Poems I Love, No. 1
Left Behind in the Riverbed
A warlord, a river, and the oldest complaint in the world
Mina hito wa / kaeru nami naru / Natori-gawa / ware wa nokorite / sezé no umoregi
Everyone else goes back,
like the waves on the Natori River.
I alone remain,
a log sunk in its shallows.— Date Masamune (1567–1636)[1]
This is the first in an occasional series about Japanese poems I love.[2] I will start with one that makes me laugh, and lately makes me wince a little too.
About twenty years ago I lived for a while in Sendai, a city in Japan’s northeast.[3] My flat was near the Natori River, and one day, out fishing, I came across a stone on the bank with this poem carved into it. At work there was an older colleague, a graduate of Tohoku University,[4] who patiently answered my endless questions. I asked him about the stone. “That’s Masamune-kō’s poem,” he said. People in Sendai almost never say plain “Masamune”. They add kō, “lord”, even four hundred years on.[5]
If you don’t know him: Date Masamune was the one-eyed warlord who fought his way to mastery of northern Japan at the end of the sixteenth century, then founded Sendai and ruled it as one of the great lords of the realm. In Japan he is something like a national action hero, with a crescent moon on his helmet and a reputation for nerve. It is often said that had he been born twenty years earlier, he might have ruled the whole country.[6]
So when I read the poem properly, I burst out laughing. A warlord, writing this?
A river that means “fame”
Classical Japanese poetry runs on a shared map of place names called utamakura, literally “poem pillows”. A poet who mentions one of these places summons a whole set of associations. The Natori River is one of them. Its name contains na-tori, “taking a name”, meaning to win a reputation. For a thousand years, poets used it as a pun.[7] Read that way, the first half of Masamune’s poem says that everyone else wins their name and flows on like the waves, out into the wider world where reputations are made.
Buried wood
The umoregi of the last line is wood that has lain buried in a riverbed or in the earth for so long that it has turned dark and half-fossilised.[8] In poetry it is a fixed image for a person buried by the world, someone who never sees the light. A famous twelfth-century warrior-poet used it in his death poem to lament that his life had never come to flower.[9] A man as well read as Masamune could not have missed that echo. This is more than being left out. He is being left behind.
His own river
The detail I find most interesting is that the Natori is not some distant river of legend. It flows just south of Sendai, through Masamune’s own domain. The waves come in from the ocean and go back out to it, while he stays sunk in the riverbed at home. I read it as a picture of a man who could never quite get out into the open sea of national power and stayed lodged in the provinces. I think of Ovid, sending his complaints home from the shores of the Black Sea.[10]
To be fair to the poem, the verb kaeru most naturally means “to return home”. The plainest reading is that he was stuck on duty in the capital, watching the other lords head home while he was kept behind.[11] That may well be what he meant.
But Japanese poems don’t have to mean only one thing, and that is part of the pleasure. On the surface he grumbles, “Everyone gets to go home but me.” Underneath, he sighs, “Everyone else made their name, and I’m rotting in the mud.” Reading both at once feels truest to Masamune. It is as if he had already folded posterity’s verdict, twenty years too late, into a single poem.
Forty-one, and counting
Some of my old classmates have done extremely well: a successful novelist, a filmmaker, a diplomat, and a few whose jobs I have never quite understood but who are clearly living large in Tokyo’s glossier districts.
Now and then I measure myself against them and wonder where exactly I have ended up.
I first laughed at this poem when I was barely twenty. Now that I am in middle age, writing to you from a quiet coast in Niigata,[12] I find I have stopped laughing. The poem has only grown deeper.
Notes
[1] The poem is a waka, the classical Japanese form of 31 syllables arranged 5-7-5-7-7. The romanisation and the English rendering are my own. Japanese names are given surname first: Date is the family name, Masamune the given name.
[2] The series title in Japanese is Suki na uta, “poems I love”. Uta means both “song” and “poem”, a reminder that waka were composed to be recited aloud.
[3] Sendai, about 350 km north of Tokyo, is the largest city in the Tōhoku region. It grew from the castle town Masamune founded in 1600–1601.
[4] Founded in 1907 as one of Japan’s Imperial Universities, Tohoku University is the leading university of the region.
[5] Kō (公) is an honorific for a lord or prince, roughly “His Lordship”. Its everyday use for Masamune in Sendai says a good deal about how the city still regards its founder.
[6] Masamune came of age just as Toyotomi Hideyoshi was completing the unification of Japan. By the time Masamune had conquered the north, he had little choice but to submit, first to Hideyoshi and later to the Tokugawa shoguns.
[7] The best-known example is an anonymous love poem in the Kokinshū (c. 905), the first imperial anthology of Japanese poetry. It also pairs the Natori River with buried wood, and frets over what will happen if a secret affair “surfaces” and becomes the talk of the town. Masamune takes the romantic stock image and turns it into a career lament.
[8] Bog wood, in English terms. Umoregi from riverbeds in northeastern Japan was later carved into lacquer-like crafts, which is a happier fate than the poem imagines.
[9] Minamoto no Yorimasa (1106–1180), who took his own life after defeat at the Battle of Uji, at the start of the Genpei War. His death poem, in my rendering: “Buried wood / that never once came into flower — / how sad, / the way my life / has come to its end.”
[10] Ovid was banished by Augustus in AD 8 to Tomis, now Constanța in Romania. His Tristia and Letters from the Black Sea are the classic European literature of the provincial grumble.
[11] Under Hideyoshi, and then under the Tokugawa, great lords were required to spend long periods in the capital, partly as a way of keeping them under watch. The system was formalised in 1635 as sankin-kōtai, “alternate attendance”, shortly before Masamune’s death.
[12] Niigata lies on the Sea of Japan coast, on the opposite side of the country from Sendai’s Pacific shore.