The Tales of Ise (Ise monogatari)

Section 23 ‘Izutsu’ The Well-Curb

Long ago there lived a boy and a girl, the children of parents living temporarily in the countryside, who played together by the side of a well. As they grew into adults, both the boy and girl began to grow shy about the opposite sex, yet the boy yearned to make the girl his wife if at all possible. The girl felt likewise, yet her parents would not hear of such a match. The following poem came from the boy’s house next door, to her house:

Dear well-curb,

That well-curb where

I once carved my height,

Is too low now to measure how I have grown

In the time since I have not seen you.

Tsutsu itsu no

Izutsu ni kakeshi

Marogatake

Sugi ni kerashi na

Imo mizaru ma ni

This was her reply:

My bobbed hair that once

We measured by the well-curb

Has now grown over my shoulders.

Who will it be, if not you,

That will tie it up into a woman’s knot?

Kurabekoshi

Furiwakegami no

Kata suginu

Kimi narazu shite

Tare ka agu beki

These were the poems they exchanged until finally they were able to attain their wish to be united.

And so the years passed until the women’s parents died, leaving her without an income. So unstable did their livelihood become that they seemed on the verge of drifting apart. He began visiting a woman in the Takayasu district of Kawachi Province. Nevertheless, she showed no signs of resentment. She bade him farewell each time he left, until the man began to believe that she might be seeing another man. Once he hid himself in the garden bushes to spy on her, yet she seemed her normal self, as though she had bid him sad farewell. As beautifully made up and dressed as though he were there, she recited this poem to herself:

The winds blow, and

Waves of not knowing flow over

Me here on Mt. Tatsuta.

Perhaps by midnight

I imagine you going alone to the other side.

Kaze fukeba

Oki tsu shiranami

Tatsutayama

Yowa ni ya kimi ga

Hitori koyuran

But the man heard her voice from the garden, and was moved as never before. He gave up going to Kawachi.

On a rare visit much later to Takayasu, the man was amazed to find that the woman who had so charmed him in the beginning had now let herself go, even to the point of helping herself to scoops of rice with her own paddle, heaping them into her bowl. The man was so disappointed in the sight that he gave up ever seeing her again. Even so, the woman recited this poem, gazing in the direction of Yamato from where he had come:

I will go on looking

For you out there on

Mt. Ikoma (mountain of the wild pony).

The rain may fall, but

I ask you, clouds, never to hide him from me.

Kimi ga atari

Mitsutsu wo oran

Ikomayama

Kumo na kakushi so

Ame wa furu tomo

And so she kept her lookout, until eventually she heard him announced, the man from Yamato. So happy was she to wait for him in this way, and so many days had gone by that she recited this poem:

You said you would come to me, and

Each night as I wait,

Another night goes by until

I knew I should not trust in you, and yet

I go on being in love with you.

Kimi kon to

Iishi yogoto ni

Suginureba

Tanomanu mono no

Koitsutsu zo furu

Her feelings were genuine, but the man never came back.

Tr. Kenneth L. Richard

14 April, 2003 (revised 2004)