三井楽
五島列島の最西端に位置する福江島の北西部分・三井楽の島は、8世紀から9世紀にかけて多くの遣唐使の最終経由地であった。三井楽から東シナ海を真西に渡るという危険な旅に出たが、生きて帰ってこられたのは半数程度だったという。冬になると海から吹き付ける強風のため、草深い半島の木々や草木はほとんど横に伸び、三井楽は荒涼とした容赦のない場所に感じられる。
この半島の厳しい気候と、日本列島の西端に位置し、遣唐使が故郷に別れを告げる場所であることから、世界の最果てを意味するこの地名が生まれた。10世紀の『かげろう日記』に収録された歌には、死後の世界とあの世の狭間である「みみらく」で、いつか亡き母に会えるようにと祈る作者の姿がある。
Mimiraku Peninsula
The Mimiraku Peninsula on the northwestern end of Fukue Island, the outermost of Goto’s main islands, was the final staging ground for many of the Japanese envoys who traveled to Tang China between the eighth and ninth centuries. From Mimiraku they set out on a treacherous journey directly westward across the East China Sea—a voyage from which only around half of those who departed would return alive. Trees and bushes on the grassy peninsula grow almost horizontally due to the storm winds that blow in from the sea and across the landscape in winter, when Mimiraku can feel like a bleak and unforgiving place.
The peninsula’s often grim weather and its location at the western edge of the Japanese archipelago, where the envoys to China bid farewell to their native land, inspired its name, a reference to the end of the world. In a poem included in the tenth-century Kagero nikki (The Mayfly Diary; published in translation as The Gossamer Years), the author prays to one day meet her dead mother at mimiraku, a place between the mortal world and the afterlife.
