Thereupon the troops that had heen hidden on the river-hank rose up simultanously on this side and on that side, and fixing their arrows [in their bows], let him go floating down. So he sank on reaching Kawara Point.[1] So on their searching with hooks[2] the place where he had sunk, [the hooks] struck on the armour inside his clothes, and made a rattling sound.[3] So the place was called by the name of Kawara Point. Then when they hooked up[4] his hones, the younger King sang, saying:
“Catalpa bow, Evonymus standing by the ferry-bank of Uji! My heart had thought to cut [you], my heart had thought to take [you]; but at the base methought of the lord, at the extremity methought of the younger sister; grievously methought of this, sorrowfully methought of that; and I come [back] without cutting it,—the Catalpa bow, the Evonymus.”[5]
- ↑ Kawara no saki. The author, in the next sentence, derives this name from the rattling sound made by the hooks as they struck on the armour. But there seems a great deal to be said in favour of Arawi Hakuseki’s view that kawara is an old word itself signifying “armour.”
- ↑ The word kagi here used occurs elsewhere to denote the hooks employed for fastening doors, and in later times took the specific meaning of “key.”
- ↑ Literally, “sounded kawara.”
- ↑ The text has the characters 掛出. But Motowori says that 掛 stands for 掻, and that we must interpret the passage to mean that they scratched [about to find] and take out [his corpse].
- ↑ The signification of this Song is: “I came here meaning to kill thee as
view, and thinks that the drowning prince is rather giving vent to sentiments of pride and defiance. He says (speaking in the Prince’s name): “It is not that I have been capsized out of the boat into the river, but that I am swimming off after a pole which has fallen into the water. If there be any strong and willing fellows among my partisans, let them swim after me.” It must be explained that the word rendered “boatmen” in the translation is literally “pole-takers” (or, according to Moribe’s view, “to take a pole”). Motowori’s interpretation seems to do less violence to the wording of the original, and Moribe’s has not even the merit of accounting for the use of the Future komu where the Imperative kone would be what we should naturally expect.—Uji is preceded by the, in this context, untranslatable Pillow-Word chihayaburu (see “Dictionary of Pillow-Words,” s.v.).
