Leaving Yatsuhashi, they went on and came to the province of Suruga. At Mount Utsu, the road they were about to take was very dark and narrow and overgrown with ivy and maples. They felt uneasy, thinking what a strange fate it was, when they met a wandering monk.
"What are you doing on a road like this?" he said, and when they looked, it was someone they knew. Thinking of a certain person in the capital, the man wrote a letter and entrusted it to him.
"I have come near Mount Utsu in Suruga, and, as its name says, neither in waking (utsutsu) nor even in dreams can I meet you."
People of old believed that if someone was thinking of you, they would appear in your dreams. If the beloved does not appear even in dreams, perhaps it is because she no longer thinks of him. The poem holds that fear and loneliness. It is witty wordplay, echoing Utsu and utsutsu, yet set against the eerie mountain path it carries a deep solitude.
The road over Mount Utsu later came to be called "the narrow ivy road." It is the Utsunoya Pass on the border of Shizuoka and Fujieda, where the old road still survives and can be walked. In the Edo period it was known as a hard stretch of the Tokaido, and in the hamlet of Utsunoya at the foot of the pass, teahouses selling the local specialty, todango dumplings, lined the road.
In the Izayoi Nikki of the nun Abutsu, who traveled east in the Kamakura period, and in many other travel writings, travelers recall Narihira's poem here. For later travelers, the journey east in the Tales of Ise was both a model for travel and a signpost for the heart.