Kokinshu #312

[lnhammer]

Written in Ôi on the last day of the Ninth Month.

    Is it in the voice
of the stag crying upon
    Ogura Mountain
like a crescent-moon evening
that autumn closes its day?

—19 September 2012

(Original by Ki no Tsurayuki.) Ôi is in the western outskirts of Kyoto, across the Ôi River from Mt. Ogura. The Ninth Month, here called nagagatsu, "Long Month," was the last month of autumn, falling from roughly early-October to early-November. Yûzukuyo, literally "night of evening moon" but understood as an evening with a crescent moon (because evening is the only time a waxing crescent is visible after sunset), is a stock-epithet for Mt. Ogura because its name sounds like it means "small darkness" -- that is, "dusk"; that idomatically autumn "darkens" to its end adds to this wordplay. However, at the end of a lunar month, the moon is a sliver of waning crescent not visible in the evening, making the epithet an implied comparison for the mountain rather than literal scene-setting. Pity. Sika deer have been poetically associated with Mt. Ogura since at least the time of the Man'yoshu. Compare to #214ff, where the belling stag is instead a symbol of mid-autumn.

yûzukuyo
ogura no yama ni
naku shika no
koe no uchi ni ya
aki wa kururamu

---L.