The poet here is a country-lad. In unfamiliar fields he listens to the great autumn chorus of insects; and the sound revives for him the memory of his far-off home and of his parents…. But here is something incomparably more touching,—though in literal translation probably more obscure,—than either of the preceding specimens:—
Mi ni shimiru
Kazé ya!
Shōji ni
Yubi no ato!
—“Oh, body-piercing wind!—that work of little fingers in the shōji!”[1] … 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
- ↑ More literally:—“body-through-pierce wind—ah!—shōji—in the traces of [viz.: holes made by] fingers!”
