古今集 406 - Abe no Nakamaro
The story behind this poem is an interesting and touching one. Abe no Nakamaro, who became a renowned scholar and poet, was sent in China during the Tang Dynasty (618-907) for studying, along with two others Japanese : the scholar Kibi no Makibi and the monk Genbô. He had great success and managed to make himself a place in the political world ; also became friend with poets like Li Bai. Several years after his arrival, he decided to return into his home with a Japanese embassy that was leaving too.
Before his departure, a group of his Chinese friends decided to make a farewell party on the beach at Mingzhou (an ancient name for Ningbo, in the province of Zhejiang). When the night arrived, the moon was so beautiful that it inspired him to compose this waka :
天の原振り放け見れば春日なる三笠の山にいでし月かも
あまのはら
ふりさけみれば
かすがなる
みかさのやまに
いでしつきかも
When I turn my eyes
up in the night sky, I see her ;
the moon - she’s the same
as the one I saw in Kasuga,
over the Mikasa mountain.
The ship, sadly, never made it to Japan. But Nakamaro still survived the shipwreck. He lived in China for a few years, tried again to come back ; a second shipwreck pulled him off to the coasts of Annan (in today’s Vietnam) where he managed, again, to survive, and to come back in Chang’an where, unfortunately, a war was about to explode : the An Lushan Rebellion. That’s when he went back to Annan to work here in a political position.
He died a few years later, in Chang’an as he was planning to seize a new opportunity for returning in Japan.
Knowing the backstory makes this poem so much more touching. The main theme is homesickness, but if you know the personal story of the author it also becomes a waka about the “last times” of life. The last time we saw that one person, we listened to that one music, tasted that one meal, appreciated that one moment that will perhaps be repeated in the future (and even then, it will not be exactly the same ; 一期一会), but maybe not too.
Nakamaro still managed to have a good life in China, but I guess it doesn’t really matter how interesting it was : no place is like home.
That feeling of homesickness can be so painful, it’s sad to think about how he must have felt during all these troubled times, so far away from home. He never had the chance to experiment this emotion when we come back from a trip to find again, with fresh eyes, the comfort of our usual environment. Especially when we consider how long his travel was, he was away for years. The vast majority of his life in fact was spent in China. When he left Japan he was certainly clueless about the fact that his fate was already sealed, that he would never see again his homeland.
Moonrise over the Sea - Caspar David Friedrich, 1822.
Notes
I’ve found few sources about the life of Nakamaro ; I had to rely on art websites who gave some background about a painting of him by Hokusai, on Wikipedia pages unfortunately (but the references were indicated at the end of the article and seemed reliable) but also this video that was quite interesting. And the book of Helen Craig McCullough provided some great information about the backstory ; this book of course is a very reliable source, and the informations I’ve found in all my sources were the same everywhere. This poem is the first waka of the book 9 (Travel), it’s apparently the “earliest identifiable Kokinshû poem”. It’s also included in the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu, where it is in the seventh position.
天の原 (あまのはら) : a very wide sky. I took some freedom in my translation with the word “night” ; I also didn’t include the nuance of the size, that feeling of scale that the japanese word is expressing. Also useful to remember the meanings of the kanji 原 : plain, field, prairie, meadow…
振り放け見れば (ふりさけみれば) < furisakemiru : to look up and far. mireba is the izenkei of miru + ba ; when ba follows the izenkei, it means “when…”.
春日なる (かすがなる) : Kasuga is the name of a place ; naru is the rentaikei of the copular auxiliary verb nari who indicates here the location, the place.
三笠の山に (みかさのやまに) : mikasa no yama (Mount Mikasa) + case particle indicating the location.
いでし = いで + し : いで comes from the verb いづ (to come out, to go out) ; し is the rentaikei of the auxiliary verb ki for personal past.
かも : a final exclamatory particle, following here a nominal (the moon) ; it’s the equivalent, in the Nara period [710-784] (in which Abe no Nakamaro lived almost all his life), of kana. In his Grammar, Haruo Shirane also writes that the ka is still useful in modern japanese for its exclamatory purpose. In my translation I admit that I didn’t wrote that nuance of exclamation, but I didn’t want to put an exclamation mark, I thought it was sufficient like this.
I will have a lot of work in the next months so I don’t know when I will make a post again, perhaps one in summer but it’s very much unlikely, probably in autumn… I’m not certain but one thing for sure is that there are still a lot of poems I want to share in this thread 
).
Mukai Chine (向井千子) (disciple of Matsuo Bashô, sister of Mukai Kyorai). She died at a young age ; this haiku was her death poem.
Mukai Chine’s haiku
Mukai Kyorai’s haiku
I forgot the cost but it was ouch! You even have to pay someone to put it on you! She thought a medium sized city might have something like only 12 people who have that skill!
That emoji 
If they’re going to teach me what I need to know to start engaging with Japanese poetry then so be it, I just want to make sure before I buy them!
