Page:The Spirit of Japanese Poetry (Noguchi).djvu/117

Rh Chujo's love-story with her is famous: it is said that his love was utterly scorned, and he called her to admit him to her house with no success whatever, and that he died under the winter snow on his hundredth journey.

Behold the heavenly vastness, The sky of the moon! Is it not the same moon I once saw Out of Kasuga's Mikasa hill?"

Abe no Nakamaro left Japan for China in his sixteenth year, and stayed in China for thirty-eight long years. The Emperor Benso admired his ability and appointed him as his secretary; and Nakamaro changed his name and took the Chinese name of Choko, and considered himself as a Chinese. But it was the 4th of Tenbio Shoho (729), when the Japanese ambassador to China, Fujiwara no Kiyokawa, was going back, and Nakamaro's thought of home stirred. And he decided to return to Japan; and many of his friends, Oi and Rihaku, the two famous Chinese poets, among them, held a farewell party in Nakamaro's honour. It was a moonlit night when the dinner took place, and he wrote this Uta thinking about the moon that used to come out of Kasuga's Mikasa hill, which he knew well in his boyhood days. The Mikasa hill is in the outskirts of Nara. It is said that every member of the party wept over