After the Death of His Wife is Kakinomoto Hitomoro’s work eloquently articulating a husband’s feelings and traverses the whole gamut of emotions in such a situation. Full of imagery and metaphorical illustrations, his candid choice of words makes it easy for the reader to comprehend the pathos surrounding the husband.
This poem effectively utilized metaphors and similes in expressing a husband’s feelings after his wife’s death. Sorrow is the predominant feeling, and pervades almost each line. Grief and yearning are strongly articulated when he went to the market place frequented by his wife and he stood and listened, obviously wanting to hear her voice or see her face. With poignant acceptance, he only uttered her name and waved his sleeve.
Hitomoro’s emotions are expressed in his metaphorical use of imagery – their closeness he describes as their souls bending towards each other like the “bending seaweed”, their strong love “abundant as the greenery”.
It can be surmised that the news of her death was so sudden to him. “...one morning, she was gone, flown like an early bird”. He must be a believer of Shintoism where he likens her departure from the earth as “gone, clad in a heavenly scarf of white” to the kagero (the quivering appearance of the air rising from the hot surface of the ground) and “went and vanished like the setting sun”.
He is forced by reality to accept her death, that she is gone from his sight, touch and feel. This he expresses when he goes to the Hagai mountains where he had been told his wife is, but after labouring the stony path, he finds not even a shadow of her; and when he says ‘who evades mortality?”.
He regrets having kept her secret in his heart, not visiting her often, just looking towards a time when they could be together. His complacency in that thought is described as “secure... as one riding a great ship.” These regrets are not explicitly said.
What is clear are his profound grief and mourning for her in his life. He seeks her in his surroundings, which seem to make his loss all the heavier to bear. He talks of his days spent broken-hearted and his nights passed sighing till dawn. He sees no help in his grief and meets no success in his quest to see her.
He has masterfully utilized his surroundings in his description of his feelings. He compares his memories and emotions to his landscape.
The yellow leaves of autumn, the dying of the day as the sun sets, the brightness of the moon dimmed behind the cloud, the elm trees with their abundant leaves, the rising kagero; these are but a few of his metaphors in expressing his sorrow and yearning.
In the envoys, Hitomoro sums up all the husband’s longing for his dead wife, his utter devastation, his attempts to re-live their days together. In the second envoy, there is acceptance of his present without her; which, now that she’s dead, is lonely.
