How to Read a Japanese Poem by Carter Steven D.;

Author:Carter, Steven D.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)

For a while

shibaraku wa

I forget even my sins.

tsumi mo wasurete

So cool, the moon!

tsuki suzushi

CONTEXT: Tagami Kikusha (1753–1826) was the daughter of a physician in Nagato. She married at age sixteen, but when her husband died just eight years later, she became a nun and poet. Because of the premature death of her husband when she was still in her midtwenties she ended up living as a poet and devotee of the True Pure Land sect of Buddhism who also practiced the art of the tea ceremony. This poem was written early in the Sixth Month of 1780, near Zenkōji Temple (Nagano Prefecture), out of gratitude to a farm couple who had given her shelter.

COMMENT: At the time she wrote her poem, Kikusha was following in the footsteps of Matsuo Bashō in his Oku no hosomichi, taking notes for her own travel record, Oi no chiri (Knapsack dust, 1782). Yet the content of her poem suggests that her motives were as much devotional as artistic, and the many anecdotes she records about mercies extended to her on the road portray her journey as a pilgrimage. As a True Pure Land nun she believed in the bodhisattva Amida, whose name she recited in the nenbutsu (“Savior Amida—All Hail!”) as a plea for grace, and we are not surprised that her poem offers a moment of respite provided by a beautiful moon that she says can make us forget—although only briefly, of course—both the summer heat and a world of sin. The moon shining in the darkness of night was frequently employed as a metaphor for Buddhist enlightenment. Here it also stands for the kind ministrations of strangers.

Her travel diary Taorigiku (Hand-picked chrysanthemums, 1812, p. 161) records another poem she wrote around the same time that ends with the same line.

At Crone’s Crag

ubaishi o

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