At last she became so sad that she resolved not to try to find him in this world anymore, but to drown herself at once in the pool of Sawara, that she might be able to meet him in a future state.
She hurried there as fast as she could. And when she reached the pond, she fixed her pilgrim's staff in the ground, and hung her outer robe on a pine-tree, and threw away her wallet, and, loosening her hair, arranged it in the style called Shimada(2).
Then, having filled her sleeves with stones, she was about to leap into the water, when there appeared suddenly before her a venerable man of seemingly not less than eighty years, robed all in white, and bearing a tablet in his hand.
And the aged man said to her: "Be not thus in haste to die, Otohime! Shuntoku whom you seek is at Kiyomidzu San: go thither and meet him."
These were, indeed, the happiest tidings she could have desired, and she became at once very happy. And she knew she had thus been saved by the august favor of her guardian deity, and that it was the god himself who had spoken to her those words.
So she cast away the stones she had put into her sleeves, and donned again the outer robe she had taken off, and rearranged her hair, and took her way in all haste to the temple of Kiyomidzu.
(1) One meaning of "Ota" in Japanese is "has met" or "have met."
(2) The simple style in which the hair of dead woman is arranged. See chapter "Of Women's Hair," in Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, vol. ii.
At last she reached the temple. She ascended the three lower steps, and glancing beneath a porch she saw her lover, Shuntoku, lying there asleep, covered with a straw mat; and she called to him, "Moshi! Moshi!(1)"
Shuntoku, thus being suddenly awakened, seized his staff, which was lying by his side, and cried out, "Every day the children of this neighborhood come here and annoy me, because I am blind!"