Mi ni shimiru
Kazé ya!
Shōji ni
Yubi no ato!
—“Oh, body-piercing wind!—that work of little fingers in the shōji!”[[2]]…. What does this mean? It means the sorrowing of a mother for her dead child. Shōji is the name given to those light white-paper screens which in a Japanese house serve both as windows and doors, admitting plenty of light, but concealing, like frosted glass, the interior from outer observation, and excluding the wind. Infants delight to break these by poking their fingers through the soft paper: then the wind blows through the holes. In this case the wind blows very cold indeed,—into the mother’s very heart;—for it comes through the little holes that were made by the fingers of her dead child.
[2] More literally:—“body-through-pierce wind—ah!—shōji in the traces of [viz.: holes made by] fingers!”
The impossibility of preserving the inner quality of such poems in a literal rendering, will now be obvious. Whatever I attempt in this direction must of necessity be ittakkiri;—for the unspoken has to be expressed; and what the Japanese poet is able to say in seventeen or twenty-one syllables may need in English more than double that number of words. But perhaps this fact will lend additional interest to the following atoms of emotional expression:—
A MOTHER’S REMEMBRANCE
Sweet and clear in the night, the voice of a boy at study,
Reading out of a book…. I also once had a boy!
A MEMORY IN SPRING
She, who, departing hence, left to the flowers of the plum-tree,
Blooming beside our eaves, the charm of her youth and beauty,
And maiden pureness of heart, to quicken their flush and fragrance,—
Ah! where does she dwell to-day, our dear little vanished sister?
FANCIES OF ANOTHER FAITH
(1) I sought in the place of graves the tomb of my vanished friend:
From ancient cedars above there rippled a wild doves cry.