Yoshitoshi's 100 Aspects of the Moon
A Haibun Collection
Fox-Trot-9

38: Ariko Weeps as Her Boat Drifts in the Moonlight

The coming spring should be a time for joy, a time for the renewal of wedding vows and love, a new birth of hope. But all of that is lost to me now. I used to be the morning sakura that blossoms just after sunrise in the eyes of my love. I used to ride upon the gentle breeze of spring whenever I would travel with my love. But now my love is dead, lost in the silent whisper of thieving death. Now I am the night sakura, viewing those blossoms drifting in the air and landing in the pond, whose petals now drift apart upon the glassy waters ere they sink below the surface.

And so shall I sink
Below the glassy water—
Springtime suicide.

(To be continued...)

A/N: Picture printed in September 1886. It depicts a scene from the Noh play Ariko no Naishi, in which the Heian court lady-in-waiting Ariko is despondent over the death of her lover. The Moon Capital seems to have been imagined poetically either as the moon itself, or as a moon-illumined mountain where the courtiers were "dwellers above the clouds". As she prepares to jump from the boat and drown herself, she recites a verse. This is the actual verse from the picture:

   How hopeless it is—
It would be better for me
   To sink beneath the waves—
Perhaps then I could see
My man from Moon Capital.
—Ariko no Naishi