Long ago, in the west wing of the mansion in the eastern Fifth Ward where the empress dowager lived, there lived a woman. There was a man who, knowing she was not someone he should love, was deeply devoted to her and visited her.
But around the tenth of the first month, she hid herself away somewhere else. He heard where she was, but it was not a place ordinary people could visit, and he spent his days in still greater pain.
In the first month of the next year, when the plum blossoms were at their height, he longed for the year before and went to the west wing. He stood and gazed, sat and gazed, looked all around, but it could not be as it had been the year before. Weeping, he lay on the bare wooden floor, its doors and screens taken away, until the moon sank in the west, and remembering the year before, he composed:
"Is this not the moon of old? Is this not the spring of old? Amid all that seems changed, only I myself remain as I was."
So he wrote, and as the night faintly lightened, he went home in tears.
This woman is said to be Fujiwara no Takaiko (the Nijo Empress), who later became empress to Emperor Seiwa. As a daughter of a noble house, she was already destined for the palace, and a love with the man could never be allowed. The moon and spring should come round unchanged, yet now that the beloved is gone, everything looks different. What does not change is only himself, still thinking of her. In the overlong first line, a grief that will not go into words overflows.