It is strange beyond believing, but ’tis true—I answer No!
THE MOTHER [Song]
Alas! Nor kith nor kin. It is too true!
His parents even did not come to you.
It must be. Yet, O Heavens, how sad! That child
Is him I seek. I, whom you now called wild.
O Heavens. O mercy. It must be a dream!
FERRYMAN [Words]
Oh, unutterable sorrow. Until now it lay outside me;
It was other people’s business. Now you say it was thy child?
Pitiful! But wherefore grievest? He is now beyond recall.
Come this way and I will show thee where his grave lies. Now ’tis near.
This the tomb of him who left us. Offer now thy deep-felt prayers.
THE MOTHER [Song]
E’en though I feared it might be so, till now
Hope led me on to make this journey long
To distant, unfamiliar Azuma;
But at the end of the sad way I find
Naught in this world but mark of where he lies.
Ah! Cruel is it!—If his fate was death—
That he should leave his birthplace and have come
To a road corner in strange Azuma,
And mingled with the roadside earth to lie
Beneath a tangled mass of spring-time’s weeds,
Beneath this very ground so it doth seem.
CHORUS
I
Then shown unto the mother in earth’s form,
May there appear the dear one of her world.