When they crossed Mount Utsu and saw Mount Fuji, though it was the end of the fifth month, snow lay on it, very white.
"The mountain that knows no season is the peak of Fuji. What time does it think it is, with snow lying dappled on it like the spots of a fawn?"
That mountain, compared with something here in the capital, was as high as twenty Mount Hieis piled on top of one another, and its shape was like a shiojiri, the tall cone of sand heaped up in salt fields.
The end of the fifth month in the old calendar is early July today, the height of summer. For people raised in the capital, a mountain wearing snow in midsummer must have been beyond imagining. He pretends to scold it as a mountain that knows no season, while likening the pattern of the snow to the white spots on a fawn's back. Surprise at snow out of season and the wit to say it lightly become one in this poem.
"As high as twenty Mount Hieis piled up" is a delightful exaggeration typical of a city person. Mount Hiei is about 850 meters high, so twenty times would be 17,000 meters. Fuji is actually about 3,776 meters, but it must have looked unimaginably tall.
In The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, Fuji appears as the mountain where the emperor had the elixir of immortality burned. In the Tales of Ise it is the astonishing mountain that the man, having left the capital, first sees in the east. For the people of the Heian period, Mount Fuji was a symbol of the faraway east.