Kokinshu #196

[lnhammer]

On a night he was visiting someone, he heard a cricket's chirping and wrote this.

    O cricket, no,
do not cry so terribly:
    though your sorrows are
as long as an autumn night,
my own indeed surpass them.

—11 January 2012

Original by Fuijwara no Tadafusa. Tadafusa's birth date is unknown but he first appears in court records in 893 and died in 928; he has 4 poems in the Kokinshu. ¶ Kirigirisu is another key 5-syllable noun without a case-marker, but a direct command makes it clear that here it's being addressed -- leaving instead the question of what, exactly, it is. Although today it is the name of a kind of katydid, at the time it meant a cricket, probably either a bell-cricket or pine-cricket, or sometimes generically any autumn-chirping insect. Pivot-word: nagaki is "long" for the night but also nagaki omoi, "long thought," is idiomatically "sorrow" -- the effect is an implicit comparison. Note also the return of the naku = "call" / "weep" pun. Whether the occasion was a visit to a friend or a (would-be?) lover is debated. This starts a series of insect poems, many with some sort of speaker identification; the night setting of this one matches the moon poems, by way of transitioning back to earlier in the season.

(New entry in this project's bibliography: Lafcadio Hearn's essay "Insect-Musicians" in Exotics and Retrospectives. The focus is on crickets sold as pets in Tokyo in the 1890s, but it includes a valuable rundown of the varieties and their cultural associations.)

kirigirisu
itaku na naki so
aki no yo no
nagaki omoi wa
ware zo masareru

---L.