Kokinshu #284

(Topic unknown.)

    Colored autumn leaves
drift on Tatsuta River.
    On Mt. Mimuro
consecrated to the gods
winter rains must be falling.

Otherwise:

    Colored autumn leaves
drift on Asuka River.

—22 July 2012

(Original author unknown.) A very popular poem, collected in multiple anthologies. There is a Mimuro in Kannabi district close to the Tatsuta upstream of Nara, but it's ambiguous whether to understand mimuro and kannabi as those places or generically as "where the gods reside" and "consecrated to the gods." Reading both as generic gives a highly sacred unspecified mountain, while both as specific loses all sacred connotations. The Asuka variant (another river near Nara) seems to derive from a similar poem in the Man'yoshu. In the generation after the Kokinshu an attribution to Kakinomoto no Hitomaro surfaced, possibly because of the Man'yoshu connection, and in Tales of Yamato, this and #283 are given as an exchange, in the reverse order, between Hitomaro and Emperor Heizei -- even though the two lived a century apart. In response, some Kokinshu textual traditions, though not my base text, specifically deny this attribution. Compare the leaves on the river to spring versions such as #118.


tatsutagawa
momijiba nagaru
kannabi no
mimuro no yama ni
shigure fururashi

mata wa,

asukagawa
momijiba nagaru

---L.