Minister of the Center, Lord Fujiwara, to match the radiance of the myriad blossoms of the spring mountains against the colors of the thousand leaves of the autumn mountains, Princess Nukata decided the question in verse with this poem."²⁷⁰ Her choka is quite understandable on its own terms, but as much cannot be said of an epistolary poem such as number twenty from the Izumi Shikibu nikki:

Surrender and come
To me? I see no sign of that,
And yet I wait,
Although the crawling vine sends out
Scarcely one visiting shoot.

Here we need to know that Izumi is replying to a poem from the Prince in which he has said that today he will surrender (makenan) to love, and that she is making a play on this statement by use of the word makuru ("surrender," but also "come" and "coil"; see translation, note 69). Izumi's verse is typical of an extremely large class which are more or less hermetic without a context. An English love poem can be expected to stand on its own feet, whether its metres move it straight forward in the direct declaration of "My luve is like a red, red rose," or through the circuitous reasonings of "To His Coy Mistress." But the first poem in the Ise monogatari—that elegant guidebook of courtly love—would look this way in a rather literal-minded prose gloss:

The garment printed with the dye
of the young murasaki plants of
Kasuga fields—in Shinobu pattern
—the distraction of concealed
love knows no bounds.

A somewhat freer verse rendering might run:

The wild pattern of
This garment stained with purple
Of the young herbs of Kasuga:
The turmoil of a secret love
Can know no boundaries.

But even this more interpretive second version presupposes a knowledge of the incident in which the poem finds its setting: A young nobleman visiting his country estate near the old capital of Nara catches a glimpse of two lovely sisters living in humble surroundings on the fields of Kasuga. Smitten at the sight, he tears off the skirt of his hunting dress and sends it to the maidens with the verse quoted above. The cloth of the garment is, the author tells us, a "Shinobu print" (shinobuzuri)—a product of Shinobu district in the province of Mutsu—famous for its wild, haphazard pattern. Hence the pun on shinobu, which also means both "to long for" and "to conceal". In the context the young murasaki plants (the gromwell, whose root was the source of a purple dye) growing on the Kasuga fields are a metaphor for the young girls who have aroused in the hero the turmoil of desire (shinobu no midare). The episode ends with a comment to the effect that the men of former times were adept at such elegant expressions of tender passion.

It was not only in "former times" however but throughout the history of traditional Japan that poetry flourished in its role of direct personal communication, whether with lovers, family, or friends. As we see them in the romances and memoirs of the Heian court such missive poems are commonly accompanied by a brief message in prose. The ease with which prose and poetry lie together in the same bed provides, along with social function and brevity of form, a third factor favoring development of hybrid genres. This literary symbiosis is perhaps most highly developed in the texts of the no plays, but Heian literature also exemplifies the tendency in striking fashion. A few examples from the Genji monogatari may be used as illustrations. In order to emphasize the way in which poems grow out of and blend into the prose text, the translations are not divided into five lines as is the practice elsewhere in this book, but are placed within an extra set of quotation marks and printed otherwise as if they were prose statements. This technique resembles the format of Japanese books, where a tanka usually occupies only one vertical line and is marked off from surrounding text only by a slight indentation.

In the first chapter of the Genji the mother of the dead Kiritsubo writes to the Emperor about her anxiety over Kiritsubo's infant son: "I am quite overwhelmed with awe at this most gracious condescension. But this message from on high has cast dark confusion over my mind: 'Now that the sheltering tree that held rough winds away has withered and gone, my heart can never rest from fret for the young bush-clover."' In the original the prose statement does not come to a full grammatical stop, but leads into the poem in a more effortless and natural way than is conveyed in the translation: "Ito mo, kashikoki wa, okidokoro mo haberazu. Kakaru osegoto ni tsukete mo, kakikurasumidarigokochi ni namu, 'Araki kaze fusegishi kage no kareshi yori kohagi ga ue zo shizugokoro naki."'²⁷¹

In the second chapter Genji sends a note to Utsusemi, another man's wife with whom he has spent one fleeting night: "'Mishi yume o au yo ari ya to nageku ma ni me sae awade zo koro mo henikeru,' nenuru yo nakereba."²⁷² Here the statement following the poem can be understood, through a very common reversal of syntax, as a grammatical extension of the poem and a comment on it. The translation attempts to convey this carry-over: "'While I have sighed and wondered if the night would ever come when I could truly meet that dream I dreamt, time has passed and gone, and even my eyelids have not met,' for there has been no night when I could sleep." The same technique is used repeatedly in the Izumi Shikibu nikki (see, for instance, translation, notes 52, 62, 66, 296, 334). A further example can be drawn from the fourth chapter of the Genji. The hero has just taken Yugao to the deserted mansion where she is to meet her untimely death. Gazing through a shroud of morning mist at the grim, decaying, vine-covered pile they are about to enter, Genji speaks:

"I never knew what such an experience would be like—it almost makes me lose heart. 'Did men of old wander thus lost on this same path I follow, ignorant of where I go, through the ghostly light of dawn?' But perhaps you are no novice at this?"

Blushing, the girl replied, "'Unable to guess what lies in store beyond the horizon mountains, the moon may cease to shine while yet it travels through the sky.' Or so I fear."²⁷³

In the Japanese Genji's poem ends with a noun, "michi" (way), which immediately becomes the object of the following question: "naraitamaeri ya" (Have you learned this way [of love]?). Similarly, Yugao's poem ends in a verb followed by a comment, adverbial in form. "Kage ya taenan" ([the moon's] light may cease) can be glossed as modified by "kokorobosoku" (forlornly). However, since the adverbial form is identical with the continuative form of the adjective, "kokorobosoku" is also Yugao's direct statement of her own emotions—"I feel so helpless."

Thus it can be seen that Japanese prose and verse tend to go well together—indeed, have an affinity for each other. Not only do they blend easily, but some kinds of poetry cry out for a prose context. This is not to deny poetry its place as an independent art in Japan. Poems could and did exist as independent units. And integration, when practiced, was often with other poems rather than with prose."²⁷⁴ In addition the flowering of linked verse in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries replaced the long defunct choka with an extended form of serious literary value albeit of far different nature. But, at least partially for the reasons mentioned above, and particularly because of the near universality of versifying by the literate society centered around the imperial court, Japan early came to possess an extensive literature of works which are neither wholly prose nor wholly verse, but a combination of the two.

These works are of several kinds, not always readily distinguishable. The spectrum ranges from undoubted fiction through an uneasy middle ground to writings intended as factual. Four words from the vocabulary of Japanese literary historians—monogatari, zuihitsu, nikki, and shu—will cover the larger part of what we know as Heian literature. But these "tales," "miscellanies," "diaries," and "collections" tend to have fuzzy boundaries, and an uncritical use of such designations can perpetuate confusion. As noted by Yamagishi, some works find themselves in more than one category, a fact that be-speaks partly our own ignorance of the circumstances of their composition, and partly the somewhat fluid sense of genre possessed by their authors.

The Rise of Autobiographical Writings

In the beginning were the songs and the stories—the oral traditions and poetry of a pre-literate people. These were collected and copied down during the eighth century in works which still survive—the first two histories, the Kojiki (712) and Nihon shoki (720); the fudoki, collections of local lore;²⁷⁵ and the Man'yoshu, the great compendium of Japanese poetry from its beginnings to the year 759. The histories, which are largely collections of myth and legend in their earlier parts, and the local lore contain much poetry placed in the mouth of god, man, and beast, and show that Tsurayuki's vision of the universality of song was founded on the most ancient concepts and practices of his nation. The Man 'yoshu is a massive anthology of over four thousand poems, and must represent the culmination of several decades of gathering together both the old heritage of song and the works of living poets. Once the composition of poetry passed from the shadowy age of anonymous singers—when verses with names attached are likely to have been attributed arbitrarily to emperors and gods—into the daylight of a literate court, men who valued their status as poets began to make collections of their own works. The emergence of the poet as an individual and self-conscious literary figure is marked in arresting fashion by the career of Kakinomoto no Hitomaro during the last two decades of the seventh century. The compilers of the Man'yoshu drew upon his private collection and those of his contemporaries and successors, as well as previous anthologies, thus preserving, as the event proved, works and writers which otherwise would not have survived.

Of Hitomaro's life we know essentially what his poems tell us. He had a passionate fealty toward the imperial house, a love of life deepened and enriched by a profound sense of its ironies and tragedies, and a broad feeling of brotherhood or identity with his fellow man. He particularly prized and praised the tender bonds joining man and wife. Of this much we can be sure. For the rest, we know only that he traveled much, presumably on orders from the court, lived for a time in Iwami on the Japan Sea coast and perhaps died there, loved at least two women, and experienced loss through death and parting. It was he who brought the choka to perfection, and he occupies an impregnable position in Japanese letters because of the human significance and technical mastery of his works. But most of his major poems which have come down to us are not marked as having been taken from the "Hitomaro Collection," and there is some uncertainty as to how many of the more numerous but shorter, lesser poems which the Man'yoshu compilers did select from that source are actually his own compositions. In short, it is not known in what state of organization Hitomaro left his writings at his death. He is hardly unique in this respect, but there are later poets whose literary remains give clearer evidence of a concern for arrangement which evolved gradually in the direction of a poetic diary or memoir.

The man who is credited with having done the most to shape the Man'yoshu as we know it is Otomo no Yakamochi (716-785). Yakamochi was the last great poet of the Man'yo age, a man of many interests and responsibilities, a prolific writer whose copious output dominates the latter part of the collection. Through his poetry we can see him as the amorous gallant corresponding with manywomen, as the grave official and provincial governor, and as the unhappy bearer of a proud and ancient but now tarnished name.²⁷⁶ He is regarded as a transitional figure because among the variety of his poetry can be found foreshadowings of a shift in the concerns of Japanese poetry—a turning away from the larger world of nature and human society to the more limited vistas of a garden and the inward questing after the essence of the poet's own sensibilities. That he was a dominant literary figure in his day can be seen from his 453 extant poems—of which 46 are choka—and in even larger measure from his work as final compiler of the Man 'yoshu. The point of greatest significance to the present discussion however is that the last four of the twenty books of that collection, dominated by his work, constitute a kind of rough poetic journal. In these books are set out in chronological order, and interspersed with prose passages, the poems of Yakamochi and his circle of clansmen, correspondents, and acquaintances written over thirty years, from 730 to 759. Many of the poems are carefully dated.

As a general rule throughout this collection Yakamochi is referred to in the third person, as are the other authors represented in it. Of course it is not known whether or not this section of the Man 'yoshu has come down unaltered from Yakamochi's hands; the process of compilation is not understood with that degree of surety. But his personal touch is visible everywhere. When he left the Capital in 746 to take up his duties as governor of Etchu Province his departure brought grief to more than one lady. Among those who expressed her feelings in verse on this occasion was a girl of the Heguri clan. The twelve heart-stricken poems (MYS 3931-3942) she sent to her lover at his distant post are followed by Yakamochi's note: "The above verses came by messenger at different times; they were not sent all at once." He regularly states when he received or heard each poem not of his own composition, once complains that he cannot find his replies,²⁷⁷ and at the end of maki 19 remarks that the poems with no author given are his own. Further, his occasional use of a humble formula, sechie ([my] humble feelings),²⁷⁸ in reference to his own poems is equivalent to employing the first-person singular in English. As will be seen, some inconsistency of person is also to be found in later works which are in a sense autobiographical. Yakamochi's collection contains, in addition to poetry in Japanese, the Chinese poems and correspondence he exchanged with his kinsman Ikenushi (fl. 738-757). His own poetry is mingled with verses sent him in letters, quoted to him by his friends, or composed at banquets. He was Japan's first great anthologist, and no doubt his habit of noting down every poem coming to his attention, along with information as to date and source, sprang from the same respect for the works of others and desire to preserve them that directed his labors on the Man'yoshu. Apparently he was particularly interested in the sakimori, the eastlanders conscripted for military service in western Japan, for he made a diligent collection of over eighty of their poems, noting carefully the name, province, and district of each man, as well as writing several poems himself on the theme of their hardships. Parcelled in among Yakamochi the anthologist and literary scholar is Yakamochi the private man and public figure. His lengthy collection is by no means a day-by-day diary, but it enables us to follow many of his doings and the various happenings and occasions that inspired his poetry. Official tours and imperial progresses, drinking parties, the discovery of gold in Michinoku, the loss of his favorite hawk, the death of a friend's mother, his own illness, the songs or stub-born silence of the hototogisu—all are topics for his verse. The years of his governorship of Etchu (746-751) are dealt with in particular detail.

Yakamochi was a man of parts, and his four books of the Man 'yoshu reflect a wide-ranging curiosity and an intellect of unusual vigor, but the fact that they include poems not of his own compositiondoes not set them apart from later private collections. Unlike the "collected works" of our Western poets, the personal collections—shikashu or ie no shu—of the classical Japanese tradition include not only the poems of the author but some of those he received in the exchanges which were a normal part of everyone's social and private life. From this habit of preserving poetic exchanges arises much of Heian and later Japanese literature, including the autobiographical or factual tendency previously mentioned. A collection of such exchanges, arranged in chronological order and accompanied by the usual explanatory prose, required only slight elaboration to become a nikki—a diary or memoir.

In order to visualize the process by which such autobiographical writings came into being we must conjure up a picture of a capital overrun by message-bearers of every description, hurrying up and down the broad avenues, scurrying into narrow alleys, going in and out of palaces, mansions, and monasteries. Along with the billets doux they carry confidences exchanged between court ladies, letters from one family member to another, desperate pleas to a young nobleman not to abandon the world, documents drawn up in Chinese concerned with matters of government and family estate, writings of all sorts dealing with all the romantic or everyday business of life. At their destinations these various messages are carefully inspected and copied into official records, negligently glanced at and tossed aside, or eagerly awaited and immediately answered, according to their contents and the responsibilities and dispositions of their recipients. The arrival of a personal note and poem, written in elegant brushstrokes on a carefully selected paper of appropriate hue, folded into a knot and attached to a flowering branch may cause a hurried repair to the inkstand to indite an equally graceful reply. Before the answer is handed to the waiting messenger the author makes a copy for his or her own personal collection. Or if no copy, then the first draft is kept. The received message joins a growing pile of correspondence. It may in turn be copied, serving as a model for calligraphy practice.

In such ways, over a period of years, an educated aristocrat with a nimble brush would accumulate a considerable volume of miscellaneous writings. Some would be mere scraps—notes from someone dashed off hurriedly. Others might be poems or letters which were the source of particular pride or pleasure. If the collector had serious poetic aspirations, to these would be added more formal verses—on such traditional subjects as the four seasons, love, and parting—or verses written for entry in competitions or in response to requests for poems to decorate screen paintings. And finally, a court lady or gentleman might include in his or her bundle of personal writings some more or less extended prose sketches, mingled with poetry, called forth in response to especially affecting scenes or events. All the above practices are alluded to or implied in Heian literature. When Genji, for instance, writes a poem for the little girl Murasaki, he does so in a simple hand easy for a child to read. Delighted, her attendants exclaim, "Yagate, ontehon ni" (This will go into her copybook at once).²⁷⁹ Later, when Murasaki has grown up and become Genji's wife, he sends her letters and drawings from his exile at Akashi. She keeps them and puts them to good use at the time of the picture competition. During their separation she also records her thoughts and experiences "in the fashion of a diary" (niki no yo ni).²⁸⁰ One scene of the Izumi Shikibu nikki (translation, pages 156-160) shows the heroine doing the same thing, writing down her impressions of a long, lonely night and misty dawn—a composition she later decides to send to the Prince. Sei Shonagon's celebrated Pillow Book is a long collection of just such jottings. The Murasaki Shikibu nikki provides another interesting sidelight on the treatment of accumulations of paper. Murasaki is explaining whythe record of her thoughts and experiences (what we now call her nikki) which she is sending to an unnamed correspondent to read is so illegible and unsightly, and why she has written no more. She has been writing on the backs of old letters, and her supply is now exhausted: "There is still much that I could tell, but recently I have gotten rid of my whole accumulation of old notes and odd scraps of paper, tearing them up and burning them, or using them to build the doll houses I made last spring. Since then I have had no letters. I have deliberately avoided writing on fresh paper, and so this is hardly fit to be seen."²⁸¹ Of course the destruction of such a pile of old paper implies that it was first accumulated, and shows the result of years of correspondence.

We have then a picture of a society much given to reading and writing, to scribbling off notes and poems, and to keeping—at least for a time—piles of correspondence and personal memorabilia. Individuals of particularly strong literary ambitions were naturally inclined to shape these formless heaps of paper into something which could help establish a reputation and preserve a name for posterity. The first and most obvious stage was the personal poetry collection—the shikashu. These might be organized along the lines of the chokusenshu, the imperial anthologies, i.e., categorically by the topic of the poem, or chronologically, or miscellaneously, or in a mixture of all three ways. Such collections were sometimes put together specifically for the purpose of serving as raw material for the imperial anthologies. Inclusion in the latter of course was the highest seal of official immortality.

Also among the collectors of poetry and miscellaneous writings were those who shared in some degree the narrative urge described in the words of Arthur Waley's Genji: "An emotion so passionate that he can no longer keep it shut up in his heart. Again and again something in his own life or in that around him will seem to the writer so important that he cannot bear to let it pass into oblivion."²⁸² Genji is discussing "the art of the novel," but the passion he speaks of—sometimes diluted, sometimes intense—is to be found as a motivating force behind the autobiographical genres as well. In shikashu the urge takes the form of long kotobagaki or headnotes. Length of headnotes varies greatly from one collection to another, and between different sections of the same collection. Poems of a formal nature written on set topics may have no story behind them and hence no need for a kotobagaki. Sequences such as hyakushuuta²⁸³ and kunzoku²⁸⁴ also would not be interrupted by explanatory material. The kotobagaki was most obviously necessitated by the informal exchange of poems and flourished mightily in this context. In putting together a collection or part of a collection including many such exchanges, the poet with the autobiographical passion might elaborate the kotobagaki more and more until the result was a poem-centered story, or group of stories, of his own experiences—in short, something which might as well be called a nikki.

As we have seen, the writings of Otomo no Yakamochi partake somewhat of this character. The four books of the Man'yoshu dominated by his poetry however are still too loosely and fortuitously shaped, with the prose too scattered and subordinate, to be characterized as a true nikki. They are a step on the way, no more. It is to the Heian Period that we must look for the full development of the new form. An early example is provided by the Ise shu, the private collection of the Lady Ise (fl. ca. 895-935). Of its over five hundred poems the first thirty-three are accompanied by particularly lengthy prose sections put together in such a way as to form a narrative of several years in Ise's life. The first of these begins: "During the reign of a certain Emperor there was, serving in the apartments of his consort, a lady whose father resided in the province of Yamato."²⁸⁵ There follows the story oflse's unhappy affair with Fujiwara no Nakahira (875-945), the younger brother of her mistress Onshi (872-907), one of the consorts of Emperor Uda (867-931; r. 887-897). As a result of this affair Ise leaves to stay with her father in Yamato, but later returns to court at Onshi's request. Then come exchanges with would-be lovers Taira no Sadabumi (the hero of the Heichu monogatari; see below, page 120) and Nakahira's brother Tokihira (871-909). After successfully keeping both men at a distance, Ise receives the favor of the Emperor and bears him a son, a prince who dies while yet a young child. The introductory, nikki-like, section continues until the death of Onshi in 907, an event which is commemorated by a choka at the end of the collection.

A shikashu of similar structure is the Ichijo Sessho gyoshu, the personal collection of Fujiwara no Koretada (also read Koremasa) (924-972). It contains over 190 poems in all, of which the first 41 constitute an independent collection. They relate amorous incidents in the life of a lowly young official named Kurahashi no Toyokage, a fictitious stand-in for Koretada. Toyokage is used as an alternative title of the collection. The first sentence may be translated, "Kurahashi no Toyokage, a scribe in the Treasury, though of lamentably low rank, during his younger days made a collection of the verses he sent to women."'²⁸⁶

Both Toyokage and the Ise shu are usually listed as shikashu, but their earlier sections have developed far beyond mere collections of poems. It will have been noticed that both are written in the third person. This characteristic they share in a measure with some of the works generally designated as nikki. The Izumi Shikibu nikki is of course one of these. Another is the Tosa nikki, traditionally described as the parent of the nikki genre and of its variant, the travel record. The Tosa is not formally third-person because its narrative is put into the mouth of an anonymous woman by its real author, Ki no Tsurayuki. The technique is slightly different—narration by an individual involved in the action rather than by the author—but the effect of fictionalizing a true story is much the same. The Tosa nikki relates the return sea voyage from the province of Tosa in Shikoku to the capital by a provincial governor whose term of office has expired. The governor is Tsurayuki himself, who held the post from 930 through 934. He is never referred to by name, but by such familiar if sometimes vague terms as aru hito (a certain person), chichi (the father), and okinabito (the old man). The opening sentence is a famous one: "Otoko mo su naru niki to iu mono o, onna mo shite min tote suru narin"²⁸⁷ (They say men keep something they call a "diary"; now a woman will try her hand). The reference to the diaries kept by men is thought to be to the private journals in Chinese mentioned previously; this "woman's diary" is written in Japanese in the native kana script. The time-span covered is a little less than two months, from Shohei 4 (934). 12.21 (28 January 935 by the Western calendar) to Shohei 5.2.16. The influence of the kambun diaries is apparent in the structure, which is in the form of day-by-day entries, rather than the flowing narrative style usual in nikki bungaku, in which whatever dates appear are woven into the text. Nevertheless the Tosa is unquestionably a literary work, in an elegant style relying heavily on balanced antithetical phraseology, with vivid vignettes and sharp character sketches. It abounds in satire, some of which Tsurayuki directs against himself, and the narrative technique is quite effective in this respect. Written from notes kept and verses composed on the voyage, it was probably completed soon after Tsurayuki's return to the capital. At the time the Tosa nikki was the longest prose work yet to appear in kana, the previous examples having been limited to more or less extended kotobagaki, a few utaawase nikki, and Tsurayuki's own Kana Preface to the Kokinshu in 905.

A less well known work of the travel journal genre is that entitled Ionushi, "The Master of the Hermitage." It was written by a priest whose Buddhist name was Zoki, but whose identity is otherwise unknown. It is not even certain whether he lived in the tenth or the eleventh century. The work actually consists of three parts, an account of a trip to the Kumano shrines (Kumano kiko), a section of miscellaneous poems, and another travel section, the Totomi michi no ki. There are 123 poems in all. The author refers to himself as lonushi, and begins the Kumano kiko in this way: "Once—when could it have been—there was a man who, wanting to escape from the world and live as he pleased, set out to visit the various renowned and interesting places of which he had heard, thus fulfilling his desires; he had at the same time the intention of praying at all the holy places in order to eradicate his sins."'²⁸⁸ lonushi is a good traveling companion, for along with his Buddhist sentiments he shows a light and humorous turn of mind delighting in jokes and puns. The work is supposed to have been written in the author's late years.

Third-person narration is maintained in token form—a gesture as it were—at the beginning of the Kagero nikki. This work provides an excellent example of the typical process of nikki formation. It was begun probably in 971 by a secondary wife of Fujiwara no Kaneie, the grandfather of Princes Tametaka and Atsumichi (see page 6) and one of the dominant figures of his day at the Heian court. The author was herself the daughter of a minor Fujiwara official, but is known only as "the Mother of Michitsuna,"²⁸⁹ the son she bore to Kaneie. The work deals with twenty-one years (954-974) of her married life, years in which she became increasingly embittered by neglect, and it is slanted to present her side of an unhappy situation. The opening passage all but allows us to see her, seated before an accumulation of poems and letters reaching back to the days before her marriage and pondering what use to make of this mass of damning evidence of a wasted life: "Kaku arishi toki sugite …" (The times when things were thus have passed …). The sentence as a whole may be translated, "There was a person whose youthful days had passed and whose worldly ties had proven most unstable, but who went on living aimlessly, unable to adopt any certain course."²⁹⁰ The brief third-person introduction continues with a statement of the author's purpose in writing—to describe the painful, unromantic realities of marriage—and an apology for any lapses of memory. The body of the nikki then begins, with a change to first-person narration and a turning back to the beginning, the days of her courtship seventeen years before. It is apparent that the Kagero, sketchy in its early passages but thereafter increasingly detailed, is no longer retrospective from about the time of the author's retreat at Narutaki in 971. The rest was probably written as events occurred. The Kagero is then a combination autobiography-diary, depending on saved letters, poems, and other memorabilia for over four-fifths of the period it covers.

The Sarashina nikki is another work looking back over a whole lifetime, and it too preserves a tiny vestige of third-person narration. This is no more than the use of hito (person) in the first sentence (the same word used in the Ionushi, Kagero, and Ise shu): "How outlandish must a person be who grew up in a place even beyond the end of the Eastern Road …"²⁹¹ The person who felt herself to be so barbaric was the daughter of Sugawara no Takasue (973-?), an official of the provincial governor class. Since her mother was a daughter of Fujiwara no Tomoyasu (d. 977), she was the niece of the author of the Kagero. She was born in 1008, and in 1017 accompanied her father to the province of Kazusa in eastern Japan, where he occupied the post of vice-governor. There she developed a lifelong fondness for tales and legends. The Sarashina begins with her journey back to the capital in her father's entourage, a trip which took three months in the fall and winter of 1020.The scenery, the incidents, and the stories told along the way are recounted with something of the naive wonder of a twelve-year-old girl. The rest of the nikki relates almost forty years of a rather quiet and uneventful life. The author had a romantic outlook and was given to imagining herself the heroine of some private Tale of Genji. In reality however little of an exciting nature ever ruffled the surface of her dreamy calm. Dreams in fact bulk large in her memoirs, eleven different ones being recounted in some detail. She seems to have had a rather naive faith in them, but chides herself at the end for not taking them seriously enough. Shy and introspective, she was content to stay at home with her parents and her books. Eventually, at the age of thirty-two, she entered court service, though due to no desire of her own. Still later she married Tachibana no Toshimichi, to whom she bore two daughters and a son. Family responsibilities brought more practical interests to the fore, but her husband's death in 1058 at the age of fifty-seven sent her off once again into a land of dreams, this time in the form of religious yearnings and self-reproaches. It is supposed that she wrote the Sarashina nikki in her late years on the basis of her memories and a lifetime of the usual kept exchanges, notes, and poems. Four works of fiction have also been attributed to her: Hamamatsu Chunagon monogatari, Yowa no nezame, Asakura, and Mizukara kuyuru. The first two are tales in the tradition of the Genji monogatari, and have come down to us, but the other two have been lost. Hamamatsu Chunagon at least is generally accepted as her work.

Third-person narration is not employed in a majority of the works making up nikki bungaku. The above examples indicate however that it was an available style. Not all nikki are dominated by poetry, but the court society as a whole was, to the extent that neither nikki, monogatari, nor zuihitsu was conceivable completely devoid of poems. The social fact was naturally reflected in the literature. In the autobiographical genres, writers with discursive tendencies naturally produced the works which are farthest removed from the private poetry collection. Murasaki Shikibu (ca. 978-1016?) can hardly be considered less than adept and prolific as a poet in view of the hundreds of poems she has left in the Genji monogatari and her own private collection, the Murasaki Shikibu shu. The latter, like certain sections of the Izumi Shikibu shu, is a source of biographical information, and shows the not-quite-nikki stage of development noted previously in connection with Otomo no Yakamochi. The Murasaki Shikibu nikki, on the other hand, contains only a handful of poems, though several of them are tied to rather interesting incidents. It deals with a period of less than two years, from the summer of 1008 to the beginning of 1010, and concentrates on description of events at court, character sketches and critiques of other court ladies, and Murasaki's reflections about her own personality. Murasaki became a lady-in-waiting at the court of the Emperor Ichijo's principal consort, Empress Akiko [Shoshi], probably late in 1007, and was present at the birth of two of her sons, the future emperors Go-Ichijo (1008-1036; r. 1016-1036) and Go-Suzaku (1009-1045; r. 1036-1045). The birth of Go-Ichijo is treated at the greatest length of any event in this nikki. The work dwells in detail on the preparations for Akiko's confinement at her father's residence, the Tsuchimikado Palace, describes the birth, the various ceremonies following, and Akiko's return to the Imperial Palace. Murasaki continues with an account of her own visit to her private residence, her reflections while there, her return to court, and various incidents and ceremonies. The famous remarks on her fellow court ladies follow, along with further self-evaluation. This first division of her nikki is concluded with the correspondence section already quoted in part above (page 104). It is known from internal evidence that this letter could not have been written earlier than the fourth month of Kanko 7 (1010).²⁹² The Nikki continues however with material dealing with events of Kanko 6 and the first month of Kanko 7. This includes Michinaga's jocular remarks about the Genji monogatari, the sceneof his midnight knocking on Murasaki's door, and the ceremonies of the first month of Kanko 7 involving the two infant princes. It is thought that this latter material existed separately and was added later by someone else to the text Murasaki sent to her unnamed correspondent.

The Murasaki Shikibu nikki with its various opinions and experiences is not essentially different from the Makura no soshi of Sei Shonagon (b. ca. 966). The latter is longer and more elaborate, and of course is the product of a quite different personality, but like the Murasaki Shikibu is essentially a combination of personal anecdotes and remarks on set subjects. It is the extensive development of the latter element which has caused Sei's work to be classed as zuihitsu or informal essay (the first representative of this genre in Japanese literature) rather than nikki. But the Murasaki Shikibu has more in common with the Makura no soshi than with exemplars of the nikki-as-autobiography such as the Kagero and Sarashina. This is to say that the notes and various sketches which make up the former two were not put together with the same concern for telling a connected personal story as was the case with the latter two. Sei and Murasaki are not necessarily to be faulted for this lack of long term narrative interest in their personal writings. Murasaki of course has given us the longest narrative in classical Japanese literature in the Genji, and the anecdotal and categorical style of the Makura no soshi seems eminently suited to Sei's personality. The point to consider here is that traditional genre designations do not always make clear where the real similarities and differences lie between one work and another.

Sei's sketchbook deals with a period approximately ten years earlier than Murasaki describes, during the heyday of Akiko's predecessor and rival Sadako [Teishi] (976-1001), daughter of Michinaga's elder brother Michitaka (953-995). A child of the Kiyowara family of scholars, Sei was the daughter of Motosuke (908-990), one of the compilers of the second imperial anthology of Japanese poetry, the Gosenshu (951). She entered Sadako's court probably in 993, and soon began keeping copious notes on everything going on around her. In them she details her opinions on all manner of subjects, illustrates her categories of the pleasant and unpleasant with personal anecdotes, and gives us by far the most vivid and vivacious picture we have of the Heian court. Her manuscript was only partially complete when it was accidentally discovered and made off with by a visitor, Minamoto no Tsunefusa (969-1023), in 996. Sei insists that she had been keeping it secret and implies dismay at the resultant unintended publication.²⁹³ Apparently she continued to record her memories in the manuscript for several years after leaving court service in 1001 upon Sadako's death.

Even worse disasters befell the writings of Shijonomiya Shimotsuke, a lady-in-waiting to the consort of Emperor Go-Reizei (1025-1068; r. 1045-1068). She states that during the years of her court service (ca. 1051-1068) she had written down her impressions of various amusing incidents, but that her collection was largely destroyed in fires. The remnant she discarded, and was only persuaded to rewrite from memory in her old age.²⁹⁴ Either something must have been saved, or her memory was prodigious, for her literary remains consist of a chronologically arranged shikashu, the Shijonomiya Shimotsuke shu, containing 211 poems with long kotobagaki. Eighty of these poems are by someone other than Shimotsuke. Miscellaneous writings could also be gathered and preserved by a posthumous editor of course as is indicated in most vivid fashion by the colophons Fujiwara Teika added to his sister's memoir, the Kenju Gozen nikki (see above, pages 64-66; Introduction, note 194).

Works such as the Kagero nikki and Sarashina nikki are not really in danger of being mistaken formere poetry collections; much less are the Murasaki Shikibu nikki, Makura no soshi, or Kenju Gozen nikki. In all these the prose has assumed a dominant role and the desire to tell a story or express opinions is the guiding force. To this list might be added the Sanuki no Suke nikki,²⁹⁵ some portions of the Nakatsukasa Naishi nikki,²⁹⁶ and the Towazugatari,²⁹⁷ three works which carry the nikki tradition on into the late Kamakura Period. All were written by ladies in the personal service of Emperors and are important in various ways for their descriptions of scenes and events at court or for frankness of narration.

It is the other group of personal writings—those in which shikashu and nikki verge indistinguishably into each other—which is of greater concern here. These include the Iseshu, Toyokage, Ionushi, and Shijonomiya Shimotsuke shu already mentioned. Other examples are provided by the Jojin Azari no haha shu, Kenreimon 'in Ukyo no Daibu shu, Ben no Naishi nikki, and some passages of the Nakatsukasa Naishi nikki.

The Jojin Azari no haha shu is a work unusual in Japanese or any other literature. It was written by an octogenarian mother as an expression of her grief at parting with her son, a man in his sixties. The son was the Tendai cleric Jojin Azari (1011-1081), who in 1069, in his fifty-ninth year, decided to go to China on a pilgrimage to the monastic centers Wu T'ai Shan and T'ien T'ai Shan.²⁹⁸ This resolve he carried out in 1072. His aged mother, whose one desire had been to spend the rest of her days in the care and company of her son, poured out her feelings in over 170 poems and accompanying prose in a testament of maternal love which she hoped Jojin would read should he return to Japan after her death. As events turned out however, he never saw what she had written, for he remained in China for the rest of his life. The work begins with events of 1067 and continues into 1073, about a year after Jojin set sail for China, ending with the author's account of her ill health, feeling of impending death, and hope for rebirth in paradise.

Another poetry collection with prose sections highly enough developed to qualify it for consideration as a nikki is the Kenreimon'in Ukyo no Daibu shu. Its author was the descendant of a line of famous calligraphers stemming from Fujiwara no Yukinari (972-1027). In 1173, probably at about the age of eighteen, she entered the service of Taira no Tokuko (1155-1213), daughter of the virtual dictator Kiyomori (1118-1181) and consort of the reigning Emperor Takakura (1161-1181; r. 1168-1180).²⁹⁹ Her collection begins with the new year, 1174, spans the period which saw the pinnacle of Taira power and glory, the long war with the Minamoto, the downfall of the once proud and mighty Taira, and the establishment of the new military regime in Kamakura. The last poem is from 1213.³⁰⁰ Ukyo no Daibu withdrew from the Empress' entourage in 1178 and led a private life for the next twenty years, before reentering court service in about 1198. In her youth she was loved by Taira no Sukemori, a grandson of Kiyomori who died with the last of the Heike warriors at Dan no Ura in 1185. Memories of this love remained with her for the rest of her life, and form the dominant theme of her writings. It is thought that her collection, which comprises two maki, was put together at two separate periods, the first maki shortly before her return to court service, and the second about twenty years later.³⁰¹

The author of the Ben no Naishi nikki³⁰² was very different in personality from the mournful mother of Jojin and the melancholy Ukyo no Daibu. She was the daughter of Fujiwara no Nobuzane (1175-?), and counted among her immediate ancestors men with reputations in poetry and painting. Her own dates are unknown, but she entered the service of the future Emperor Go-Fukakusa (1243-1304; r. 1246-1259) while he was yet Heir Apparent, and preserved a poetic diary of several years of his reign. Her nikki begins in the first month of Kangen 4 (1246) with the abdication of the Emperor Go-Saga (1220-1272; r. 1242-1246) and continues on into late 1252. It is devoted largely to descriptions of court ceremonies, with very little of a personal nature. The form reverts to that of the Tosa nikki, with dated entries, although there are many gaps between dates. Each entry is centered around one or more poems. The tone is bright and cheerful; the author seems to have taken a simple and straightforward pleasure in everything she saw and to have been untroubled by gloom. The work contains over three hundred poems, and was probably originally of greater length; the latter sections of all its manuscript copies are badly worm-eaten. It seems likely that it was written while at court, close to the time of the events it describes. Together with certain portions of the Nakatsukasa Naishi nikki (see note 296) it shows how, even after the eclipse of the power of the imperial court, one of its characteristic literary forms continued to appear—a form which is at the same time a poetry collection and a diary or memoir.³⁰³

The difficulty of distinguishing between nikki and shikashu is underlined by the titles of the various works discussed above. Whether a work was to be titled shu or nikki must in some cases have been difficult to decide, and is not always very important. Sometimes the confusion is even more apparent. The Jojin Azari no haha shu is also referred to as Jojin no haha nikki or Jojin Azari no haha nikki,³⁰⁴ and the Ben no Naishi nikki has the alternative title Go-Fukakusa-in no Ben no Naishi kashu.³⁰⁵ The Sarashina nikki is referred to in one source as a kashu,³⁰⁶ and the Yoshitaka shu, the private collection of Fujiwara no Yoshitaka (954-974), in another as a nikki.³⁰⁷ Perhaps of greater interest is the way in which prose and poetry may dominate in different sections of the same work. There are parts of the Jojin Azari and the Kenreimon'in Ukyo no Daibu shu, for instance, in which one poem follows another almost without interruption. In these sections the works are truly collections of poetry. Or, as in the case of the Ise shu and the Ichijo Sessho gyoshu (Toyokage), the nikki portion may come first and be followed by poems with shorter headnotes and without the connected story told by the earlier section. The Kagero nikki also has appended to it a collection of fifty-odd poems variously entitled Fu no Dainagon no haha ue no shu³⁰⁸ and Michitsuna no haha no shu. The poems do not appear in the Kagero, but are thought to have been culled from the author's posthumous papers shortly after her death.³⁰⁹ Tamai Kosuke suggests that if Izumi Shikibu's collected poems had been fewer in number (there are over fifteen hundred in the combined Seishu and Zokushu) they might have been added to the Izumi Shikibu nikki, producing a result similar to the Ise shu or Toyokage.³¹⁰

Fiction

Autobiographical genres were not the only outgrowth of the peculiarly Japanese mixture of prose and poetry. Perhaps in truly primitive times there was no distinction between fiction and non-fiction, one story being as believable as another and all belonging to a general oral tradition. Or perhaps the clever rabbit who bragged too soon and lost his skin to his dupes the crocodiles was never taken quite as seriously as the sovereign who mounted his palace tower to watch the smoke from his subjects' cooking fires, or even as the hero who fought with a magic sword and changed into a bird after his death, or the god who pretended to eat centipedes combed from the locks of the master of the underworld.³¹¹ One cannot be sure. At any rate all these stories and many more are mixed intogether in the Kojiki and Nihon shoki, and are told with equal grave assurance, not less than that devoted to veritable facts of the reigns of recent emperors. But undoubtedly Yakamochi and the other compilers of the Man'yoshu knew a made-up yarn when they heard one, as for instance the story about the old bamboo-cutter and the fairy maidens (MYS 3790-3802). This poem-group shows obvious influence from the T'ang story Yuhsien-k'u.³¹² Acquaintance with Chinese fiction must have aided greatly in the development of literary sophistication. Interest in legends as legends is evinced by the whole of maki 16, the so-called yuen (or yoshi) aru uta, or "poems with a story," a collection of traditions such as that of the girl Cherryblossom who, torn between two lovers, went to the forest and hanged herself from a tree. The lovers' poems follow, commenting on the tragedy with a punning grief: "The cherry blossoms I thought to deck myself withal, alas, are scattered and gone."³¹³ Each of the little stories either introduces or serves as a footnote to a poem or poems which it explains. The technique is equivalent to that which led to the development of the nikki, and had the same potential for evolution into extended prose-poetry genres, this time fictional in nature.

In due time this fiction came. It was at first fanciful and then—partially due to influence from the developing nikki bungaku—more realistic. It is all referred to by the general term monogatari, "the telling about things." None of the surviving works is likely to antedate the tenth century, but the Taketori monogatari, the official "ancestor" of the long fictional tale,³¹⁴ is clearly an accretion of various fairy-tales probably of considerable antiquity. The figure of the old bamboo-cutter, as we have seen, was already known to the men of the Man'yo age. The Genji monogatari, written during the first decade or two of the eleventh century, is at once the first real achievement of realistic fiction, the high point of Japanese traditional fiction as a whole, and perhaps, as is generally asserted, the pinnacle of the nation's literature. Between it and the Taketori there remain only two monogatari, both, like the "ancestor," of unknown authorship. One is a very long work entitled Utsubo monogatari; the other, the Ochikubo monogatari, is of more modest length. Both suffer in a sense from being the non-missing links between the Taketori and the Genji, the Utsubo suffering perhaps more. The Taketori is fantasy delightfully pure and simple, but the Utsubo, perhaps not completely the product of one hand, runs from the most fantastic adventures in a faraway country where presumably anything could happen, to a fairly realistic treatment of the dynastic infighting at court. The whole is laced through with a thread of supernatural music, a motif which in more sophisticated hands might have had something of the possibilities of the magic stone in The Dream of the Red Chamber. As it is, the Utsubo is so jumbled and episodic that it barely holds together. The Ochikubo is nothing if not realistic in detail, but in conception it is a Cinderella story deprived of supernatural elements, with a rescuing prince and a happy ending both too good—if we may judge Heian social reality from such works as the Kagero—to be true. All of these, and later monogatari, have poems woven into the fabric of plot and dialogue in the most natural way imaginable, a fact already illustrated with examples from the Genji. Practically everyone of any consequence in these tales composes poetry as a matter of course. This is so largely for the reasons previously enumerated—the natural affinity of prose and poetry, the fact that the tales sprang from a society where everyone was his own poet, and the brevity of poetic form. Obscurity, whether caused by the inherent vagueness of Japanese or by obvious dependence on a knowledge of situation, made prose contexts inevitable, and brevity made the poems easily acceptable units in a complex whole. This helped lead, as we have seen, to the rise of nikki bungaku.

The Poem-Tale

The monogatari described above, whether fantastic or realistic, were fiction and recognized as such. But there is another class of writings standing between the autobiographical and the fictional which is the subject of some debate. This in-between literature might be described as semi-fiction, but is usually called utamonogatari (poem-tale). It is the product of an in-between sort of motivation, and the degree of fiction present is often difficult to assess and varies from case to case. Its authors are all unknown.

The poem-tale came into existence in a way that paralleled the development of the nikki. It was not only the poet himself who was concerned with collecting his poetry and preserving his fame. The matter of the compilation of private collections is one of many obscure problems in Japanese literature. The question is in need of further study and elucidation, but the process was undoubtedly more complex than has been suggested so far in this discussion. It is known that shikashu were sometimes compiled by people other than the author of the poems. This might be done soon after the poet's death by someone closely connected with him. Or such a collection might be assembled at a more remote epoch by someone who admired the poet's work and wished to have at hand a body of his poems to serve as models in composition. Or a poet might leave a collection ordered by his own hand, which after his death would be augmented or rearranged by others. In the cases of the oldest known shikashu, those mentioned in the Man'yoshu, we do not know to what extent a name like Kasa no Kanamura kashu represents the selection of the poet himself.³¹⁵ The general opinion is that the so-called Hitomaro kashu contains many poems which have nothing to do with Hitomaro but were attributed to him because of his great fame.³¹⁶ The collected poems of Izumi Shikibu illustrate very well the complexities of the problem. The Izumi Shikibu seishu is the longest of the group of collections comprising her literary remains. As has been mentioned in the discussion of authorship, it is analyzable into several discrete poem-groups. Some of these definitely were arranged by Izumi herself, but the Seishu as a whole is thought to have been put together by a later person. The same seems to be true of the Zokushu, the second-longest collection. On the other hand, the Shinkambon and Matsuibon collections of her poems are purely the results of selection and arrangement from various imperial anthologies.³¹⁷

The poems of other poets were subject to varied uses; not only the editorial, but the creative urge found them to be malleable material. As kotobagaki might be lengthened at will into nikki, so they might be enlarged into little stories by someone other than the poet. Or the stories might be invented to fit poems gleaned from various sources. By some such process the Ise monogatari came into existence. It contains 125 adventures of an unnamed man, arranged in an order taking him from youth to deathbed. The stories are written simply and with admirable economy, and each reaches its high point with one or more poems, usually an exchange or series of exchanges. About one third of the over two hundred poems were written by Ariwara no Narihira (825-880), and he has always been thought of as the hero. The formation of utamonogatari is by no means fully understood even today, and for centuries the Ise monogatari was thought the work of Narihira himself. An abundance of other hypotheses, some of which now seem fanciful, has been advanced. It is now generally recognized that a no longer extant collection of Narihira's poems was one of the elements—probably the most important—which went into the composition of the Ise. Many of the tales are no doubt elaborations of the kotobagaki found in it. Anonymous poems drawn from the Kokinshu and perhaps other sources were used as the nuclei of other stories invented by the author or authors. Popular traditions about Narihira and other people were included, and new poems written or old oneschanged to fit different contexts. The whole is harmonious in style and subject. The theme is courtly love, and it seems likely that the Ise was based most closely on Narihira's life and work because Narihira was not only an excellent poet but a famous lover. Various strands of evidence indicate that the Ise monogatari probably dates from about 951 or shortly thereafter, although it is possible that it may be somewhat earlier. Opinion now generally rejects any date before the beginning of the tenth century.³¹⁸

Another poet famous as a lady's man was Taira no Sadabumi (d. 923). His collected poems, now lost as a separate work, were apparently taken as the basis of another example of the utamonogatari genre, the Heichu monogatari.³¹⁹ The Heichu is composed of thirty-eight episodes relating the adventures, mostly amorous, of a character referred to only as "kono otoko" (this man). Though resembling the Ise in these respects, the Heichu has much more highly developed prose sections, both from the point of view of length of prose without poetry and of actual sentence length. The Heichu in this way resembles later Heian fiction. Its hero, understood to be Sadabumi, is less successful as a lover than the passionate Narihira, indeed is rather pathetic, easily turned aside and outwitted by women. He is not yet the figure of fun that Heichu became in later legend however but is a rather appealingly human character.³²⁰ As with other works of this type, the Heichu has not been precisely dated, but was perhaps written between 959 and 965.

The Heichu and the Ise form an obvious pair, dealing as they do with the lives of famous lovers. The Yamato monogatari is quite different in that it has no central character, but is a collection of short poem-centered stories about many different people. There are 173 of these stories in the most widely circulated version of the Yamato. They were probably adapted from various written collections and from oral traditions circulating at court. It is likely that the whole Yamato was put together in gradual stages during a period of 50 or 60 years covering the latter half of the tenth century.³²¹

The Tonomine Shosho monogatari provides a contrast to all three of the works described above. Like the Ise and the Heichu it centers on one actual historical figure, Fujiwara no Takamitsu (d. 994). But instead of the usual concern with romantic love, the central theme is the power of the religious impulse over human affections. Takamitsu was the son of the Great Minister of the Right Morosuke (908-960) and Princess Gashi (910-954), daughter of Emperor Daigo (885-930; r. 897-930). Among his brothers were the Regents Koretada (the author of Toyokage; see above, page 106), Kanemichi (925-977), and Kaneie (husband of the author of the Kagero nikki and grandfather of Princes Tametaka and Atsumichi; see above, pages 6, 108). Unlike these politically ambitious elder brothers however Takamitsu had from his youth but one aim—to leave behind the entanglements of the mundane world and seek enlightenment in a monastic order. This desire he fulfilled after his father's death. On Owa I (961).12.5 (13 January 962 by the Western calendar) he went to Yokawa on Mt. Hiei, cut off his topknot with his own hand, and entered the religious life. He was probably about twenty-three at the time. In Owa 2 (962).8 he left Yokawa for Tonomine, a mountain in Yamato Province, where he lived in retirement the rest of his life, thus earning the appellation by which he is known (the Minor Captain of Tonomine). The Tonomine Shosho monogatari deals with the six months beginning with his abandonment of the secular life. Despite its title, it ends before his retirement to Tonomine. Contrary to the practice of the Ise and the Heichu, Takamitsu is referred to by name, and the work has much more the air of a true record. It consists of thirty short episodes, each with poetic exchanges, and concentrates on the grief of Takamitsu's loved ones, especially hiswife and younger sister. Over thirty historical personages appear. The author was someone with detailed information about the events, apparently someone very close to the family. Because of the use of honorific language in referring to all the members of Takamitsu's family, Tamai puts forward the hypothesis that the author may have been a serving woman, perhaps the wet-nurse of Takamitsu's wife.³²² The work makes no reference to Takamitsu's going to Tonomine, probably because it was finished before that event.

The Ise, the Heichu, and the Yamato have in varying degrees the aspect of semi-fiction—a large element of fact along with traditional and perhaps invented material, with the whole worked up into a series of stories about real people. In the Ise and the Heichu the anonymity of the hero is preserved by referring to him simply as "a man," but the material is known to be based on the lives of Narihira and Sadabumi. Of these two the Heichu has the more highly developed prose, and therefore is in a sense a more highly evolved work, further from a mere shikashu with its kotobagaki-plus-poems. The Ise, on the other hand, is a more fully realized work of art, true to a single theme followed through the life of a man, incorporating material not belonging to the life of any single person but handled with unity of tone and style, thus giving to the whole a significance surpassing the merely biographical. The Yamato deals with a large number of individuals, naming them by name. It is disparate, with very short anecdotes consisting of nothing more than a headnote and one poem, and other sections in which the prose extends for two or three pages without a line of verse. All three of these works consist of a series of distinct, separate stories, contrasting in this respect with the Tonomine Shosho monogatari which, despite its episodic quality, is a connected narrative. The Tonomine is much nearer to nikki bungaku in form and style and in evident closeness to the facts of a situation. But all show the variety of narrative uses to which written materials—mostly poems and explanatory prose—could be put.

Here again, emphasizing the vague boundaries between genres, there occurs the phenomenon of alternate titles. As pointed out by Yamagishi in his argument on authorship of the Izumi Shikibu nikki, the Ise, the Heichu, and the Tonomine are, in some sources, referred to as nikki. The Tonomine, of which no pre-Edo manuscripts remain, was transmitted without title. The title by which it is now known and which has been employed in this discussion was popularized by the Gunsho ruiju. It is referred to as Takamitsu nikki however in the Honcho shojaku mokuroku and Kakaisho.³²³ These two sources also refer to the Heichu monogatari as, respectively, Heichu nikki³²⁴ and Sadabumi nikki.³²⁵ And the Sagoromo monogatari, a work of the eleventh century, alludes to the Ise as Zaigo Chujo no nikki.³²⁶ The Yamato is not referred to as a nikki; unlike the other three it is not based on the life and poems of a single individual.

The fourth work mentioned by Yamagishi, the Takamura monogatari, is different from the others in one important respect. Like them it is a story about an historical personage, Ono no Takamura (802-852), but it is apparently not based on his private poetry collection. The poems attributed to him are thought to have been written by the author of the story.³²⁷ There exists a genuine Takamura shu which has no poems in common with the monogatari, and the latter was not the source of Takamura's poems in the Kokinshu. The compilers of subsequent imperial anthologies however seem to have accepted this monogatari as genuine, for they used it as a source for the poems they credit to Takamura. The historical Takamura was an important scholar of Chinese in a period when Japan was under its strongest cultural influence from China. He was one of the committee who made theofficial commentary on the legal code, the Ryo no gige, which was put into effect in 834. He was appointed assistant envoy (fukushi) to T'ang China in the same year. The departure of the embassy was delayed until 838, at which time Takamura feigned illness and refused to go because of a disagreement with the chief envoy. For his disobedience he was exiled to the Oki Islands for two years, but was pardoned and allowed to return to the capital in 840, after which he proceeded with his official career. The Takamura monogatari deals with none of these facts, but relates a strange story in which Takamura in his youth becomes the tutor and lover of his half-sister. When the girl becomes pregnant her mother treats her so cruelly that she dies and comes back to Takamura as a ghost. Despite her haunting presence he lives down his grief and goes on to marry the daughter of the Great Minister of the Right and embark on a flourishing career. The work is very brief and splits in two between the death of the sister and the subsequent marriage. The hero is called both "otoko" (the man) and "Takamura." For some reason, perhaps because of his independent-mindedness—he wrote a satire on embassies to China at the time of his insubordination—the historical Takamura, like his kinswoman Komachi, and like Heichu, Izumi Shikibu, and many others, became a magnet for all sorts of legendary material. The Takamura monogatari seems to belong to this category. It is in any case not the product of the same process which led to the development of nikki and utamonogatari—the elaboration of preserved writings—but is a piece of fiction. The authors of both Kakaisho and Kacho yosei nevertheless refer to it as Takamura nikki,³²⁸ and one of its manuscripts bears the title Ono no Takamura shu.

Early Japanese literature then forms a continuum of genres, mixing prose and poetry—the poetry collection, the personal memoir, the "poem-tale," and the overtly fictional tale. The first three especially have blurred boundaries. Somewhere among them belongs the Izumi Shikibu nikki. Is it essentially an utamonogatari, a treatment by an unknown author of an important turning point in the life of a famous poet, using materials at least some of which were actually written by its central figure? It resembles the Ise and the Heichu in the anonymity of its main character, but is closer to the Tonomine in being a connected narrative dealing with a limited period—less than a year in both cases. Or is it a memoir? Heian writers, like Caesar, sometimes used the third person where one might expect the first, and so the argument from third-person narration cannot be conclusive. On the other hand, there is no other acknowledgedly autobiographical work of comparable length which uses that narrative technique throughout. The existence of imagined scenes and conversations is an important comparative factor. Other nikki, such as the Kagero, describe scenes which the author did not witness, but always with the explicit or implicit indication that people informed her of what happened. On the other hand, the Ise shu, which in its earlier sections verges on nikki, sometimes uses verb inflections which state rather than conjecture the emotions of people other than the poetess herself. Conversely, the Izumi Shikibu nikki has passages which surmise rather than state the Prince's thoughts or feelings (see translation, notes 50, 208, 345). If Izumi Shikibu did write the work that bears her name, then her nikki is an immensely more developed, imaginative, and polished analogue of the Ise shu; if written by someone else, it is most comparable to the Tonomine. In either case, like them, it could not survive without its poems. Aside from its terminal prose section the Izumi Shikibu nikki is constructed on the framework of the poem-exchange. It is either a "poem-tale" or a fictionalized "poem-memoir," and until the authorship question is finally settled, it must be left to the reader to decide which.

Notes

… ¹¹⁰ "To omoitamauru mo nikukaranu ni ya." Tamai, Shinchu, p. 106, and Shimizu, Ocho nikki, p. 177, are obliged to interpret this, somewhat forcedly, I think, as "I feel I cannot hate it."

¹¹¹ Ozaki, Kochu, p. 60, interprets "Ika ni zo tsuki wa mitamau ya" as a question concerning how the moon looks to Izumi, instead of punctuating after "zo."

¹¹² I.e., do you, as I, remember how we watched the moon together that night, and sigh that tonight we are apart?

¹¹³ This poem appears as Seishu 871 (823), with the following variant readings: "omoedo" for "omoeba," "nagamureba" for "nagamuredo," and "kokoro wa yukazu" for "kokoro mo yukazu."

¹¹⁴ More literally, "He thought, 'There is a carriage! Someone has surely come'" (Kuruma haberi. Hito no kitarikeru ni koso). Both Ozaki, Kochu, p. 61, and Tamai, Shinchu, p. 109, suggest that Izumi is living with a younger sister, basing this supposition on the headnote to Seishu 748 (723): "Oya nado iu koto arikereba, shinobite harakaradomo nado, mukashi arishi yo nite monogatari suru, aware ni oboyureba" (One time when, having been censured by her parents, she secretly talked with her sisters, just as in the old times, being overcome by a sense of the sadness of things). Tamai interprets this reference to parental displeasure as alluding to Izumi's separation from her husband Michisada. Ozaki and Tamai further suggest that the carriage seen by the Prince is one belonging to Oe no Takachika, the lover of Izumi's sister (see Introduction, pp. 4, 6). Tamai would have "hitobito katagata ni sumu tokoro narikereba" refer only to Izumi and her sister.

¹¹⁵ The last two lines could more literally be translated, "Today's long rain [gazing] is no ordinary thing." The reference is to Kokinshu 1093 (Anonymous):

Sooner than I,
Perfidious-hearted,
Shall forsake you,
Waves will pour across
The pine-clad peak of Sue.

The meaning of the Prince's poem therefore may be stated thus: "Although I have known of your faithlessness all along, last night's proof of it leaves me stunned, listlessly staring through today's long rain." "Nagame" is a kakekotoba: nagame (gaze)/naga-ame (long rain).

¹¹⁶ A more nearly literal translation: "As for 'the pines of Sue,' you are the one that I have been hearing about; who can go over, equal, in the same wave with you?" Hitoshinami (equal to) is a kakekotoba containing the word nami (wave). The poem appears as Seishu 872 (824), with "omoishika" (I thought) instead of "kikiwatare" (I heard) as the third line.

¹¹⁷ A prose rendering: "I have had no leisure time, what with thinking of you in various ways, now as unfeeling, again as lovable."

¹¹⁸ A more nearly literal translation: "As for our meeting, be it this way or that, I shall not sigh—but if our relationship should become one of undying resentment—" This poem appears also as Seishu 873 (825).

¹¹⁹ A reference to a poem by Fujiwara no Takamitsu (see Introduction, pp. 121, 122), Shuishu 435. written when Takamitsu was thinking of abandoning the world:

In this our world
That seems so difficult

A place to live,
How enviously limpid
Dwells the moon!

¹²⁰ A more nearly literal translation: "Whom would you have me tell—even if you do not come to see me—that I am looking at the moon, gazing in my desolate dwelling?" "Mi ni konu made mo" (even if you do not come to see me) is an elliptical parenthetical expression which I have, following Endo, Iwanami text, p. 412, note 2, taken to imply "at least send me a letter."

¹²¹Hisumashi warawa were young girls whose chore was cleaning chamber pots and privies.

¹²²Sudare, a screen made of reed or finely split bamboo which could be rolled up or lowered by means of strings. Sudare were hung (among other places) behind the shitomi (see note 87), between the veranda and the main part of the house, and could be lowered to provide concealment for someone sitting inside looking out.

¹²³ "Rei no tabigoto ni menarete mo aranu onsugata" (the usual figure which never grew stale no matter how many times she saw it).

¹²⁴Noshi, a voluminous, large-sleeved gown which was the ordinary wear of high aristocrats. It contrasted with more formal court costumes such as sokutai. For pictures see Ema Tsutomu, Kokubun kojitsu fuzokugo shushaku: yogi fukushokuhen (1935), pp. 358, 359; Edward Seidensticker, trans., The Gossamer Years, plate 4.

¹²⁵ After this sentence the following one appears to be a non sequitur.

¹²⁶Oeibon texts have "senzai no okashiki naka o" (through the pleasant garden) instead of "naka ni" (about in). If the Prince were walking through the garden directly toward the house, the previously noted non sequitur could be avoided.

¹²⁷ "Hito wa kusaba no tsuyu nare ya" (Is it because that person is dew on leaves of grass?), a reference to Shuishu 761 (Anonymous):

Is it because
The one for whom I long
Is dew on blades of grass

That thoughts of love
Should make my sleeves so limp?

"Kakureba" serves a double function: "[sonata no koto o kokoro ni] kakureba" (when I think of you)/" [tsuyu no] kakureba" (when the dew falls on my sleeves).

¹²⁸ "Tare ni shinobitsuru zo to miarawasan tote nan." This sentence is variously interpreted by the different commentators. Ozaki, Kochu, p. 69, renders it, "to find out whom you are longing for," interpreting shinobu as (to long for) rather than (to keep secret). Tamai's opinion, Shinchu, p. 114, is similar: "tare ni … nan" is essentially a prose statement of the poem "Ware yue ni" which the Prince has handed to Izumi. Endo, Iwanami text, p. 412, note 24; p. 452, sup. note 63, however points out that were the verb in question, the text should read "tare o shinobitsuru" instead of "tare ni …" I have adopted this approach, but have rejected Endo's further opinion that "tare" refers to the man or men who are presumably visiting the woman or women in the other wing or wings (cf. the affair of the parked carriage; see note 114). I have instead followed Yamagishi, NKZ, p. 208, note 8, assuming that the subject of "shinobitsuru" is Izumi herself. The effective difference between Endo and Yamagishi is very slight however for the essence of the former's interpretation is that the Prince says he has come to find out whom the man or men have really been meeting—Izumi or someone else.

¹²⁹Monoimi, literally, the fear or religious avoidance of things; not necessarily the fear of direction (kataimi, see note 104), though Endo, Iwanami text, p. 412, note 15, interprets it in this light. The term evidently also had a more general meaning, designating a period of seclusion during which a person fasted, avoided activity and polluting influences, and in general purified himself. Bad dreams were often the occasion for such measures (Yusoku kojitsu jiten, pp. 799, 800). The other commentators favor the more general meaning of monoimi.

¹³⁰ "Started to" is an interpretation demanded by the context. The original is simply "kaerasetamaeba" (as he went home).

¹³¹ The moon is of course a metaphor for the Prince. A more nearly literal translation: "As an attempt, would that even the rain might fall, so that the moon's light [form], which goes beyond my house across the sky, might stop within." "Kage" in this instance could mean either "light" or "form" (sugata). Tamai, Shinchu, p. 115, suggests it means the moon itself. This poem appears as Seishu 874 (826).

¹³² I have followed Endo, Ozaki, Tamai, and Yamagishi in adopting the reading "komekite" (being childlike), found in the Kangembon and Fusoshuyoshubon, in place of the "umekite" (groaning) of the Sanjonishibon and Oeibon.

¹³³ A closer translation: "Unpleasantly lured by the moon-of-the-dwelling-place-of-clouds, it is my form which departs; would my heart go?" Kumoi, written (cloud-dwelling) or (cloud-well), was a poetic name for the sky. "Kage" here is used in the sense of "outward form," contrasted with "kokoro."

¹³⁴ "Ikade ito ayashiki mono ni kikoshimeshitaru o, kikoshimeshinaosarenishi gana to omou" (punctuated as in Iwanami text, p. 413). There are several variant readings of this sentence to be found among the various texts, but the crucial question is whether is to be read as the desiderative gana or the exclamatory kana. Shinko gunsho ruiju, XIV, 460, lacks the nigori (sonant mark). Such a reading would justify the translation in Diaries of Court Ladies of Old Japan; p. 169, "He seemed to have been thinking her a worthless woman, but he had changed his mind, she thought." Yosano Akiko makes the same interpretation in her translation into modern Japanese (Heian-cho joryu nikki, trans. Yosano Akiko, in Gendaigoyaku kokubungaku zenshu, IX [1938], 310, 311). The more recent commentators and translators, including Endo, Ozaki, Tamai, Yamagishi, and Enchi Fumiko, make the interpretation necessitated by the reading "gana," as have I.

¹³⁵Shosho (Minor Captain) was the third-ranking position in the Konoefu (see note 29). It is not clear to whom reference is made here, but Ozaki, Kochu, p. 71; Yamagishi, NKZ, p. 209, note 16; and Endo, Iwanami text, p. 413, note 23, suggest Minamoto no Masamichi (d. 1017). Gonki, Shiryo taisei, XXXV 289, entry for Choho 5 (1003).6.5, refers to Masamichi as Ukon Shosho (Minor Captain of the Inner Palace Guards of the Right).

¹³⁶Jibukyo (see Introduction, note 29). The Jibukyo at this time was Minamono no Toshikata (960-1027). Texts of the Oeibon group read "Hyobukyo" (Minister of War) instead of "Jibukyo." The Hyobukyo at this time was Fujiwara no Takaie (979-1044) (see note 96).

¹³⁷ More literally, "She had not said one thing and another for a very long time" (Ito hisashu nani yo ka yo to kikoesasuru koto mo naku).

¹³⁸ "Tokidoki mo kaku oboshiiden hodo wa." My translation fails to account for the "kaku." It seems odd that Izumi should say "remembers me thus," when this is precisely a point when the Prince is neglecting her. Perhaps her reference is to his late abortive visit, of which she has just heard. The page apparently comes for his own purposes, and it seems doubtful that the lady could have interpreted his call as an example of the Prince's thoughtfulness.

¹³⁹ "Nazo mo kaku" (Why thus?). Ozaki, Kochu, p. 73, suggests this may be an allusion to one of two poems:

Kokinshu 934 (Anonymous):

Few are the years
I now can hope to see—
Why then are my thoughts
Thus seaweed-tangled
In the net of vain desire?
Kokinshu 529 (Anonymous):

How can it be that I,
Who am no boat-torch
Such as the fishers use,
Yet float in flames
Upon the river of my tears?

I should think either poem a possible reference, though the emotional situation of neither exactly corresponds to Izumi's. I see no reason why there need be any allusion at all, and have translated as if there were none.

¹⁴⁰ "Uramiji" is a kakekotoba:—"I shall not resent"/ "I shall not look at the shore." The imagery and action of the rest of the poem spring from this pun, but also apply metaphorically to Izumi. "Ura" (bay), "iso" (strand), "kogi" (row), "ama" (fisherwoman), and "obune" (little boat) are all engo.

¹⁴¹ This poem is complicated by several puns. "Sode no ura" is a kakekotoba: Sodenoura ("Sleeve Bay," an utamakura or famous place name frequently used in poetry)/sode no ura (lining of my sleeves). "Yaku" also has two meanings: (duty) and (bum). And "shio tarete" has both its literal meaning of "dripping brine" and its metaphorical one of "shedding tears." A prose gloss might run: "I am indeed that ama, a person who makes his living from the sea, by fishing, gathering shellfish, making salt, etc.] whose function is simply to carry [pails of] brine at Sode Bay [in order to make salt by] burning [or: whose only function is to shed tears on the lining of her sleeves], and who has let her boat drift away." Though complicated in explanation, the poem is a cleverly effective reply to that of the Prince. Izumi has taken the "ama" and the boat from the Prince's poem, but has changed their significance. She is indeed the ama referred to by him, but far from rowing off and deserting him, she has lost her own boat, that is, been herself deserted by him. The poem appears as Seishu 875 (827).

¹⁴² "Tanabata-hikoboshi." According to a Chinese legend familiar in Japan, on the seventh night of the seventh month two celestial lovers, the Weaving Maid (Shokujosei or Tanabata, i.e., the star Vega) and the Herdsman (Kengyusei or Hikoboshi, the star Altair), separated all year by the Milky Way, have their annual rendezvous. On that night the Weaving Maid is enabled to cross the "Riverof Heaven" (amanogawa, the Milky Way) to her lover on a bridge made of the out-stretched wings of magpies. The term tanabata, literally "shelf-loom," refers to the occupation of the Weaving Maid, who is called in full Tanabatatsume (the girl of the loom). It is also by extension applied to the day of the lovers' meeting,.… That day was the occasion for a festival, Tanabata no Matsuri or Kikoden, which was one of the group of five annual festivals known as the Go Sekku. Because of the romantic associations of the legend it was the occasion for exchange of love-notes and the writing of poems on five-colored strips of paper, left tied to branches of bamboo. It was also the time when girls prayed to the Weaving Maid for skill in sewing. Tables were set up in front of houses, and in front of the Seiryoden at the Palace, with offerings and burnt incense (Yusoku kojitsu jiten, pp. 221, 222, 535).

¹⁴³ It is grammatically possible that the Prince may mean the poem to refer to Izumi. Endo, Iwanami text, p. 414, note 13, interprets thus. I have followed Tamai, Shinchu, p. 120, and Ozaki, Kochu, p. 76.

¹⁴⁴ Ozaki, Kochu, pp. 76, 77, interprets "Tanabata ni imaru" as "shunned by Tanabata [the star, i.e., the Prince]," instead of "shunned at Tanabata [time]." The poem appears also as Seishu 876 (828), with "amaru" in place of "imaru." Perhaps "amaru" might be interpreted "left over," i.e., "unessential": "When I consider how I am left out of things at Tanabata time …"

¹⁴⁵ The original reads simply "Nado ka tokidoki wa" (Why, from time to time?).

¹⁴⁶ "Ogikaze" is a kakekotoba: (wind among the reeds) (beckoning wind). The sense of Izumi's poem is: "Since you sleep soundly, undisturbed by heartsore longing, you cannot hear the wind of my desire which beckons you. And yet does it not blow for you, night after autumn night?" The poem appears as Seishu 877 (829), in the following variant form:

Since nothing breaks your sleep,
You do not hear, I think,
My message borne upon the wind,
Blown through the beckoning reeds
On every autumn night.

¹⁴⁷ "Mono omou toki wa to zo," a reference to Ki no Tsurayuki's poem:

When I am filled with longing
In my lonely solitude,
How can I know the momentary sleep
Even of the windblown reeds
Along the shore at Naniwa?

¹⁴⁸ "Oroka ni" (indifferently). This could equally well be rendered "I am not indifferent," or "I am far from indifferent."

¹⁴⁹ A closer version: "If the reed [beckoning] wind blows, from now on it behooves me to listen, sleepless, and hear whether my beloved, sleepless, will rouse me up." "Ogikaze" is the same pun mentioned in note 146. "I mo nede" is also a kakekotoba: i mo nede (not sleeping a sleep)/imo nede (my little sister [i.e., mistress] not sleeping). It is possible to take "ima yori zo" as going with "odorokasu ka to," rather than with "kikubekarikeru," and the poem is so interpreted by Endo, Iwanami text, p. 415, note 24, and p. 453, sup. note 73; and by Yamagishi, NKZ, p. 212, note 12. In this case "keru" has a past rather than a purely emotional significance, and the last three lines are to be translated: "I should have listened to hear whether your beckoning wind would wake me up at any moment." I have followed Ozaki, Kochu, p. 78.

¹⁵⁰ I.e., he had not seen her other than dimly by moonlight or at dawn. See note 247.

¹⁵¹ This poem appears as Seishu 878 (830), with the fourth line reading "Omoishigurenu" (My thoughts have been a cold drizzle).

¹⁵² An expansion of the original, "Mube hito wa" (men, to be sure). This is a reference to a poem by Onakatomi no Yoshinobu (921-991), Shuishu 1104:

Again the voices
Of wild geese, back from the north,
Fall upon our ears:
Surely man cannot forsake
The bonds of this bitter world.

Or, more literally, "The geese which had returned are crying; it seems natural that men cannot forsake this trying world." The wild geese migrate south to Japan in the fall and return north in the spring. Japan, to which they have returned to winter, is likened to this world of pain and illusion which men (and Izumi Shikibu) find so hard to give up. Endo, Iwanami text, p. 453, sup. note 76, interprets the reference to mean something closer to "We find it hard to accept our fates."

¹⁵³ Possibly a reference to the night the Prince handed Izumi a poem on his fan, or to one of the nights he took her to his mansion. The visit immediately preceding was described as "inconsequential."

¹⁵⁴ There is a question as to the meaning of "kakaru ariki mo hikikaetaru mi no arisama to omou ni" (thinking that such expeditions showed how greatly she had changed). Endo, Iwanami text, p. 416, note 12, and Yamagishi, NKZ, p. 214, note 6, take "ariki" to refer to Izumi's not being before the Buddha. I have preferred to assume that she is sighing over how greatly she has changed from the old, happy days when she had no griefs to send her off on pilgrimages. The interpretation is doubtful however.

¹⁵⁵ "Aware ni omoigakenu hodo ni kitareba." Here I have chosen to translate "aware ni" as "happily." For a similar construction and a different interpretation see note 8.

¹⁵⁶Hodashi, a hobble, tether, fetter, and hence earthly ties impeding religious dedication. The Prince is alluding to a poem by Mononobe no Yoshina, Kokinshu 955:

Though I would enter
The mountain path where this world
And its pain must fade,
The thought of one I love
It is that keeps me fettered here.

This is an onaji moji naki uta, a poem which deliberately avoids use of any vowel or consonant-vowel combination more than once.

¹⁵⁷ A more nearly literal translation: "Did a person know I would inquire today, crossing the Barrier? The ceaseless concern I feel for you!" The Barrier referred to is Ausaka (Osaka) no Seki, an ancient inspection point east of the capital, long since fallen into ruin (it went out of use in 795), but which remained a favorite place name in poetry because of its pun on "meet" (au). My interpretation of the poem follows Endo, Iwanami text, p. 417, note 19. Tamai, Shinchu, p. 128, points out that "kokorozukai" may be a kakekotoba meaning "heart messenger" as well as "anxious thoughts." The "inquiring" and "crossing the Barrier" are to be understood as "by letter." The "o" ending the last line may be taken either as indicating exclamation (as in my translation), or that "omoitae senu kokorozukai" is also the object of "shiru." The poem appears as Seishu 221.

¹⁵⁸ "Omiji" is a kakekotoba: Omiji (the Omi Road)/au michi (meeting road). The Prince has said that he would cross the Meeting Barrier on the Omi Road to Ishiyama Temple (in Omi Province near Lake Biwa), but Izumi replies that he seems to have forgotten that Meeting Road. This poem appears as Seishu 222.

¹⁵⁹ "Oboroke ni omoitamaeirinishi kamo." "Oboroke" here has the opposite of its usual meaning of "vague." Endo, Iwanami text, p. 453, sup. note 78, considers that "kamo" poses a problem, since its usual use in Heian writing is to express doubt or questioning rather than exclamation as in pre-Heian Japanese. Since it would seem unlikely that Izumi is here questioning her own statement, the reading" oboroke ni omoitamaete irinishikaba" found in Oeibon texts is to be considered preferable.

¹⁶⁰ The implied answer is "never." "Uchide" is a kakekotoba: uchide (going out)/Uchide no Hama (the Beach of Uchide [at Otsu on Lake Biwa]). Yamagishi, NKZ, p. 215, note 14, regards "uki" as a kakekotoba as well: (mire), as well as (frustrating, painful, melancholy, miserable). If such is the case, the first two lines should be rendered, "If, though living in the mountains, my life should fall into the mire." "Uki" might be an engo of "hama" (beach).

¹⁶¹ A closer version: "Is it right that you have forgotten me, lost in mere vagueness, so that there is no use [valley] for my visiting journey up Meeting-Slope Mountain?" "Osakayama" contains the pun on au (meet) previously mentioned. "Kai" is also a kakekotoba: (mountain valley)/(result). In this poem the Prince tosses back at Izumi her accusation of forgetfulness.

¹⁶² "Omi no umi" ("the Sea of Omi," i.e., Lake Biwa) and "Uchide" contain the puns already explained in notes 158 and 160. Essentially the Prince is saying, "Come back and meet me." This poem appears as Seishu 224.

¹⁶³ An allusion to an anonymous poem, Kokinshu 1061:

If every time
That life is difficult
Men cast themselves away,
Even the deepest valley
Would be too shallow for them all.

¹⁶⁴ There is a play on seki (barrier) and seki (dam up). I have interpreted "Omi no umi" as a double kakekotoba: (the Sea of Omi)/(the misery of one who would meet you [or "whom you would meet"]).

¹⁶⁵ A closer version: "As a test I would make trial even of my own heart; come and see if you can tempt me, saying, 'Let us go to Miyako."' The poem's cleverness and charm lie in the word play of "kokoromi"—"kokoro"—"kokoromimu" (trial—heart—I'd make trial). It appears as Seishu 230, with the reading "kimi ga kokoro mo" (make trial of your heart) instead of "onoga kokoro mo."

¹⁶⁶ An expansion of the original, "Sasoimiyo to arishi o, isogiidetamainikereba nan" (As for your "Try to tempt me," since you hurriedly came out of the mountains …).

¹⁶⁷ A closer version: "I have left the mountains and made my way back along the road of darkness for the sake of meeting you now once more." The "kuraki michi" is the way of worldly desire. The poem appears as Seishu 883 (832), with the variant readings "… michi ni o/Tazunekoshi" (came seeking you along the road).

¹⁶⁸ The Prince implies that the heavens reflect his own emotional state (which is not to say that his sights literally blow up a storm!).

¹⁶⁹ This poem appears as Seishu 884 (833).

¹⁷⁰Ariake no tsuki, the waning moon, which, because of its late rising, remains shining in the sky at dawn.

¹⁷¹ A somewhat free handling of "karojite okoshitemo" (though at length she made her get up). I have at this point inserted a sentence from the Kangembon—"Karojite odorokashite mata hito okosedo mo okizu"—which I have rendered as indicated in the translation. This sentence makes clear what is implied later in the grumbling comments about the "ladies [i.e., ladies-in-waiting, omoto] in this house"—that another servant, presumably a man, has been wakened by the person whom the lady has roused.

¹⁷² "Igitanashi" (soiled with sleep).

¹⁷³ Simply "karojite okite" (finally getting up) in the Japanese.

¹⁷⁴ This poem appears as Shinkokinshu 1169 (for a discussion of its role in the controversy over authorship and date of the Izumi shikibu nikki see Introduction, pp. 51-52, 61-62, 67-69).

¹⁷⁵ "Hikimusubite," folded it lengthwise into a narrow strip and then bent it into a knot: musubibumi.

¹⁷⁶ A closer version: "Within the period of autumn they are going to rot away; whose sleeves shall I borrow for the inevitable winter rains?" Shigure are the cold rains of early winter; Izumi says that her sleeves will be rotted away with tears before the rains even begin. The poem appears as Seishu 885 (834).

¹⁷⁷ "Kusa no iro sae mishi ni mo arazu nariyukeba, shiguren hodo no hisashisa mo madaki ni oboyuru, kaze ni kokorogurushige ni uchinabikitaru ni wa" (As even the color of the grasses became ever more different from the way it had looked, though the distance of the time when the shigure would fall seemed not yet, [the grasses] bent with apparent heartsoreness before the wind). I have followed Ozaki, Kochu, p. 79, in taking "hisashisa" to mean "distance" rather than "length," though with "madaki" it becomes redundant. For other examples of Izumi's reactions to the grasses growing about her house see pp. 57, 58, 131, and note 3.

¹⁷⁸ The original: "Tadaima mo, kienubeki tsuyu no waga mi zo ayauku kusaba ni tsukete kanashiki mama ni, oku e mo irade, yagate hashi ni fushitareba." The part from "kienubeki" through "kanashiki" is evidently a garbled poem which has fallen into the prose text (see Introduction, note 178, and pp. 42, 54, 56). That this is likely to be the case can be deduced from the fact that, whereas Izumi's composition contains only four poems, the Prince sends her five replies. Each reply starts with the same words as one of her poems, but there is nothing to correspond to the Prince's "Kienubeki/Tsuyu no inochi to." A further item of evidence is provided by the fact that this sequence of Izumi's poems—all five of them—is present in the Seishu as nos. 885-889 (834-838). The secondone reads:

My life, a drop of dew
About to vanish,
Frail as leaves of grass,
Can never know tranquility
Among its multitude of woes.

The fourth line involves a kakekotoba: … waga mi wa … ayauku, sawa ni kanashikeru (My life is in danger, and many are the things that I am sad about)/ ayaukusa (dangerous [or endangered] grass). In the translation I have followed the Nikki text as it exists.

The poem contains an allusion to two lines of Chinese verse in the Wakan roeishu (an anthology of often-recited Chinese and Japanese poetry, compiled by Fujiwara no Kinto; see Wakan roeishu, ed. Kawaguchi Hisao, NKBT, LXXIII [1965], 254). These lines, Wakan roeishu 790, are attributed to one Lo Wei. However Kakimura Shigematsu, Wakan roeishu kosho (1926), p. 368, states that this name must be a mistake for Yen Wei, an 8th-century T'ang poet. The lines read:

(Look upon yourself—grass whose roots have parted from the brow of a bank [or cliff];

Consider your life—a boat loosed from its moorings on the river.)

Kawaguchi, Wakan roeishu, p. 254, quotes a Buddhist parable from the Wakan roeishu shichu, a 12th-century commentary of doubtful authorship (perhaps attributable to Shakushin'a [dates unknown]; or to Kakumyo [1157-1241]): A man, chased by a tiger, flees along a thousand-fathom precipice. In order to escape he hangs over the edge by a single strand of grass. In the abyss below is an openmouthed crocodile; above, a black and a white rat are gnawing at the grass. The crocodile symbolizes hell; the rats, the sun and moon (or days and months—i.e., time?); the grass, evil passions. A similar story appears in a commentary by the Chinese monk Seng Chao (ca. 374-414) on the Vimalakirtih Sutra: Chu Yuimakitsu kyo, kan 2, Taisho shinshu daizokyo, ed. Takakusu Junjiro, XXXVIII (1926), 343. In this version a man flees because of an offense he has committed against his king. The king has him pursued by a maddened elephant; in desperation the man leaps into an abandoned well, where he hangs on by a tuft of decaying grass. From below an evil dragon spits venom at him; five poisonous snakes are ready to bite him; two rats gnaw at the grass; the elephant glowers down from above. But honey from a tree beside the well drips into the man's mouth, causing him to forget his terror and his peril. Thus the pleasures of this world delude men into forgetting the true nature of the human condition. For the second line of the Wakan roeishu poem Kawaguchi suggests a source in the Chuang-tzu, chüan 10, "Lieh Yü-k' ou" (He [the man without abilities] drifts like an unmoored boat; he rambles and roams in vacancy) (Kambun taikei, ed. Hattori Unokichi, IX [1911], 9).

Izumi Shikibu's interest in the Wakan roeishu lines is attested by a sequence of 43 poems in the Seishu (268-310); each of these waka begins with a syllable taken, in sequential order, from the Japanese reading of the Chinese verses: "Mi o kan-zureba kishi no hitai ni ne o hanaretaru kusa/Inochi o ron-zureba e no hotori ni tsunagazaru fune." The figure of the "dangerous grass" is also referred to by Sei Shonagon: "Ayaugusa wa, kishi no hitai ni ouran mo, ge ni tanomoshikarazu" ("Dangerous grass" growing on the brow of a bank would certainly be undependable) (Makura no soshi, in NKBT, XIX, 104).

¹⁷⁹ "Tsuyu nerubeku mo arazu" (I was not to sleep so much as "dew").

¹⁸⁰ A more nearly literal translation: "I wonder, alas, how many nights it has been that I have not dozed off—simply making my occupation listening to the cries of wild geese." This poem appears as Seishu 887 (836), with the reading "ikuka" (how many days) in place of "iku yo" (how many nights). It also appears as Zokushu 397 (1239), with the reading "iku yo."

¹⁸¹ The clearness of the moonlight seems inconsistent with the mistiness of the sky; it is possible that the sky is intended to be understood as only partially misty. This passage is discussed in detail by Endo, Shinko, pp. 166-173. He concludes that sumu in the Heian Period did not have its modern meaning of "is clear," but was applied to any material or scene presenting an even appearance free of foreign admixtures. It could have the sense of kusumu (to be of a subdued color of low brilliance). Hence there need be no contradiction between the verbs sumu and kiru (to be misty): the moon is shining through an even veil of mist.

¹⁸² Endo, who stresses the lady's unhappiness throughout this passage, states that "mezuraka nari," which I have translated as "strangely new," means "ill-omened" (fukitsu) in the present context.

¹⁸³ A closer version: "Even a person not myself will surely see: as for aware, nothing can be rated equal to the Long Month's still-up-at-dawn moon." Aware, the sentiment and the word which dominate this passage, and which I have translated variously according to the context, is that sad and tender sensibility discussed in note 5. The poem appears as Seishu 888 (837), and as no. 438 in the Shokugosenshu.

¹⁸⁴ "Tadaima, kono kado o uchitatakasuru hito aran, ika ni oboenan." The implication is that she would be extremely moved. Endo comments that the lady has entered a new emotional state since opening her door and looking at the moon. The force of the "tadaima" is that (although someone knocked before) if now someone were to knock she would be completely overcome with emotion. (I have taken the new emotional state to be one in which the lady's depression and irritability are replaced by awe and tenderness inspired by the spectacle of moon and mist. Hence I have preferred my translation of "mezuraka nari" to the one suggested by Endo [see above, note 182].)

¹⁸⁵ This poem appears as Seishu 889 (838), and as no. 1423 in the Shokusenzaishu.

¹⁸⁶ I have supplied the words "His messenger had come, and she had availed herself of the opportunity." The original reads simply: "Miya watari ni ya kikoemashi to omou ni. Tatematsuritareba" (As she was thinking she should send it to the Prince. Having presented it …). The Sanjonishibon lacks a clause present in the other texts after "omou ni": "Owashimashitarikeru koto o omou ['yo to omou' in Oeibon texts] mama ni" (thinking of how he had come to visit her). It should be noted that in any case the sentence represents an overlapping in narration with the passage immediately before the text of Izumi's composition.

¹⁸⁷ "Aenaki kokochi." Because the reply had come too quickly, indicating lack of thought (Ocho nikki, p. 183, note 30)?

¹⁸⁸ A closer version: "Although within an autumn my sleeves have rotted, a person thinks of nothing else but 'My sleeves are thus."'

¹⁸⁹ The chrysanthemum was associated with longevity and with the ninth month (Shinchu, p. 141).

¹⁹⁰ A more nearly literal translation: "To listen, without dozing off, to the cries of wild geese that fly the kumoi is an occupation that comes from your own heart." For kumoi, here translated "cloudy vault," see note 133. Yamagishi, NKZ, p. 221, note 30, suggests that by "kokorozukara no waza" the Prince means that Izumi's fickleness gives her much to think about.

¹⁹¹ A closer version: "A person not myself was also gazing, with the same heart, solely at the sky where the moon was still up at dawn." This poem appears as Shokukokinshu 1181.

¹⁹² A closer version: "I thought that you at least, though in another place, would be the very one to be looking at the moon, but this morning when I went to you I was chagrined."

¹⁹³ A very free rendering of "Ito akegatakaritsuru o koso" (It was in particular the way it was very hard to open). "Akegatakaritsuru" is a kakekotoba, referring both to the gate and the dawn (Yo ga akegatakaritsuru).

¹⁹⁴ I have inserted the words "I have a request to make of you," which are not represented in the original.

¹⁹⁵ "Ana shitarigao." Ozaki, Kochu, p. 106, and Endo, Iwanami text, p. 422, note 1, interpret this as meaning "How can I complacently write such a poem for you?"

¹⁹⁶ "Notamnawasetaru koto was ikade ka" (As for what you say, how—?). I have followed Yamagishi, NKZ, p. 223, note 4. Tamai, Shinchu, p. 142, interprets "how" as meaning "How can I compose the kind of poem you request?"

¹⁹⁷ A closer version: "Would that your image would remain in my regretful tears, even though autumn [satiety] goes, not knowing my heart." "Aki" is a kakekotoba: (autumn)/(satiety). In the latter sense the last line means "… even if you become tired of me and go away." The poem appears as Seishu 890, (839), in the following form:

For the tears I shed
And never stint their number
I would have you stay,
Though this stagnant-hearted
Autumn of our passion goes.

¹⁹⁸ A more nearly literal translation: "I wonder where she might go, leaving you. Even I am making the effort to live in this miserable world." "Yo no naka" has the secondary meaning of "the relations between a man and woman" here. The poem appears as Seishu 891 (840).

¹⁹⁹ "Mishirigao" (know-it-all face).

²⁰⁰ A free rendering of "Amari zo oshihakarisuguitamau, uki yo no naka to haberu wa" (As for this "uki yo no naka," you are engaging in too much guesswork).

²⁰¹ A closer version: "As for the person who abandons me and goes on a journey—if it be thus, so let it be, if you but think of me as a person second to none."

²⁰² The Sanjonishibon has; all other texts have, which I have adopted.

²⁰³ A rather free handling of "Koko ni kakute aru yo nado abosu" (He thought, "Here she is, thus!").

²⁰⁴ "Tamakura no sode," sleeves of the arm on which one rests one's head. The phrase is picked up and exchanged in several succeeding poems. The Prince is saying that his sleeves are wet with tears he has shed in sympathy with Izumi's suffering.

²⁰⁵ "Aware naritsuru yoru no keshiki mo, kaku nomi iu hodo ni ya, tanomoshiki hito mo naki nameri kashi to kokorogurushiku oboshite" (He felt pained at heart even about the night scene which had been aware, thinking, perhaps because she spoke only thus, that she seemed indeed without a person to rely on). I have here translated "aware" as "sweetly sad," and have introduced the words "the next morning."

²⁰⁶ A closer version: "Within the space of this morning I suppose they have now dried—the sleeves of the arm-pillow which looked as if they had been wet [we had slept] only as much as a dream." "Nuru" is a kakekotoba: (slept)/ (wet). The poem appears as Seishu 892 (841).

²⁰⁷ A closer version: "Though you may have seen them as being wet by only a 'dream' of tears, it has been impossible to dry them, the sleeves of my armpillow." The Kangembon and Sanjonishibon have "fushi" (lying down) in place of "hoshi" (drying), and "wazurau" (be a trouble) instead of "kanetsuru" (be impossible). I have preferred the Oeibon version. The other must mean "I cried so much that I felt quite uncomfortable lying there." Shimizu, Ocho nikki, p. 199, mixes the two versions: "Hoshi zo wazurau."

²⁰⁸ "Kokoro kara ni ya." Another instance in which the Prince's feelings are conjectured (see Introduction, pp. 89, 125).

²⁰⁹ I have supplied the words "Why should you go on living in this way?" The original is "Ito kaku tsurezure ni nagametamauran o" (While you seem thus to be gazing in utter tedium).

²¹⁰ This and the previous sentence are a translation of: "Yo no naka no hito mo binage ni iu nari. Tokidoki maireba ni ya, miyuru koto mo nakeredo, sore mo, hito no ito kikinikuku iu ni." Tamai, Shinchu, p. 151, takes this to be a reference to the rumored visits of other men to Izumi, none of whom the Prince has yet seen (miyuru koto nakeredo). Endo, Iwanami text, p. 424, note 3, understands the same phrase to mean that it is Izumi whom the Prince has not seen. I have preferred to follow Ozaki, Kochu, p. 114.

²¹¹1 have inserted "from those fruitless excursions when I have been unable to gain admittance," following Endo, Iwanami text, p. 424, note 5, in this interpretation. The original is simply "mata tabitabi kaeru hodo no" (again, on the frequent occasions when I am returning home).

²¹² "Makoto ni kiku koto no arite sei-suru koto nado araba, sora yuku tsuki ni mo aran" (Truly, if it were heard of and I were restrained, it would be a case of the "sky-traveling moon"). I have limited the "hearing" in translation to a "certain person," perhaps the Prince's official consort, or one of the lords warned about by the nurse (see notes 95, 97). "Sora yuku tsuki" is evidently an allusion to a poem by Tachibana no Naomoto (mid-10th century), Shuishu 470:

Do not forget—
Though between us be the distance
To the cloudy vault—
Until the moon that goes across the sky
Shall circle back again.

Ozaki, Kochu, p. 114; Tamai, Shinchu, p. 152; and Endo, Iwanami text, p. 455, sup. note 92, attribute this poem to Naomoto. Shimizu, Ocho nikki, p. 202, note 15, and Hachidaishu zenchu, I, 488, however, attribute it to Tachibana no Tadainoto (also mid-10th century). The poem also appears in Ise monogatari, episode 11. Considering the fact that the poem was written to a girl (see Hachidaishu zenchu, I, 488), "I would be as out of reach as the moon in the sky," or "You would be in the position of waiting 'till the moon came circling round,"' might be better translations; especially so, in that there is probably also reference to the exchange of poems in which Izumi likens the Prince to the wandering moon (see notes 131, 133). There is also a possibility that "sora yuku tsuki," whether or not derived from Tadamoto's (or Naomoto's) poem, was a customary phrase used to express separation (see Iwanami text, p. 455, sup. note 92; Kochu, p. 114; Shinchu, p. 152; NKZ, p. 226, note 8; Ocho nikki, p. 202, note 15).

²¹³ "Hito nado mo aredo." It seems clear in this case that "hito" refers to the Prince's legal spouse.

²¹⁴ I have inserted this sentence.

²¹⁵ "Ichinomiya no koto mo kikoekirite aru o." Presumably a reference to an invitation to become a lady-in-waiting to the Retired Emperor Kazan, the eldest son of Reizei, and half-brother of Princes Atsumichi, Tametaka, and Okisada.

²¹⁶ "Sari tote, yama no anata ni shirube suru hito mo naki o," apparently a reference to Kokinshu 950 (Anonymous):

Would that I had
A dwelling far beyond
The mountains of fair Yoshino—
For when the world goes ill
I'd make of it my hidden refuge.

²¹⁷ Perhaps a reference to a poem by Fujiwara no Kiyotada (d. 958):

Unbeknownst to men
Its note may die away,
The hototogisu,
Feeling itself living
In a night that has no dawn.

²¹⁸ "Kono nureginu wa, saritomo kiyaminan" (As for this wet garment, despite it all she would cease to wear it). Nureginu (wet garments) is a name for an undeserved bad reputation, in this case a reference to the Prince's recurrent accusations of unfaithfulness. If she goes to live in his mansion he will no longer be prone to the suspicions that her solitary life provokes.

²¹⁹ "Nanigoto mo tada ware yori hoka no to nomi omoitamaetsutsu sugushihaberu." Endo, Iwanami text, p. 425, note 28, suggests that the phrase "ware yori hoka no" was drawn from a poem, but says the source is not clear.

²²⁰ This sentence and the previous two read in the original: "'Yoso nite mo migurushiki koto ni kikoesasuran. Mashite makoto narikeri to mihaberan namu katawara itaku' to kikoyureba, 'Sore wa koko ni koso to mo kaku mo iwareme."' Because of lack of personal pronouns a problem exists indeciding who is being criticized. I have assumed that both Izumi and the Prince are referred to. Ozaki, Kochu, p. 118, favors the interpretation that both Izumi and the Prince are referring to the Prince and takes "koko ni" to refer to Izumi's house. Tamai, Shinchu, p. 154, follows this same line, but interprets "Sore wa koko ni koso to mo kaku mo iwareme" to mean "Yes, I no doubt will be talked about in various ways." Yamagishi, NKZ, p. 228, notes 21, 22, thinks that Izumi is concerned with criticism of herself. Shimizu, Ocho nikki, pp. 204, 205, thinks she is worried about the Prince's reputation, but interprets "koko ni" as the Prince's way of referring to himself, not to Izumi's abode. Endo, Iwanami text, p. 425, notes 30-32, and p. 455, sup. note 95, also treats "koko ni" as a reference to the Prince, and applies the criticism to both.

²²¹ "Koshi", presumably the shitomi (see note 87).

²²² We are to understand that his sleeves are soaked with tears as well as dew.

²²³ A closer version: "Because of a man who is up and about with the dew on the roadside grass, the sleeves of my arm-pillow have not dried either." "Oki-" is a kakekotoba: (get up)/ (settle). In the latter meaning it is not functional, but only an engo for "dew."

²²⁴ "Koko ni mo kashiko ni mo" (both here and there), i.e., each in his own residence.

²²⁵ "Okitekeri" is the same kakekotoba noted above—"formed"/'rose." Shirotae or was a white cloth made from the bark of the paper mulberry (kaji no ki). The word served as a makurakotoba with names of several articles of clothing, as well as with kumo (cloud), yuki (snow), etc. "Linen-white" is of course only an equivalent. The poem appears, with the reading "okikeru o," as Seishu 392 (367).

²²⁶ "Notanawasetaru." Tamai, Shinchu, p. 158; Ozaki, Kochu, p. 121; and Endo, Iwanami text, p. 426, note 5, all interpret this as something the Prince says to himself on reading the lady's poem. Ozaki considers the use of the rentaikei exclamatory, Endo posits an understood ni, and Tamai has "notamawasetaru" modifying the next sentence.

²²⁷ "Oki-" is the usual kakekotoba. The Prince takes Izumi's last two lines (Kesa uchimireba/Shirotae ni shite) as the point of departure for this example of renga (see Introduction, note III).

²²⁸ "Towasetareba, toku mairade, imiju sainamumeri" (When he asked for you, you did not come quickly, and it seems he is railing at you). The presence of an "attendant" is implied by the context, the use of the causative, and the auxiliary verb meri (seems). If "towasetareba" is not regarded as part of the attendant's speech, the view taken by Yamagishi, NKZ, p. 229, note 5, the sentence could be translated "The Prince had his attendant question [or 'call'] the page. The attendant said, 'It seems he is heaping abuse on you because you did not come quickly."'

²²⁹ I have followed Endo, Tamai, Yamagishi, and Ozaki in rejecting the Sanjonishibon reading of "mata" (again) in favor of the "mada" (not yet) found in other texts.

²³⁰ A closer version: "Thinking perhaps you were looking at the moon of the night when we slept, this morning I arose [frost formed] and waited, but there was no one who called." "Oki-" is thekakekotoba noted previously, and "shimo" doubles as the emphatic particle and "frost." I have followed Endo, Iwanami text, p. 426, note 10, in interpreting "nenuru yo" as "the night we slept together," presumably the night the Prince sees the lady's tears falling in the moonlight. Tamai, Shinchu, p. 159, takes it to mean "tonight when you actually were fast asleep."

²³¹ "But I doubt that you actually did" is implied. There is the usual play on "oki-" and "shimo." There is a question concerning to whom "madoromade" refers. Ozaki, Kochu, p. 123, would have it that "madoromade" refers to the action of the Prince. Tamai, Shinchu, p. 159, makes it refer to Izumi: "You say you've stayed up all night looking at the moon that I gazed at without sleeping all one night." I have followed Endo, Iwanami text, p. 426, note 12, and Suzuki, Zenko, p. 227. The poem appears as Seishu 393 (368) in the following variant form:

When I look upon the moon
That I have watched,
Alone and sleepless,
Its countenance seems to say,
"I've stayed up all this frosty night."

In this case the moon is a metaphor for the Prince. (This interpretation is based on Kubota's note in the Nihon koten zensho edition of Izumi Shikibu shu, p. 67, note 14. A similar interpretation might be feasible in the case of the Nikki poem.)

²³² "Uchitokenitaru" has both its literal and figurative meanings of "melted." The poem appears as Seishu 394 (369).

²³³ "Kesa shitarigao ni oboshitaritsuru mo ito netashi." It seems unlikely that the "shitarigao" (self-satisfied expression) refers to the "akashigao" (stayed-up-all-night expression) with which Izumi has branded the Prince in her poem (note 231). The context shows that the Prince is angry about the page's tardiness.

²³⁴ A closer version: "Although it is frost which must melt when the morning sun strikes it, there is a condition of sky hard to melt away." The "sora no keshiki" (condition of the sky) of course refers to the Prince's anger. "Sora" is an engo of "asahi" (morning sun).

²³⁵ A very free treatment of "Korosasetamaubekannaru koso tote" ("That you should kill him, well—" she said).

²³⁶ A more nearly literal translation: "Do you now intend not to say 'live!' [go!] to the lad, who appears at infrequent intervals when you do not come?" "Ike" is a kakekotoba: (live!)/ (go!). This poem appears as Seishu 395 (370).

²³⁷ "Shinobi" is a kakekotoba: "Kono warawa shinobi" (Endure this lad)/ "shinobi no tsuma" (hidden spouse).

²³⁸ This accusation seems rather odd, as Izumi has begun this exchange with a "pillow-sleeves" poem, while the Prince has not mentioned the subject. From the point of view of the Nikki as a story, this inconsistency casts an interesting sidelight on the Prince's reactions here, as he rather too abruptly changes the subject after his somewhat absurd remarks about killing the page. As suggested by Suzuki, Zenko, pp. 431-435, however this sort of minor discrepancy may also be regarded as an indication of the process by which the Nikki was written—amalgamation of a collection of poems, letters, jottings, etc., pieced out with memory, imagination, and literary skill but with some rough edges still showing.

²³⁹ This poem appears as Seishu 396 (371).

²⁴⁰ I have inserted this sentence.

²⁴¹ A more nearly literal translation: "If the matter had ended without my saying anything, would you have called them to mind at all, those pillowsleeves?" The poem, a rhetorical question implying a negative answer, contains a play on "kakete." Izumi's poem uses the expression "kokoro ni kakete" (hung in my heart, i.e., cherished). In the Prince's reply "kakete dani" means "not in the least," but also "even if you have hung them in your heart."

²⁴² Perhaps an allusion to a poem by Domyo Azari (see Introduction, note 99, and pp. 20,21,46, 87), Goshuishu 785:

Night after night
I lie in wakefulness,
Sending my thoughts to you—
I wonder if my heart will go
And startle you from sleep.

There is some doubt about this allusion however because of the late date of the author.

²⁴³ See Introduction, p. 79 and note 229, for a discussion of the relationship of this poem to the problem of the authorship of the Izumi Shikibu nikki.

²⁴⁴ "Uchinagamerarete." The passive indicates spontaneity. Tamai, Shinchu, p. 161, thinks that the object of the gazing is the Prince's poem, not the moon. Ozaki, Kochu, p. 128, takes the verb to be (to recite a poem) rather than (to gaze).

²⁴⁵ A more nearly literal translation: "Although I think it must be late, I cannot sleep; but since itwould be nakanaka, I do not look at the moon." "Nakanaka" means kaette (contrary to what one would expect); looking at the moon, normally a pleasant experience, would make things worse than before. This poem appears as Seishu 397 (372).

²⁴⁶ "Onnaguruma," a carriage decorated in the fashion used by women, with colorful curtains of damask silk hung within the sudare screening the openings and allowed to trail out beneath, as were the long sleeves of the passengers.

²⁴⁷ An apparent conflict with the statement on p. 152. See note 150.

²⁴⁸ I have expanded the original, which is simply "Izariidenu" (She crept out on her knees), supplying the words "from behind her screen to greet him."

²⁴⁹ "Higoro no obotsukanasa nado katarawasetamaite." This could equally well be rendered: "Speaking of his [or their] impatient restlessness of the past several days."

²⁵⁰ "Mite mo nageku." This may be an allusion to Kokinshu 752 (Anonymous):

See my love once? I must again!
Again? Oh let me see her still!
So my desire grows;
And this must be the very reason why
She so detests familiarity.

I have followed the interpretation given to this poem in Kokinwakashu hyoshaku, ed. Kubota Utsubo (1960), II, 474. Kubota's gloss is essentially this: The more I meet my love, the more our mutual desire grows. But she fears to give way to passion entirely, because she does not trust me. Hence she detests over-familiarity. Tamai, Shinchu, pp. 163, 164, takes the poem to be the woman's guess at the reason why her lover has forsaken her—he cannot endure their ever-increasing desire to see each other. Ozaki, Kochu, p. 131, has still another view: When the two lovers live apart and see each other only occasionally, their meetings have real zest. Hence dull familiarity is to be avoided. This last interpretation is closest to the significance which must lie in Izumi's "mite mo nageku"—a fear of indifference coming from over-familiarity—but seems least likely as an explanation of the poem. It is doubtful that Izumi's remark can be assigned a source in this poem, whose sense is uncertain and which lacks the word "nageku."

²⁵¹ "Shioyakigoromo nite zo aran" (It will be a case of the salt-burning garments). This is an allusion to a poem in the Kokinrokujo:

Even the rustic garb
The girls of Ise wear when burning salt
Familiarity makes dear—
And it alone enables one to judge
How precious the beloved.

"Burning salt" refers to the process of extracting salt by boiling sea water or burning seaweed saturated with brine. Not only does familiarity not breed contempt, the Prince asserts, answering Izumi's allusion with one of his own, but exactly the opposite is true. In the above poem the first two lines constitute a jo (preface), related to the basic statement of the poem—only when one has come to know someone thoroughly can one know how much he loves her—as a specific illustration, and also related through "narete koso," which functions grammatically with both the first two and last two lines.

²⁵²Mayumi or (true bow), so called because its wood was used in the making of bows: a small deciduous tree.

²⁵³ I.e., our love has deepened. These lines appear as Seishu 398 (373), with the reading "Kotoha fukaku mo."

²⁵⁴ The "dew" is a metaphor for the Prince's affection, just a momentary touch of which has deepened the color of her leaves (i.e., has deepened into love). This is another example of linked verse, Izumi in this case supplying the first three lines to cap the Prince's last two. They appear as Seishu 398 (374).

²⁵⁵ I have chosen to amplify this sentence in order to give the reader some idea of the sight that so pleases the lady. The original runs: "Onnoshi ni, enaranu onzo, idashiuchigi ni shitamaeru" (With his noshi he wore an unbelievable [lit., 'impossible'] garment as an idashiuchigi). For noshi, which I have described in the translation, see note 124. The uchigi was an undergarment, a long robe worn beneath the hakama (a sort of bifurcated skirt). When worn so that its lower edge showed below the hakama it was called idashiuchigi (Shinchu, p. 164).

²⁵⁶ "Kino no mikeshiki no asamashu oboitarishi koso kokorouki mono no, aware narishika" (The very fact that your appearance yesterday showed you felt put out was, although distressing, yet at the same time touching). The reference is to the lady's embarrassment at being seen by day. Ozaki, Kochu, p. 135, interprets "aware" as "happy"-—"I was happy to be able to see you." Tamai, Shinchu, p. 165, reads without the nigori as "oitarishi" (covered)—" … the way you … hid yourself behind fans and curtains." I have interpreted the verb "izariidenu" (see note 248) as meaning she has emerged from behind such protections.

²⁵⁷ A closer version: "The god of Kazuraki, too, must have thought the very same way indeed—that the bridge to be put across along the Kume Road was an awk-ward thing." "Hashitanaki" is a kakekotoba: "Kumeji ni watasu hashi" (the bridge to be built across at [i.e., along the line of] the Kume Road)/ "hashitanaki made" (to the point of being awkward). This is a reference to the story of En no Ozuno and the god Hitokotonushi no Kami. En no Ozuno, also known as En no Gyoja (late 7th-early 8th cent.) was a Buddhist magician, the reputed founder of the mountain ascetics. Once he wanted to build a stone bridge from Kazuraki (now pronounced Katsuragi) to Kimbusen, two mountains in Yamato Province which were connected by the Kume Road, and he ordered the gods of Mt. Kazuraki to perform the task. One of them however, Hitokotonushi no Kami, also known as Kazuraki no Kami, would work only at night because he was ashamed of his ugliness. Hence the bridge was never completed, and En no Gyoja put a curse on the recalcitrant deity, binding him with a spell in a deep valley. (For another version of this story, see Ogisho, in Nihon kagaku taikei, ed. Sasaki Nobutsuna, 1 [1957], 277.) In this poem Izumi is likening herself to the god of Kazuraki because of her reluctance to be seen by day.

²⁵⁸ A closer version: "If I have effective power from religious practices, will I end things just like that, with you saying, 'Kazuraki's bridge is awkward'?" "Hashitanashi" is the same kakekotoba explained above. The Prince is in turn likening himself to En no Gyoja and saying that if he has that man's magic power he will not leave Izumi where she is. "Araba … yaminan" could perhaps more properly be translated, "If I had … would I … ?" The Prince is not claiming he actually does possess such powers. However, araba does not imply as strong a negation as ariseba (if I had), but stands midway between that inflected form and areba (since I have), a definite assertion of possession. Hence I have chosen the translation "if I have," which is intended to be ambiguous.

²⁵⁹ "Yoshi naki koto" ("things without any reason, meaning, connection"; also, "contemptible things"). Endo, Iwanami text, p. 430, note 2, interprets the phrase to mean "incomprehensible things."

²⁶⁰ A closer version: "What is upon me even the plover will probably not report; has the frost formed also on the wings of the great bird in this same way?" I have followed Suzuki, Zenko, p. 250, in my interpretation. The poem is an allusion to a folk song entitled "Otori". This verse, which exists in more than one version, is one of a group known as fuzoku-uta, apparently of very ancient date, collected in the Heian Period (see Nihon bungaku daijiten, VI, 213-215; Kodai kayoshu, ed. Tsuchihashi Yutaka and Konishi Jin'ichi, NKBT, III [1957], 277-281). The Fuzokufu now extant, consisting of 26 of these songs, is attributed to the compilation of Minamoto no Masanobu (920-993). It is to be found in Nihon kayo shusei, ed. Takano Tatsuyuki, vol. II (1928); Kochu kokka taikei, vol. I (1929); Kamo no Mabuchi zenshu, ed. Kokugakuin Henshubu, vol. II (1903); and in Kodai kayoshu.

The version of "Otori" given by Konishi, Kodai kayoshu, p. 438, reads:

Upon the great bird's wings—
Yarena!
The frost has fallen—
Yarena!
Who says so?
The plover says so!
The kayaguki says so!
The blue heron
Comes from the capital and says so!

Konishi tentatively identifies the "great bird" as the stork (konotori), though he says it could equally well refer to the eagle (washi), crane (tsuru), swan (kugui), or similar large birds. "Yarena" is a hayashikotoba, a meaningless word put in for the sake of rhythm. The kayaguki, now called kayakuguri (the plunger in miscanthus), is a small songbird frequenting mountains at low elevations, sometimes kept in a cage as a pet. The mitosagi is described in the Wamyosho as being a type of small heron, bluish-black in color.

Yamagishi, NKZ, p. 236, note 4, quotes another version of "Otori," which reads:

Upon the great bird's wings—
Yarenamu!
The frost has fallen—
Yarenamu!
Who says so?
The plover says so!
The kayaguki says so!
Not so! Not so!
The plover would not say so;
The kayaguki would not say so;
The blue heron, too,
Would not come from the capital to say so.

I have not resolved the question of the meaning of -mu in "iwajimu." A reading of iwashimu does not seem feasible, since the causative does not fit the context, either in its basic or its honorific function. Besides, "iwaji(mu)" clearly parallels "araji" and the last "iwaji." It will be noticed that in this version of "Otori" the hayashikotoba is "yarenamu" instead of "yarena." It may perhaps be assumed that in both cases the -mu is without meaning, simply a preference for a final -mu or -n sound. The songs of the Fuzokufu were familiar to the court society of the time through their use at entertainments and as part of the Kagura performances (for similar poems alluding to "Otori" see Utsubo monogatari [II], ed. Kono Tama, NKBT, XI [1961], 161).

What Izumi is saying in her poem, then, is this: The plover, for all his fame as a frost-reporter, may not tell you how white are my sleeves with frost, but let me assure you they are, for I have been up all night, unable to sleep because of my loneliness. I doubt that the wings of the great bird [the Prince], which the song says are covered with frost, are anything like as deeply encrusted with it. (I doubt you ever stay up thinking of me.)

Endo, Iwanami text, p. 430; Tamai, Shinchu, p. 167; and Ozaki, Kochu, p. 136, prefer a reading of "tsukeji" in place of "tsugeji." In this case the first part of the poem has to be understood to mean "The plover leaves no track on me." Ozaki takes this as a protestation of innocence on the part of the lady. The interpretation is plausible, but "tsugeji" seems a much more probable reading in the light of the reference to "Otori."

The poem appears also as Seishu 399 (375), in the following version:

Even the plover
Will not tell you of my plight,
Though on the great bird's wings
Such frost has not yet formed
As lies upon my sleeves.

²⁶¹ A closer version: "Upon a person who said she slept without seeing the moon it did not—the frost—form as on the great bird." "Okishi mo seji" contains a kakekotoba: okishi mo seji (it did not form)/okishimo seji (there was no frosting). "Shimo" can also be taken as the emphatic particle. "Oki-" and "shimo" are engo. I have again followed Suzuki's interpretation—"I am the one who has been up all night." The reference to not seeing the moon is an allusion to Izumi's poem "Fukenuran" (see note 245).

²⁶² Because of monoimi (see note 129).

²⁶³ "Kaze no mae naru." Perhaps a reference to a passage in the Kusharon (Abhidharma-ko a- astra): (One's life is like a lamp before the wind). Izumi uses the same phrase in two of her poems:

Zokushu 134 (976):

Wretched is my life
That will not flicker out,
Detest it as I may,
And enviable
The evening lamp before the wind.

Zokushu 637 (1479):

What thoughts would be mine,
Who now must struggle through
Each weary day,
If I were but a leaf
Before the wind?

²⁶⁴ A closer version: "Thinking perhaps it is the chilly shower which has fallen [grown old] in the world in the Godless Month, today's long rain [gazing] falls [passes the time], I imagine, without making distinction." The poem has three kakekotoba: furinitaru (fallen)/furinitaru (grown old); nagame (long rain)/ nagame (gaze); fururan (presumably falls)/fururan (presumably passes the time). Kaminazuki (the Godless Month), so called because all the gods of Japan were believed to assemble at the Grand Shrine of Izumo during that period, leaving the rest of the country "godless," was the name for the tenth month. Other explanations for the name are "Thunderless Month" (Kaminarinashizuki) and "Month of Fermentation" (Kaminashizuki). In this poem the Prince is accusing both Izumi and the rain of being indifferent to his desire to see the autumn foliage.

²⁶⁵ This poem appears as Seishu 400 (376), with the reading "shimogare wa" ([in the season of] frost-withering) in place of "shigure kamo."

²⁶⁶ "Araji" is a kakekotoba: araji (Probably do not exist)/arashi (storm). The poem appears as Seishu 231.

²⁶⁷ "Araji" may or may not be intended as a kakekotoba in this case; I have translated as if it were.

²⁶⁸ "But since suc h is no t the case, I see no point in a mountain trip" is implied. The poem appears as Seishu 401 (377), with the last two lines having the obscure reading "Ikaga yukite no/Kotogoto ni mimu."

²⁶⁹ "Sawaru koto" (a hindrance), perhaps monoimi, Buddhist purification (soji, see note 60), or the onset of the menstrual period. In this passage, covering the next three poems, I have followed Endo, Iwanami text, p. 431, notes 17-20, and pp. 456, 457, sup. note 109. The entire passage, punctuated as in Iwanami text, p. 431, runs:

Hitohi owashimashitarishi ni, "Sawaru koto arite kikoesasenu zo" to moshishi

o oboshiidete

[Izumi] Takasebune haya kogiide yo sawaru koto sashikaerinishi ashima waketari

to kikoetaru o, "Oboshiwasuretaru ni ya

[Prince] Yamabe ni mo kuruma ni norite yukubeki ni takase no fune wa ikaga yosubeki to areba

[Izumi] Momijiba no mi ni kuru made mo chirazaraba takase no fune no nanika kogaren tote.

²⁷⁰ "Oboshiidete." This verb poses a problem if the "remembering" is to be assigned to Izumi, as is done by Yamagishi, NKZ, p. 239, note 17. The verb obosu is usually reserved for the thoughts of the Prince, and Ozaki, Kochu, p. 143, and Endo, Iwanami text, p. 431, note 17, assign it to him here. Tamai, who assigns it to Izumi, conjectures, Shinchu, p. 171, that it is either a mistake in copying for "omoiidete," or an example of Izumi absently slipping in a little respect language while writing about herself in the third person. The fact that the following poem is by Izumi would seem toindicate that she is the subject of "oboshiidete," but the sense of the entire passage makes a doubling back in the sequence here seem preferable as an interpretation. The Prince "recalls" what Izumi had said, and her next poem as well, and then goes on with "Oboshiwasuretaru ni ya" (Have you forgotten it?), which I have freely rendered, "Now the Prince teased her with forgetting her own poem."

²⁷¹ A closer version: "Shallows boat, quickly come rowing out; the obstruction—the reeds because of which you poled back home—I have parted." In this poem Izumi uses "sawaru koto" in its concrete sense of "an obstruction."

Ozaki, Kochu, p. 143, quotes Wamyosho to the effect that a takasebune, lit., "shallows boat," was a small, deep boat. Later boats designated by this name were large and with a shallow draft more appropriate to navigating shallows. My translation, "river skiff," is no doubt only an approximation. "Skiff in one of its meanings is "a light rowboat." "Sashi" in "sashikaerinishi" refers to punting after getting stuck in the reeds, This poem appears as Seishu 402 (378).

²⁷² "Oboshiwasuretaru ni ya" (see note 270). I have followed Endo in considering this a question from the Prince to Izumi. The other commentators assume it to be a part of the narrative—"Perhaps he had forgotten it." Endo contends that this is unlikely because the Prince proceeds to make a reference to the takasebune in his own poem. Tamai, Shinchu, p. 171, gets around this difficulty by assuming that what the Prince has forgotten is not Izumi's poem, but the incident out of which it grew—when she told the Prince she could not see him—and that therefore he does not understand the poem's significance, thinking that it must have reference to his invitation to go foliage-viewing. This is a feasible interpretation, though it somewhat strains the order of the Japanese, "to kikoetaru o, oboshiwasuretaru ni ya," which comes immediately after Izumi's poem, and should refer to it (see note 269). It also depends on taking the poem as something written "now," and not as a past incident.

²⁷³ A closer version: "To the mountain country too, getting into a carriage, one should go; as for the boat of the shallows, how could it approach?" The significance of this poem is the subject of much dispute. It seems obviously a reference both to the Prince's invitation to go to see the foliage in the mountains, and to Izumi's "Takasebune" poem. Both Yamagishi, NKZ, p. 239, note 19, and Tamai, Shinchu, p. 171, take "kuruma" to be a kakekotoba: (carriage)/(the time of darkness). They assert that the Prince is replying to Izumi's request that he come "quickly" (haya)—he cannot come until it is dark. Ozaki, Kochu, pp. 143, 144, has a completely different interpretation: "We can get into our carriage and go foliage-viewing even in that difficult mountain country, but how can I row to a meeting (ause) with you in my shallows boat when you have ended such meetings, saying that a hindrance prevented you?" Endo's explanation runs approximately as follows: "You wrote to me some time ago, saying you were waiting for a visit from me. Therefore it would be only natural to assume that you would be glad to get into my carriage and go foliage-viewing with me (and so why this refusal?). But as for going by boat, we obviously could not reach our destination."

²⁷⁴ A closer version: "If the colored leaves did not scatter until one came (by carriage) to see, why would anyone [bum with longing] row the boat of the shallows?" "Kuru made" contains a kakekotoba: mi ni kuru made mo (until one comes to see)/kuruma de (by carriage). "Kogaren" is another kakekotoba: (would row)/ (would burn with longing). Endo, Iwanami text, p. 457, sup. note1O9, takes the poem's sense to be: "If the leaves did not fall until people came to see them, no one would be anxious to go. It is precisely because they do fall that people burn with longing to see them; after they have fallen there is no point in going (and so I am not going to go with you)." The "takase no fune" is brought in for word play, as a reference to the Prince's poem, and as a way of expressing metaphorical refusal of his invitation. Ozaki, Kochu, p. 144, gives the following explanation: "Your heart is as undependable as the leaves which fall before people can go to see them. If it were not so, why would I wait with burning longing the coming of your 'shallows boat'? It is because you are fickle that I am anxious." He also suggests that "se" in "takase" in this series of poems carries the additional meaning of "man" or "husband," se.

²⁷⁵ "Konata no futagareba" (since this direction was blocked up). See note 104.

²⁷⁶ The commentators seem unanimous in making a break at this point. To me the sense of the passage indicates continuity; for a discussion see Introduction, note 234.

²⁷⁷ "Shijugo nichi no imitagae." The directional superstitions discussed in note 104 necessitated a method by which their penalties could be avoided, A system of such methods was developed, referred to by various names, including katatagae (conversion of the direction) and imitagae (conversion of the interdiction [translations after Frank, "Kata-imi"]). The system is but imperfectly understood. One of its aspects however was a means by which one could proceed to a desired destination even if it lay in a "blocked" direction. In order to accomplish this one first went to a house in a different direction, stayed there at least until midnight, and then proceeded safely to one's original destination.

This procedure of making a detour constitutes the most common form of katatagae. It is not however the form applicable to the present passage. As remarked in note 104, Daishogun and Oso prohibited not only movement but a large number of other activities. In order to be free to carry on any of these activities in a "closed" direction, a system of "preventive katatagae" was evolved. The essence of this system was that one had to leave one's own dwelling and go to lodge in a different location several times a year. The annual point of departure for these changes of residence was the night of spring setsubun, the end of the solar year as calculated in the old Sino-Japanese calendar. (Actually, there were two calendars—a lunar and a solar [in addition to the cyclical system of the "ten stems and twelve branches"]. The lunar was divided into twelve months of either 29 or 30 days, plus an intercalary month added about once every three years. The solar was divided into 24 named periods of 15 days each. The first of these periods, risshun [Spring Begins], theoretically fell midway between the winter solstice and the vernal equinox. But since 15 x 24 = 360, over five days less than the actual number of days in the solar year, frequent adjustments had to be made in the length of some of the solar periods, and the date of risshun would vary slightly from year to year. In terms of the lunar calendar its variation of course was great; it fell within the lunar "old year" about once every three years. Setsubun was the day before risshun and the corresponding turning-points of the other seasons.) On the night of setsubun it was imperative to go and lodge elsewhere for the purpose of katatagae. Thereafter the necessity recurred at fixed intervals, depending on which deity was involved and on whether one were living in one's "principal place" (honjo) or elsewhere. If someone was occupying his honjo, his customary residence, and wished to undertake forbidden activities in a direction blocked by Daishogun, he was obliged to go elsewhere every night for a period of 45days. In the case of Oso the period was 15 days. If however one was occupying someone else's house, or a building not one's customary residence, one katatagae within a period of 45 or 15 days would suffice. Places other than the honjo were called tabisho (travel places). Because interdictions attached much more readily to the honjo than to the tabisho, the custom arose during the 12th century of having a honjo in name only, and actually living in the tabisho. If one neglected to make a katatagae within the 45-day period, one could transfer the interdiction thereby incurred to the honjo by simply going and lodging there for one night. At the time of Izumi Shikibu this convenient procedure had not yet been developed however. The setsubun of the other seasons were also, less importantly, points of departure for such series of preventive katatagae. These katatagae of course imposed themselves not on everyone, but only on those who had a need to circumvent specific interdictions. Interestingly, the place resorted to on such occasions was often the very place in which was planned some "violation of the earth."

Such essentially is the system as pieced together by Frank. It is apparently nowhere stated in historical records however that the "daily" katatagae imposed on those occupying their honjo actually extended for a period of 45 (or 15) days. Frank makes this assumption on the basis of correspondence to the rule of "once every 45 days" for occupants of a tabisho. References, such as the present one in the Izumi Shikibu nikki, to a "forty-five-day imitagae [or katatagae]" can then be explained in precisely this way: it would certainly be simpler to move in with a friend for the period than to commute back and forth for 45 days, leaving one's house every night.

One may perhaps assume then that Prince Atsumichi is circumventing a prohibition by Daishogun against some activity such as erecting a building. As far as can be seen there would be no connection between this imitagae and the katafutagari mentioned in the previous sentence. The way to Izumi's residence could be blocked by any one of a number of deities, and either in relation to the Prince's own house or to the site of his katatagae. Hence there is here no evidence either pro or con as to whether the passage should be split in two (see Introduction, note 234). As has been pointed out (Introduction, p. 81), Yoshida assigns the beginning of the Prince's imitagae to Choho 5 (1003). 10.2. This date corresponds to 30 October 1003, in the Julian calendar, and according to Frank, "Kata-imi," p. 225, winter setsubun falls on either 29 or 30 October (varying according to the year, again in terms of the Julian calendar). And the setsubun were the points of departure for such imitagae. Yoshida, Kenkyu, pp. 378-383, apparently not taking into account Frank's researches, theorizes that it is the direction of Oso which the Prince is avoiding.

²⁷⁸ See note 48. A cousin of Prince Atsumichi holding this rank in 1003 was Fujiwara no Kanetaka (985-1053), son of Atsumichi's uncle Michikane, the elder brother of Yukiko.

²⁷⁹ "Kuruma yadori." This was a building outside the "central gate" (chumon) of the shinden-zukuri type of mansion, used for housing the ox-drawn carriages and other conveyances of both the owner and his guests (Yusoku kojitsujiten, p. 266). Tsunoda Bun'ei, Jokyoden no nyogo (1963), p. 93, points out that kuruma yadori attached to. the homes of Buddhist priests were not mere garages, but lavish guest-houses where one could live in as much comfort as in the main house. Frank, "Kataimi," pp. 115, 116, mentions a method of katatagae performed by staying all night in a carriage parked at the gate of a building. It is unlikely that such a katatagae is intended here, for it is Izumi who never descends from the carriage; and besides, a 45-day rather than a one-nightkatatagae is being performed.

²⁸⁰ "Anagachi nari" ([The Prince's regrets] were forced). The commentators interpret "anagachi" as meaning "quite convenient for him," and I have followed this gloss. "Anagachi nari" can also be regarded as a direct comment by the author.

²⁸¹ A closer version: "Accustomed to wakeful dreams on nights when I would sleep [side by side], in the village of Fushimi [lying down and seeing (a dream)] this morning I arose." "Naraite" is a kakekotoba: naraite (accustomed)/narabite (aligned). "Fushimi" is another kakekotoba: Fushimi no sato (village of Fushimi [south of the Capital])/fiushimi (lying down and seeing [i.e., having a dream]). "Mi" and "yume" are engo. Yoshida, Kenkyu, pp. 382, 383, concludes from this poem that the residence of the Prince's cousin is in Fushimi, south of the Capital, and that the Prince has gone there to avoid the direction of Oso (the north in winter).

²⁸² A closer version: "Since from that night matters concerning my own self have been unknowable, I have gone and slept perversely in unheard-of [lit., 'non-existent'] places away from home." "That night" is indefinite. Ozaki, Kochu, p. 148, assumes it to be the night of their first meeting, and interprets "aranu tabine" in the plural. "Tabine" (sleeping on a journey) he further gives a psychological significance, extending over the lovers' nocturnal trysts at Izumi's home as well as in other places. This poem appears as Seishu 403 (379), in the following version:

From that first night,
Although I have not wept
Cold, rainy tears upon my bed,
Yet I have recklessly
Slept in strange places and strange ways.

²⁸³ "Kabakari nengoro ni katajikenaki onkokorozashi o, mizu shirazu, kokorokowaki sama ni motenasubeki." Evidently an interrogative "ni ya" is to be understood after "motenasubeki" (should treat).

²⁸⁴ "Kotogoto wa, sa shimo arazu." I have followed the interpretation of Ozaki, Kochu, p. 148. Endo, Iwanami text, p. 432, note 14, and Yamagishi, NKZ, p. 241, note 1, understand the sentence to mean "I shan't act coldly toward him in one way and another." The key point seems to be whether "kotogoto" is to be taken as, "strange things," or, "various things." I have reversed the order of this and the previous sentence.

²⁸⁵Sukuse, predetermination by actions in a former life.

²⁸⁶ An allusion to Kokinshu 952 (Anonymous):

In what sort of cavern
Deep within the crags
Should I have to live
In order not to hear
The painful tidings of this world?

Such a life would be that of a mountain ascetic, and Izumi is saying metaphorically that she wishes to abandon the world for the consolations of religion.

²⁸⁷ "Mata uki koto mo araba ikaga sen." Ozaki, Kochu, p. 150, interprets this sentence as having to do with possible unpleasantness at the Prince's mansion.

²⁸⁸ "Nao kakute ya suginamashi. Chikakute oya harakara no on'arisama mo mikikoe." I have followed Ozaki, Kochu, pp. 150, 151, here. Endo, Iwanami text, p. 433, notes 22, 23, and p. 457, sup. notes 112-114, takes "kakute" (thus) to refer to Izumi's resolution to go to live with the Prince. In that case "chikakute" would also refer to proximity to the Prince.

²⁸⁹ "Mata mukashi no yo ni mo miyuru hito no ue o misadamen to omoitachinitareba" (As she decided she should see to the future of the person who reminded her of the past…). Presumably Koshikibu, whom she bore to her first husband, Tachibana no Michisada, is the person referred to.

²⁹⁰ "Ainashi" (disagreeable). My interpretation follows Ozaki, Kochu, p. 150. Endo, Iwanami text, p. 433, note 25, and p. 457, sup. note 114, contends that the word is a critical comment by Izumi Shikibu as author on her own way of thinking—a disapproval of her caution in avoiding scandal because of her desire to care for her family.

²⁹¹ "Isa shirazu." My interpretation follows Ozaki, Kochu, p. 152. Yamagishi, NKZ, p. 242, note 8, glosses: "From now on I shall say I do not know any such woman," and suggests the possibility of an allusion to a poem by Otsubune, daughter of Ariwara no Munahari (d. 898), Gosenshu 635:

I do not know what others feel,
But as for me, an undeserved bad name
Is something that I should regret,
And so I shall reply
I never knew you either then or now.

The poem, which appears also as Kokinshu 630, attributed to Otsubune's brother Motokata(888-953), was written in reply to a man who threatened to defame her by saying she was his ex-wife.

²⁹² In the original, this and the first part of the next sentence read: "Kore wa mameyaka ni notamawasetareba, omoitatsu koto sae honokikitsuru hito mo abekameritsuru o, oko naru me o mo mirubekameru kana to" (Since he had said this earnestly, it seemed there must be someone who had gotten some glimmering of her decision. Hence she must face such a stupid situation). This passage can be interpreted in either of two ways: (1) Evil-minded people have gotten wind of Izumi's plans and have deliberately spread rumors to make the Prince break off with her. (2) Her friends have heard of her decision, and now she will lose face if it turns out that, because of the new rumors, she does not go to the Prince's mansion after all. The two possibilities are discussed by Ozaki, Kochu, p. 155. He favors the latter, I the former.

²⁹³ "Aritsuru koto" (things which had been). Perhaps the Prince's accusations?

²⁹⁴ "Omowamashikaba," an allusion to a poem by Ise in the Kokinrokujo, kan 4 (Kochu kokka taikei, IX, 405):

Though strangers' tattle
Should grow thick
As seaweed that the ama cut,
If you but care for me,
I'll let the world say what it will.

²⁹⁵ I have followed Ozaki, Kochu, p. 153, and Endo, Iwanami text, p. 434, in eliminating the word "kaeri" (reply) found in the Sanjonishibon and Kangembon texts before "keshiki," in favor of the reading found in the Oeibon.

²⁹⁶ A closer version: "Would that you would come within this moment; how can I go to you, saying, 'I love you,' even though I have a reputation?" Note that the preceding sentence is grammatically joined to the poem. This poem appears as Seishu 404 (380).

²⁹⁷ A closer version: "In this way you have been thinking about rumors arising; I see that such concerns depend on the man." Ozaki, Kochu, p. 153, suggests that "hito kara" be read "hitogara" (your nature)—"It is your [negative] nature to worry about such things."

²⁹⁸ A closer version: "Although I think, 'I shall not doubt; even less shall I resent,' my heart does not fit in with my heart." The poem loses its point unless both "hearts" are taken to belong to the Prince.

²⁹⁹ A closer version: "Let not the heart die out you say resents me; I also doubt—even you, upon whom I am utterly dependent." Doubting is a sign of emotional involvement. Ozaki, Kochu, pp. 156,157, remarks of this and the previous poem that their use of paradox accurately expresses the psychology of a young man and woman caught in the toils of love. Endo, Iwanami text, p. 434, note 11, takes "tanomu kimi" to mean "you who trust what people say." This poem appears as Seishu 405 (381), in the following version:

Let not that heart die out
You say resents me—
I also doubt,
Sick with disappointment at our bonds
Of love, wherein I trusted without bound.

³⁰⁰ A closer version: "Frost-withering [separation] is desolate; in the blowing of the autumn wind reeds rustled [you visited me]." "-Gare" is a kakekotoba: shimogare (frost-withering)/kare (separation). "Otozure" is another kakekotoba: (sound-chafing)/(visit). Izumi complains that now that winter has come the Prince no longer visits her as he did in autumn. The poem appears as Seishu 406 (382).

³⁰¹ "Kare-" is the same kakekotoba as in the previous poem. "Arashi" is another: araji (probably are not)/arashi (storm).

³⁰² Or sent the usual carriage for her: "Rei no kuruma areba" (as there was the usual carriage).

³⁰³ "Shinobitaru tokoro ni owashimasu tote." This could also be rendered: "was going to a secluded place." Presumably this is to be understood as the cousin's house previously mentioned (see note 278). Evidently this time the lovers have a better rendezvous than the carriage shed.

³⁰⁴ A closer version: "When today I idly counted up, I realized that, of all the years and months, yesterday was the only time when I had not thought of mournful things." The poem appears as Seishu 407 (383).

³⁰⁵ A more nearly literal version: "Although I do think that there is you who comfort me, still the dusk of evening is somehow sad." This poem appears as Seishu 408 (384).

³⁰⁶ A more nearly literal version: "As for the evening dusk, everyone feels that way only; but you, who speak first, are superior to others." I.e., she is more sensitive than they.

³⁰⁷ A more nearly literal version: "It is a frosty morning after one has stayed up all might that truly has nothing in the world to surpass it." With its use of the verb masaru (surpass), this poem is a reply to that of the Prince. The last two lines might be interpreted, "There is nothing so touching in the world." "Oki-" is the usual pun on "rise" and "settle." The poem appears as Seishu 409 (385).

³⁰⁸ This poem appears as Seishu 410 (386).

³⁰⁹ Or a nervous ailment accompanied by headache, bodily pains, chilfs, etc.? Kaze in the Heian Period apparently sometimes referred to a disease involving such symptoms, and in grave cases even partial paralysis. For a discussion see Zenko, pp. 301, 302.

³¹⁰ Enchi Fumiko in her translation into modern Japanese in Ocho nikki shu (1960), p. 179, interprets "taeshi koro" as having reference to the death of the late Prince Tametaka, which event made Izumi too wish to die. The poem appears as Seishu 4.11 (387).

³¹¹ "Imijiki koto kana. Kaesugaesu mo" (What an extraordinary thing! Emphatically so!).

³¹² "Tama nb o" (thread of life), "taen" (break), and "musubi" (bind) are engo.

³¹³ I have followed Endo, Iwanami text, p. 437, note 17, and p. 458, sup. note 124, in this translation. The original, punctuated as in Iwanami text, p. 437, runs: "Kaku iu hodo ni, toshi mo nokori nakereba, harutsukata to omou. Shimotsuki tsuitachi goro" (While they were saying such things, since there was nothing left of the year, she thought, "Spring or thereabouts." Around the first of the eleventh month …). Ozaki, Kochu, pp. 167, 168, places no punctuation after "omou," and argues that "harutsukata" (toward spring), which seems inconsistent with the month specified unless one accepts a solution similar to Endo's, is a mistake in copying for "hatetsukata" (toward the end [of the year]).

³¹⁴ A closer version: "Although it is snow which has fallen [grown completely old] from the Age of Gods, today in particular it is rare!" "Furi-" is a kakekotoba: (fall)/(grow old). In the latter meaning it is an engo with "kamiyo" (Age of the Gods). I have chosen the reading "naredo" (although it is), found in all other texts, in preference to the "nareba" (since it is) of the Sanjonishibon.

³¹⁵ A closer version: "As each winter I look and say, 'The first snow!', I get older and older with no feeling of rarity." "Furi-" is the same kakekotoba noted in the previous poem. Only in the sense of "aging" is it functional; in the sense of "falling" it merely serves as an engo for "hatsuyuki" (first snow). This poem appears as Seishu 412 (388).

³¹⁶ "Hitobito fumi tsukurumereba" (since it seems people are making writings). The commentators interpret "fumi tsukuru" as I have indicated in the translation.

³¹⁷ A closer version: "Since, having no leisure, you will not come, I shall go; I would like to learn the way in which I might make writings [steps to you]." "Fumi" is a kakekotoba: (writings)/(treading). "Michi" is also used in both its literal sense of "road" and its metaphorical one of "way [of doing something]." This poem appears as Seishu 413 (389).

³¹⁵ A closer version: "Come to my dwelling to visit me; I will teach you the way of making writings [steps], that we should see a meeting." "Fumi" and "michi" involve the same word play explained above.

³¹⁹ A closer version: "The many-times-preening snipe of cold-clear nights—are they I? How many mornings has the frost formed [have I stayed up and looked at it]?" "Okite" is a kakekotoba,.… This poem contains an allusion to Kokinshu 761 (Anonymous):

At dawn I hear the snipe
Preening their feathers—
Preening a hundred times;
I toss and turn more restlessly than they
On nights you do not come.

Kubota Utsubo, Kokinwakashu hyoshaku, II, 483, quotes Kokinshu seigi (1832), a commentary by Kagawa Kageki (1768-1843), to the effect that snipe really do not preen their feathers, but only stick their bills into the mud and make a gishi-gishi sound. The author of the poem, according to this theory, mistook the sound for preening (hanegaki). The last line is subject to various interpretations. The author, presumably a woman, tosses and turns while she lies waiting for her lover. Either her restless movements or the sounds she makes are likened to those of the snipe. Kageki however takes "ware zo kazu kaku" to mean "I count the nights you do not come." The poem appears as Seishu 414 (390).

³²⁰ A closer version: "During this period, when it seems rain falls and snow falls also, just like the settling of the morning frost [thinking only how shallow is your affection], I stay up all night and look." "Asashimo" is a kakekotoba: asashimo (morning frost)/asashi mo (shallow). "Oki-" is the usual pun.… Izumi is again complaining of the Prince's neglect. This poem appears as Seishu 415 (391), in the following form:

Through the falling snow,
The falling rain, this winter
I lie wakeful through the night
Because of your hard heart,
And watch the light of frosty morning break.

³²¹ I have supplied this word.

³²² "Aware ni, nanigoto mo kikoshimeshiutomanu on'arisama nareba, kokoro no hodo mo goranzeraren tote koso omoi mo tate." I have followed Endo, Iwanami text, p. 439, note 12, in my interpretation of "omoi mo tate" (She made up her mind). The other commentators are in agreement. Tainai, Shinchu, p. 189, asserts that "aware ni" modifies "kikoshimeshiutomanu" (listened in amanner not distant), and has the meaning of "jitsu ni" (really). I have preferred to follow Endo in assigning it to "on'arisama nareba" (gave the appearance), with its usual meaning of "full of emotional awareness," although strictly speaking it should take the form "aware naru" in order to modify "on'arisama." On the other hand, I have followed Tamai, and Ozaki, Kochu, p. 172, in treating "kikoshimeshi" as an honorific prefix, rather than having it mean "hearing," as Endo does.

³²³ An expansion of "kakute wa" (being thus). I have followed Tamai, Shinchu, p. 189.

³²⁴ "Hoi no mama ni mo narinu bakari kashi." The commentators agree on this interpretation of Izumi's hoi (original purpose).

³²⁵ A closer version: "In transient might-be's all the night long—" These lines and Izumi's reply are combined into one poem, no. 416 (392), in the Seishu.

³²⁶ "Mikeshiki no, rei yori mo ukabitaru kotodomo o notamawasete." I have followed Ozaki, Kochu, p. 174, Yamagishi, NKZ, p. 251, note 9, and Endo, Iwanami text, p. 439, note 16, in interpreting "ukabitaru" as "uncertain" or "undependable." Tamai, Shinchu, p. 281, takes it to mean "in good spirits."

³²⁷ A closer version: "When I think of it as reality there is no way to speak of it; I would like to turn the matter of tonight into a dream." "Koyoi" (tonight) is used in the sense of "this night [just past]." This poem appears as Seishu 411 (393).

³²⁸ "Ikaga wa" (How?). I have followed Yamagishi, NKZ, p. 252, note 3, in this interpretation. Ozaki, Kochu, p. 175, suggests the passage should be taken to mean "I wonder what you think of this." …

Finding List

BMFJ: Bulletin de la Maison Franco-Japonaise.

Chuko kasenden: Chuko kasen sanjurokuninden, in Shinko gunsho ruiju.

Dai Nihon kokiroku: Dai Nihon kokiroku, ed. Tokyo Daigaku Shiryo Hensanjo (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1953-1966).

GR: Shinko gunsho ruiju, ed. Kawamata Keiichi (Tokyo: Naigai Shoseki Kabushiki Kaisha, 1938-1939).

Iwanami text: Izumi Shikibu nikki, ed. Endo Yoshimoto, in Nihon koten bungaku taikei, XX (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1957, 1962), 379-459.

Kochu: Ozaki Tomomitsu, Izumi Shikibu nikki kochu (Tokyo: Toho Shobo, 1957).

Kochu kokka taikei Kochu: kokka taikei, ed. Nakatsuka Eijiro (Tokyo: Kokumin Tosho KabushikiKaisha, 1927-1931).

KT: Shintei zoho kokushi taikei, ed. Kuroita Katsumi (Yoshikawa Kobunkan, 1929-).

MYS: Man'yoshu.

NKBT: Nihon koten bungaku taikei (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten).

NKZ. Izumi Shikibu nikki, ed. Yamagishi Tokuhei, in Nihon koten zensho [no vol. number] (Tokyo, Osaka: Asahi Shimbunsha, 1959), 111-263.

Nihon koten zenshu: Nihon koten zenshu, ed. Yosano Hiroshi, Masamune Atsuo, and Yosano Akiko (Tokyo: Nihon Koten Zenshu Kankokai, 1925-1931).

Ocho nikkii: Izumi Shikibu nikki, ed. Shimizu Fumio, in Nihon koten kansho koza, VI [Ocho nikki] (Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1959).

Ohashi, Kenkyu: Ohashi Kiyohide, Izumi Shikibu nikki no kenkyu (Tokyo: Hatsune Shobo, 1961).

Shinchu: Tamai Kosuke, Izumi Shikibu nikki shinchu (Tokyo: Sekaisha, 1950).

Shinko: Endo Yoshimoto, Shinko Izumi Shikibu monogatari (Tokyo: Hanawa Shobo, 1962).

Shiryo taisei: Shiryo taisei, ed. Kawamata Keiichi (Tokyo: Naigai Shoseki Kabushiki Kaisha, 1934-1938).

TASJ: Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan.

Yoshida, Kenkyu: Yoshida Koichi, Izumi Shikibu kenkyu, I (Tokyo: Koten Bunko, 1964).

Yoshida, Zenshu: Yoshida Koichi, Izumi Shikibu zenshu: hombunhen (Tokyo: Koten Bunko, 1959).

Zenko: Suzuki Kazuo and Enchi Fumiko, Zenko Izumi Shikibu nikki (Tokyo: Shibundo, 1965).

Zoho shiryo taisei: Zoho shiryo taisei, ed. Zoho Shiryo Taisei Kankokai (Kyoto: Rinsen Shoten, 1965).