花さそふ

あらしの庭の

雪ならで

ふりゆくものは

わが身なりけり

にゅうどうさきのだいじょう

だいじん

はなさそう

あらしのにわの

ゆきならで

ふりゆくものは

わがみなりけり

Fujiwara no Kintsune

Luring the blossoms down,

The gale in the garden

Imitates the fall of snow,

As a sad reminder

Of my fall of age.

Hokusai

Fujiwara no Kintsune (1171 - 1244), also known as Nyudo Saki no Daijo Daijin (meaning ‘lay priest and former prime minister) or Saionji Kintsune, established the Saionji Fujiwara clan and gave it its temple, Saionji, with villa at the site of the present Kinkukiji temple in north-west Kyoto. He was the grandfather of shogun Yoritsune. His older sister was married to Teika (poem 97). There are 114 poems of his in imperial collections.

作者略伝と語釈

Yuku means ‘to go, to die’ and yuki is ‘snow’ which ‘falls’ (furi). Furiyuki is ‘to become old’ and furi also means ‘snowfall’.

Ono no Komachi’s poem (9) has a similar sentiment.

Peter Morse writes that it is possible that Hokusai was somewhat irritated by the self-pity of the poet. He may be right in this. One woman is looking a bit reproachfully up to the cherry blossom, probably for the extra work it gives her. Hokusai himself was a prolific artist, who worked until his last days. Born in 1760, he said before he died in 1849: “If I had another five years, even, I could have become a real painter.”

At age seventy-five he had said:

“From around the age of six, I had the habit of sketching from life. I became an artist, and from fifty on began producing works that won some reputation, but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention. At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If only I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am eighty-six, so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature. At one hundred, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at one hundred and thirty, forty, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive. May Heaven, that grants long life, give me the chance to prove that this is no lie!”