Of Old Japan
On the day following his first letter this poem was sent:
To you I betrayed my heart—
Alas! Confessing
Brings deeper grief,
Lamenting days.
Feeling was rootless, but being unlearned in loneliness, and attracted, she wrote an answer:
If you lament to-day
At this moment your heart
May feel for mine—
For in sorrow
Months and days have worn away.
He wrote often and she answered—sometimes—and felt her loneliness a little assuaged. Again she received a letter. After expressing feelings of great delicacy:
[I would] solace [you] with consoling words
If spoken in vain
No longer could be exchanged.
To talk with you about the departed one; how would it be [for you] to come in the evening unobtrusively?
Her answer:
As I hear of comfort I wish to talk with you, but being an uprooted person there is no hope of my standing upright. I am footless [meaning, I cannot go to you].
Thus she wrote, and His Highness decided to come as a private person.
It was still daylight, and he secretly called his servant Ukon-no-zo, who had usually been the medium by which the letters had reached the Prince, and said,
