"Noh", or, Accomplishment : :: :: University of Virginia Library

When I was young I had pride
And the flowers in my hair
Were like spring willows.
I spoke like the nightingales, and now am old.
Old by a hundred years, and wearied out.
I will sit down and rest.

The Waki
(one of the priests, is shocked at her impiety
and says)

It is near evening; let us be getting along.
Now will you look at that beggar. She is
sitting on a sotoba (a carved wooden devotional
stick, or shrine)
. Tell her to come off it and sit
on some proper thing.

Ono

Eh, for all your blather it has no letters
on it, not a smudge of old painting. I thought
it was only a stick.

Waki

Is it only a stick or a stump? May be it
had once fine flowers—in its time, in its time;
and now it is a stick, to be sure, with the blessed
Buddha cut in it.

Ono

Oh, well then, I'm a stump, too, and well
buried, with a flower at my heart. Go on and
talk of the shrine.

The Tsure, in this case the second priest, tells
the legend of the shrine, and while he is
doing it, the Waki notices something strange
about the old hag, and cries out—

Who are you?

Ono

I am the ruins of Ono,
The daughter of Ono no Yoshizane.

Waki and Tsure
(together)

How sad a ruin is this:
Komachi was in her day a bright flower;
She had the blue brows of Katsura;
She used no power at all;
She walked in beautiful raiment in palaces.

Many attended her verse in our speech
And in the speech of the foreign court. [That is, China.]

White of winter is over her head,
Over the husk of her shoulders;
Her eyes are no more like the colour on distant mountains.
She is like a dull moon that fades in the dawn's grip.
The wallet about her throat has in it a few dried beans,
A bundle is wrapped on her back, and on her shoulder is a basket of woven roots;
She cannot hide it at all.
She is begging along the road;
She wanders, a poor, daft shadow.

[I cannot quite make out whether the priest is
still sceptical, and thinks he has before him merely
an old woman who thinks she is Komachi. At any
rate, she does not want commiseration, and
replies.]

Ono

Daft! Will you hear him? In my own
young days I had a hundred letters from men
a sight better than he is. They came like
rain-drops in May. And I had a high head,
may be, that time. And I sent out no answer.

You think because you see me alone now that
I was in want of a handsome man in the old
days, when Shosho came with the others—Shii
no Shosho of Fukakusa [Deep Grass] that
came to me in the moonlight and in the dark
night and in the nights flooded with rain, and
in the black face of the wind and in the wild
swish of the snow. He came as often as the
melting drops fall from the eaves, ninety-nine
times, and he died. And his ghost is about me,
driving me on with the madness.