[i] This poem relies upon an elaborate series of overlapping word plays and images in order to achieve its effect.
First, we have ta ga misogi yūtsuke ‘For whose lustration ceremony is this mulberry cloth fastened?’. This overlaps with yūtsukedori ka karakoromo ‘A cockerel crows’ (karakoromo sounded to old Japanese ears like a cock’s crow). In turn, this overlaps with karakoromo tatsu ‘A Cathay robe cut out’, which overlaps with tatsuta no yama ‘Tatsuta Mountain’. Karakoromo was, in fact, a makura kotoba conventionally associated with tastu. A further double meaning is achieved in the final line where orihaete ‘endlessly’, is derived from a verb, orihau 織延ふ, meaning ‘weave at great length’.
Additionally, implicit in the poem is the knowledge that a Cathay robe would have been made out of brocade (nishiki 錦), which was an image frequently used in poetry to describe the panoply of scarlet autumn leaves at places such as Tatsuta.
So, the poem presents us with a progression of images: from the simplicity of the sacred mulberry cloth to the richness of the brocade robe; the cockerel used in a religious ceremony, recollecting the lustration, while simultaneously being an embroidered decoration on the Chinese robe, with its crows echoing endlessly through the autumn leaves at Tatsuta, and frozen into an endless crow upon the garment.
[i] KKS XV: 747: Narihira had been seeing a woman living in the western wing of the palace of the Gojō Empress, and loved her dearly. Shortly after the Tenth day of the First Month, she disappeared off to somewhere else and, though he found out where she was, he could not communicate with her. When Spring came and the plum blossom was in full bloom, on a night when the moon was especially beautiful, he was yearning for the love of the previous year and went back to the western wing and, until the moon was low in the sky, lay upon the bare boards; then he composed.
[iii] SKKS XII: 1087: On the conception of hidden love, when he held a poetry match in one hundred rounds at his house, while he was Major Captain of the Left.
