From Darkness Into Darkness: Lady Izumi’s Final Poem

In a lesser-known Imperial poetry anthology called the Shui Wakashu (拾遺和歌集), poem 1342, is recorded what is believed to be Lady Izumi’s¹ final poem:

Japanese	Romanization	Translation
暗きより	Kuraki yori	The way I must enter
暗き道にぞ	Kuraki michi ni zo	leads through darkness to darkness —
入りぬべき	Irinu beki	O moon above the mountains’ rim
はるかに照らせ	Haruka ni terase	please shine a little further
山の端の月	Yama no wa no tsuki	on my path.

This poem was addressed to a Buddhist monk named “Shoku” and includes several Buddhist allusions. The most important is the phrase “darkness to darkness”, which comes from chapter seven of the Lotus Sutra:

….from darkness they [living beings] enter into darkness,
to the end never hearing the Buddha’s name [hear the Dharma].

translation by Burton Watson²

This refers to the Buddhist notion of Samsara, the near-infinite, aimless wandering that living beings undergo lifetime after lifetime, like a cosmic rat race. Such beings, who have yet to hear the Dharma [the teachings] of the Buddha, will continue to wander lifetime after lifetime without rest.

Thus, Lady Izumi is asking Shoku to help shine a light in the darkness for her, so that she may find the way [follow the Buddhist path].

I had trouble deciding which blog to put this in, since it covers both themes, but I decided to post here since the poem was introduced in the new historical drama about Lady Murasaki, Izumi’s contemporary.

Lady Izumi was, to put it mildly, a complex woman. She had incredible talent, and found herself in one scandal³ after another as powerful men fell at her feet, plus she earned scorn from other women such as Lady Murasaki. And yet, she was also very kind, devout and struggled to balance both the religious and worldly aspects of her life, while raising her orphaned granddaughter.

Hirshfield and Aratani note that if this poem is indeed her last, the final word she ever wrote was tsuki (月), “moon”.

¹ poem 56 in the Hyakunin Isshu (あらざらん)

² alternate translation by Murano reads: …they go from darkness to darkness, and do not hear of the names of the Buddhas.

³ this was a conservative, narrow, aristocratic society where men frequently had affairs, but it was much more scandalous if women did. The idea that women could want, and enjoy sex, was not something people really accepted at the time.