Of Old Japan
It was past the nineteenth of the Ever-growing month of the next year [1026], but there were no tidings from her, so I wrote:
No word about the blooming cherry-blossoms,
Has not the Spring come for you yet?
Or does the perfume of flowers not reach you?
I made a journey, and passed many a moonlit night in a house beside a bamboo wood. Wind rustled its leaves and my sleep was disturbed.
Night after night the bamboo leaves sigh,
My dreams are broken and a vague, indefinite sadness fills my heart.
In Autumn [1026] I went to live elsewhere and sent a poem:
I am like dew on the grass—
And pitiable wherever I may be—
But especially am I oppressed with sadness
In a field with a thin growth of reeds.
After that time I was somehow restless and forgot about the romances. My mind became more sober and I passed many years without doing any remarkable thing. I neglected religious services and temple observances. Those fantastic ideas [of the romances] can they be realized in this world? If father could win some good position I also might enter into a much nobler life. Such unreliable hopes then occupied my daily thoughts.
At last[1] father was appointed Governor of a Province very far in the East.
- ↑ In an old chronicle of the times one reads that it was on February 8, 1032.
