Who Is The Wife Who Waited (Azusayumi)?

The Wife Who Waited is the woman in section 24 of The Tales of Ise, "Azusayumi" (The Catalpa Bow), who waits three years for her husband after he leaves to serve at court. The original text calls her only "the woman."

In Episode 5, three years pass with no word from her husband, and she agrees to marry a man who has courted her with sincere devotion. That very night her husband returns and knocks on the door. She does not open it, and answers with a poem: after three years of waiting, tonight she is to be joined with someone new. As he turns to leave, she reveals her true feelings in another poem, saying her heart was always his, but he goes anyway. She runs after him but cannot catch up, collapses beside a spring, and dies after writing a poem on a rock in her own blood.

One theory holds that, at the time, a wife was free to remarry if her husband stayed away for three years, and this forms the background of the story.