Sutoku-inEmperor Sutoku’s Poem

The young master of a large merchant house has fallen ill, and no doctor can cure him. It is a sickness of the heart, they say, and he will recover once whatever is weighing on him is cleared up, but he won’t tell anyone what it is. At a loss, the old master asks Kumagoro, who works for the family and gets along well with the young man, to find out.

To Kumagoro he confesses: he is lovesick. About twenty days earlier, on a visit to a temple, he stopped at a teahouse and saw a beautiful girl. When he picked up the tea cloth (chabukusa) she had dropped and handed it back, she wrote only the first half of a poem, “Se o hayami / iwa ni sekaruru / takigawa no” (“Swift the stream / split by a rock / the rapids divide”), and left. The second half goes “warete mo sue ni / awan to zo omou” (“though parted, in the end / I know we will meet again”), meaning that someday they will meet again. But he has no idea who she is or where she lives.

Hearing that his son won’t last another five days, the old master promises Kumagoro that if he finds the girl within three days, he will wipe out Kumagoro’s debts and pay him a reward on top. Kumagoro wastes two days running around blindly. Then, on his wife’s advice, he tries shouting the first half of the poem in places where crowds gather, like bathhouses and barbershops.

On the third day, after going from barbershop to barbershop, his head and face are shaved smooth. At dusk, in yet another barbershop, a customer bursts in and starts talking: the young lady of the house he works for is lovesick over a young master she met at a teahouse. The clues are a tea cloth and Emperor Sutoku’s poem. Kumagoro grabs the man, and as each tries to drag the other home, the barbershop mirror falls and shatters...