Hyakunin Isshu #2

[lnhammer]

    Spring is over
and summer, it seems, has come --
    it's said they air out
pure-white robes of mulberry
on heavenly Mount Kagu.

—2 July 2010

Original by Empress Jitô, daughter of Tenji (#1), wife of Emperor Tenmu, and Tenmu's successor as empress in her own right. Her personal name before her accession was Unonosarara (unless it was pronounced Unonosasara). Textual issue: In the Man'yoshu version of this poem, the verb hosu is inflected to directly report that summer robes are airing; here, however, it is marked as hearsay (chô = modern to iu, "they say that") -- which is odd as Kagu is easily visible less than a mile from Jitô's palace in Asuka. The coming of summer is also inflected as a more tentative conclusion than in the Man'yoshu. Shirotae no is a conventional epithet for white objects, meaning roughly "as white as cloth woven from fiber from mulberry tree bark"; given the period, this may be literal. The white robes are, oddly, often taken to be a metaphor for spring mists which clear up during summer. Mount Kagu is "heavenly" because it is where Amaterasu, the sun goddess, hid her light in a cave.


haru sugite
natsu kinikerashi
shirotae no
koromo hosu chô
ama no kaguyama

---L.

Comments

[jonquil]

Is it possibly hearsay because it's a legend rather than fact? (Like "old mother whatsit shaking out her pillows" for snow)

[lnhammer]

As I understand it, airing out the summer clothing, as you prepare to switch from summer to winter sets,* is a long-standing practice. I don't know if it was specifically done in the late 7th century, but there are mentions of aspects of in slightly later poetry and literature, including around the time when the text shifted. (Which shift is more complicated than I reported: a century later, there were multiple variations on that line as people tried to figure out how the Man'yoshu-era method of writing with Chinese characters worked -- they'd switched to a different system that's the ancestor of the modern kanji+kana method. The version in the One Hundred People became the most common.)

* A remnant of this custom is the switch between summer and winter school uniforms, seen in in anime/manga.

---L.