[39] River of Heaven: Milky Way.
[40] Name of an old song.
[41] The continuous writing of the cursive Japanese characters is often compared to a meandering river. "Ink seems to have frozen up" means that her eyes are dim with tears, and no more she can write continuously and flowingly.
[42] A mountain in a suburb of Kioto.
[43] This conversation in the original is a play upon words which cannot be translated.
[44] In an old chronicle of the times one reads that it was on February 8, 1032.
[45] The country people of the Eastern Provinces beyond Tokyo were then called "Eastern barbarians."
[46] Away from the Capital where the King resides is always down; towards the capital is always up.
[47] This scene will be better understood by the reader if he remembers that her father was in the street in the midst of his train of attendants—an imposing cavalcade of bow-men, warriors, and attendants of all sorts, with palanquins and luggage, prepared to make a two or three months' journey through the wilderness to the Province of Hitachi, far in the East. She, as a Japanese lady could not go out to speak to him, but unconventionally she had drawn up the blind and "her eye met his."
[48] To translate: As there are a thousand kinds of flowers in the autumn fields, so there are a thousand reasons for going to the fields.