Haiku by Ryokan

The thief,
left behind,
the moon in my window

盗人にとり残されし窓の月 (nusubito ni torinokosareshi mado no tsuki): what the thief left behind, the moon in the window. 盗人に is *by the thief*, read nusubito, or nusutto in the colloquial contraction; とり残されし is *left behind*, the passive with the old attributive ending; 窓の月 is the moon in the window, an autumn word. The whole line is one clause on the moon: the thief is its agent, the moon its subject. The oldest witness is the collected edition of Ryōkan's work printed in 1918, which sets the verse under a single headnote, *after a thief had got into the Gogō-an*, his hut on Mount Kugami, and tells no story. The stories came after. A Zen abbot the same year had Ryōkan press his one padded robe on the empty-handed thief and see him off with a warning about the road; a gazetteer of 1938 had him roll off his bedding so the thief could take it. They do not agree on what was taken, and the page tells none of them. A critic of 1924 read the verse as the one thing self-interest cannot touch; Blyth wrote that in any other poet it might be suspected of affectation, and that what is known of Ryōkan's life lets it be read as it was written. Every design brushes 盗人 in its modern form; the 1918 edition wrote the word in kana. The English is Timothy L. Jackowski's, made for Takase Studios.

Translation Notes:

Here we read 盗人 as nusubito. One also sees this read nusutto.