Shunshoku Umegoyomi Vol. 1: Yonehachi & Tanjirou, Reunited (part 3)

Fig. 1: わちきやア
完知れめへかと
思つて胸が
どきゝゝして。

For whatever reason, this part proved to be quite challenging, so it took me a lot longer to figure out what I could. The last half of fig. 1 (starting from 「と思つて」) was straightforward, but I couldn't figure out how to parse the first half. 「わちき」 is a premodern version of 「私」 ("I"), and the use of a katakana for the second character in 「やア」 seems to suggest that it's an interjection (to express surprise, in this case). The use of 「完」 for 「もふ」, or 「もう」 in modern Japanese, is unusual, but the furigana provide the necessary clarification, and it makes grammatical sense. Edit: As Matt explains below, 「知れめへ」 can be parsed as the imperfective form （未然形） of 「知」 followed by 「めへ」 (pronounced 「めえ」). which is a dialectal form of 「まい」. Although this was not explained in my classical Japanese grammar book (link below), 「まい」 is the negative presumptive （打消推量） auxiliary verb, which always follows the imperfective form, as explained with an example here.

"Thinking that you might not know me anymore, my heart was pounding (fig. 1). And since I hurriedly walked, I'm in pain," Yonehachi said, beating her chest (fig. 2).

Fig. 2: そしてもふ
急ひで歩行たもん
だからア苦しいト
むねをたゝき

The primary difficulty is with 「知れめへか」. The verb 「知る」 ("to know") has two forms of conjugation: yodan （四段） and kami-nidan （上二段） - see Classical Japanese: A Grammar by Shirane for a thorough treatment of this topic. The yodan 「知る」 takes the form 「知れ」 when in the realis （已然形） or imperative （命令形） forms. OTOH, the kami-nidan conjugation of the verb takes on that form when in the imperfective （未然形） or continuative （連用形） forms. So, in this case, the conjugation doesn't help much in narrowing down what comes after it.

The only grammatically sound explanation I was able to find is that 「め」 is the realis form of the speculatory auxiliary verb 「む」. However, I have no idea what function 「へ」 has here (it doesn't appear to be the directional particle 「へ」). The following, interrogative particle, 「か」, is usually preceded by either a noun or the attributive form （連体形） of a verb with an implied noun.

Fig. 3: 胭がひっつく
よふだトいひながら
そばへすはる

There was only one kanji I couldn't figure out in fig. 2 - the one after 「歩」. Even the listed archaic forms of 「歩く」 were of no help. Edit: the kanji after 「歩」 is likely 「行」, as suggested below. However, the presence of furigana made it easy to determine the overall meaning.

"My throat is sticking," she said, sitting down next to Tanjirou (fig. 3).

The first kanji in fig. 3 is yet another good example of non-standard kanji usage. The two acceptable kanji for 「のど」 ("throat") listed in Koujien are 「喉」 and 「咽」. While the right radical of the first kanji in this sentence is clearly 「因」, the left radical doesn't seem to be 「口」. To find other kanji with the same reading, I used Tangorin, which yielded one other kanji with the 「因」 radical on the right - 「胭」. I'm not sure if that's right, but it fits a lot better than 「咽」.

 "Have you been ill?" Yonehachi said, intently looking at his face (fig. 4).

Fig. 4: おまはん
は煩つてゐさつ
しやるのかへト
かほをつくづく見て

The first thing to note is the pronoun 「おまはん」 (「は」 can be pronounced as 「わ」 even in cases other than the particle 「は」, another inconsistency in historical kana orthography) means "you" - roughly equivalent to 「お前」 in modern Japanese. One can imagine that Yonehachi and Tanjirou must be quite close, as the use of this pronoun certainly wouldn't have been acceptable between mere acquaintances.

The next part of the sentence, 「煩つてゐさつしやる」, would be written using modern kana orthography as 「煩っていさっしゃる」. Unless you've encountered this particular pattern before, you have no choice but to check each permutation of small/large kana for the 2 instances of 「つ」 and 1 instance of 「や」 to try to find a matching word. In any case, the verb 「ゐさつしやる」 is equivalent to the modern Japanese verb 「なさる」, the polite form of "to do".

Once again, the presence of 「へ」 doesn't make sense to me. However, note that unlike fig. 1, it occurs after 「か」, so the two patterns may not be related. Edit: turns out this is related to the previous occurrence — 「かへ」 (historical kana orthography) → 「かえ」 (Edo dialect) → 「かい」. The final version, 「かい」, is, in modern Japanese, a gentler/more masculine version of 「か」, although its use here by a woman suggests that such gender rules may be a more recent invention.

Also note the lack of iteration marks for 「つくづく」 - there are cases where repeated sounds/patterns are written out. Edit: As Matt suggests below, this may be because the repeated kana occurred at the start of a "new" line (at least within the togaki).

It's not clear whether the second to last character in the togaki (stage instructions written in two parallel lines) at the end of fig. 4 is the kanji 「見」 or the hiragana 「み」. Either one would make sense grammatically, and 「見」 is the kanji which this kuzushiji form of the kana 「み」 came from.