“If any should ask news,
Tell him that upon the shore of Suma
I drag the water-pails.”
Long afterwards Prince Genji was banished to the same place. The chapter of the Genji Monogatari called “Suma” says:
Although the sea was some way off, yet when the melancholy autumn wind came “blowing through the pass” (the very wind of Yukihira’s poem), the beating of the waves on the shore seemed near indeed.
It is round these two poems and the prose passage quoted above that the play is written.
A wandering priest comes to the shore of Suma and sees a strange pine-tree standing alone. A “person of the place” (in an interlude not printed in the usual texts) tells him that the tree was planted in memory of two fisher-girls, Matsukaze, and Murasame, and asks him to pray for them. While the priest prays it grows late and he announces that he intends to ask for shelter “in that salt-kiln.” He goes to the “waki’s pillar” and waits there as if waiting for the master of the kiln to return.
Meanwhile Matsukaze and Murasame come on to the stage and perform the “water-carrying” dance which culminates in the famous passage known as “The moon in the water-pails.”
CHORUS (speaking for MURASAME).
There is a moon in my pail!
MATSUKAZE.
Why, into my pail too a moon has crept!