Traditional Japanese Literature

by Haruo Shirane

  “I have allowed an almost indecent familiarity, and I have had no idea of what was going through your mind; and I may say that you have not shown a great deal of consideration, forcing me to display myself in these unbecoming colors. But I am at fault too. I am not up to what has to be done, and I am sorry for us both.” It was too humiliating, that the lamplight should have caught her in somber, shabby gray.

  “Yes, I have been inconsiderate, and I am ashamed and sorry. They give you a good excuse, those robes of mourning. But don’t you think you might just possibly be making too much of them? You have seen something of me over the years, and I doubt if mourning gives you a right to act as if we had just been introduced. It is clever of you but not altogether convincing.”

  He told her of the many things he had found it so hard to keep to himself, beginning with that glimpse of the two princesses in the autumn dawn. She was in an agony of embarrassment. So he had had this store of secrets all along, and had managed to feign openness and indifference!

  He now pulled a low curtain between them and the altar and lay down beside her. The smell of the holy incense, the particularly strong scent of anise, stabbed at his conscience, for he was more susceptible in matters of belief than most people. He told himself that it would be ill considered in the extreme, now of all times, when she was in mourning, to succumb to temptation; and he would be going against his own wishes if he failed to control himself. He must wait until she had come out of mourning. Then, difficult though she was, there would surely be some slight easing of the tensions.

  Autumn nights are sad in the most ordinary of places. How much sadder in wailing mountain tempests, with the calls of insects sounding through the hedges. As he talked on of life’s uncertain turns, she occasionally essayed an answer. He was touched and pleased. Her women, who had spread their bedclothes not far away, sensed that a happy arrangement had been struck up and withdrew to inner apartments. She thought of her father’s admonitions. Strange and awful things can happen, she saw, to a lady who lives too long. It was as if she were adding her tears to the rushing torrent outside.

  The dawn came on, bringing an end to nothing. His men were coughing and clearing their throats, there was a neighing of horses—everything made him think of descriptions he had read of nights on the road. He slid back the door to the east, where dawn was in the sky, and the two of them looked out at the shifting colors. She had come out toward the veranda. The dew on the ferns at the shallow eaves was beginning to catch the light. They would have made a very striking pair, had anyone been there to see them.

  “Do you know what I would like? To be as we are now. To look out at the flowers and the moon, and be with you. To spend our days together, talking of things that do not matter.”

  His manner was so unassertive that her fears had finally left her. “And do you know what I would like? A little privacy. Here I am quite exposed, and a screen might bring us closer.”

  The sky was red, there was a whirring of wings close by as flocks of birds left their roosts. As if from deep in the night, the matin bells came to them faintly.

  “Please go,” she said with great earnestness. “It is almost daylight, and I do not want you to see me.”

  “You can’t be telling me to push my way back through the morning mists? What would that suggest to people? No, make it look, if you will, as if we were among the proper married couples of the world, and we can go on being the curiosities we in fact seem to be. I promise you that I will do nothing to upset you; but perhaps I might trouble you to imagine, just a little, how genuine my feelings are.”

  “If what you say is true,” she replied, her agitation growing as it became evident that he was in no hurry to leave, “then I am sure you will have your way in the future. But please, this morning, let me have my way.” She had to admit that there was little she could do.

  “So you really are going to send me off into the dawn? Knowing that it is ‘new to me,’178 and that I am sure to lose my way?”

  The crowing of a cock was like a summons back to the city.

  “The things by which one knows the mountain village

  are brought together in these voices of dawn.”

  She replied:

  “Deserted mountain depths where no birds sing,

  I would have thought. But sorrow has come to visit.”

  Seeing her as far as the door to the inner apartments, he returned by the way he had come the evening before, and lay down; but he was not able to sleep. The memories and regrets were too strong. Had his emotions earlier been toward her as they were now, he would not have been as passive over the months. The prospect of going back to the city was too dreary to face.

  Ōigimi, in agony at the thought of what her women would have made of it all, found sleep as elusive. A very harsh trial it was, going through life with no one to turn to; and as if that huge uncertainty were not enough, there were these women with all their impossible suggestions. They as good as formed a queue, coming to her with proposals that had nothing to recommend them but the expediency of the moment; and if in a fit of inattention she were to accede to one of them, she would have shame and humiliation to look forward to. Kaoru did not at all displease her. The Eighth Prince had said more than once that if Kaoru should be inclined to ask her hand, he would not disapprove. But no. She wanted to go on as she was. It was her sister, now in the full bloom of youth, who must live a normal life. If the prince’s thoughts in the matter could be applied to her sister, she herself would do everything she could by way of support. But who was to be her own support? She had only Kaoru, and, strangely, things might have been easier had she found herself in superficial dalliance with an ordinary man. They had known each other for rather a long time, and she might have been tempted to let him have his way. His obvious superiority and his aloofness, coupled with a very low view of herself, had left her prey to shyness. In timid retreat, it seemed, she would end her days.

  Ōigimi tries to keep Kaoru at arm’s length and even considers offering Nakanokimi as a substitute for herself. One evening Kaoru, with the assistance of the princesses’ attendants, intrudes again behind their screens. In a panic, Ōigimi slips out and leaves the sleeping Nakanokimi behind. Kaoru is aware that he is with the other girl but spends the night beside her anyway—he finds her rather attractive. Nakanokimi believes, incorrectly, that her sister had allowed this to happen deliberately and refuses to speak to her. Kaoru decides to resolve the situation by bringing Niou to Nakanokimi at last. Niou is more than willing. Niou sneaks in to Nakanokimi’s side, much as Kaoru had done, while Kaoru spends another chaste night with Ōigimi, who is aghast at Kaoru’s subterfuge. The young men leave Uji, and Ōigimi convinces Nakanokimi that she had no part in the men’s plan. Niou returns each of the next two nights, thus sealing his marriage with Nakanokimi. The younger sister is won over by his charm. Because of his position and the scrutiny his activities receive in the capital, however, he is unable to visit as much as he would like thereafter. His mother and father, the empress and emperor, disapprove of his nocturnal wanderings. They force him to reside in the palace and to marry Yūgiri’s daughter Rokunokimi. Niou’s heart remains with Nakanokimi, but the princesses are greatly dismayed by rumors of his impending marriage combined with his failure to visit Uji. Kaoru makes plans to bring Ōigimi to the capital, but feeling responsible for leaving her sister prey to Niou’s apparent defection, she stops eating and begins wasting away. Kaoru is very concerned and commissions services for her recovery, but to no avail.

  He seldom left Ōigimi’s bedside, and his presence was a comfort to the women of the house. The wind was so high that Nakanokimi was having trouble with her curtains. When she withdrew to the inner rooms the ugly old women followed in some confusion. Kaoru came nearer and spoke to Ōigimi. There were tears in his voice.

  “And how are you feeling? I have lost myself in prayers, and I fear they have done no good at all. It is too much, that you will not even let me hear your voice. You are not to
leave me.”

  Though barely conscious, she was still careful to hide her face. “There are many things I would like to say to you, if I could only get back a little of my strength. But I am afraid—I am sorry—that I must die.”

  Tears were painfully near. He must not show any sign of despair—but soon he was sobbing audibly. What store of sins had he brought with him from previous lives, he wondered, that, loving her so, he had been rewarded with sorrow and sorrow only, and that he now must say goodbye? If he could find a flaw in her, he might resign himself to what must be. She became the more sadly beautiful the longer he gazed at her, and the more difficult to relinquish. Though her hands and arms were as thin as shadows, the fair skin was still smooth. The bedclothes had been pushed aside. In soft white robes, she was so fragile a figure that one might have taken her for a doll whose voluminous clothes hid the absence of a body. Her hair, not so thick as to be a nuisance, flowed down over her pillow, the luster as it had always been. Must such beauty pass, quite leave this world? The thought was not to be endured. She had not taken care of herself in her long illness, and yet she was far more beautiful than the sort of maiden who, not for a moment unaware that someone might be looking at her, is forever primping and preening. The longer he looked at her, the greater was the anguish.

  “If you leave me, I doubt that I will stay on very long myself. I do not expect to survive you, and if by some chance I do, I will wander off into the mountains. The one thing that troubles me is the thought of leaving your sister behind.”

  He wanted somehow to coax an answer from her. At the mention of her sister, she drew aside her sleeve to reveal a little of her face.

  “I am sorry that I have been so out of things. I may have seemed rude in not doing as you have wished. I must die, apparently, and my one hope has been that you might think of her as you have thought of me. I have hinted as much, and had persuaded myself that I could go in peace if you would respect this one wish. My one unsatisfied wish, still tying me to the world.”

  “There are people who walk under clouds of their own, and I seem to be one of them. No one else, absolutely no one else, has stirred a spark of love in me, and so I have not been able to follow your wishes. I am sorry now; but please do not worry about your sister.”

  She was in greater distress as the hours went by. He summoned the abbot and others and had incantations read by well-known healers. He lost himself in prayers. Was it to push a man toward renunciation of the world that the Blessed One sent such afflictions? She seemed to be vanishing, fading away like a flower. No longer caring what sort of spectacle he might make, he wanted to shout out his resentment at his own helplessness. Only half in possession of her senses, Nakanokimi sensed that the last moment had come. She clung to the corpse until that forceful old woman, among others, pulled her away. She was only inviting further misfortunes, they said.

  Was it a dream? Kaoru had somehow not accepted the possibility that things would come to this pass. Turning up the light, he brought it to the dead lady’s face. She lay as if sleeping, her face still hidden by a sleeve, as beautiful as ever. If only he could go on gazing at her as at the shell of a locust. The women combed her hair preparatory to having it cut, and the fragrance that came from it, sad and mysterious, was that of the living girl. He wanted to find a flaw, something to make her seem merely ordinary. If the Blessed One meant by all this to bring renunciation and resignation, then let him present something repellent, to drive away the regrets. So he prayed; but no relief was forthcoming. Well, he said presently, nothing was left but to commit the body to flames, and so he set about the sad duty of making the funeral arrangements. He walked unsteadily beside the body, scarcely feeling the ground beneath his feet. In a daze, he made his way back to the house. Even the last rites had been faltering, insubstantial; very little smoke had risen from the pyre.

  Kaoru remains in Uji for some time, lost in grief. Niou receives permission from his mother to bring Nakanokimi to the capital and to install her in the Nijō mansion (which he had inherited from Genji and Murasaki). She moves in the Second Month of the following year. Kaoru wishes he could make Nakanokimi a substitute for her sister and berates himself for having let Niou have her. Niou settles down happily with Nakanokimi, who eventually bears him a son. Plans are made for Kaoru to marry the Second Princess, a daughter of the reigning emperor and half sister of Niou, but he is unenthusiastic about the match, still longing for Ōigimi, and makes advances toward Nakanokimi, who is rather distressed by the finalization of Niou’s marriage to Yūgiri’s daughter Rokunokimi. Nakanokimi manages to distract Kaoru by telling him about a half sister whom she has just met, the result of the Eighth Prince’s affair with one of his attendants. The girl, Ukifune, was never recognized by her father and had been living in the eastern provinces with her mother and stepfather, the governor of Hitachi. Told that she greatly resembles Ōigimi, Kaoru is intrigued. He catches a glimpse of her at the Uji bridge, on her way back from a pilgrimage to Hatsuse and, struck by her similarity to the princesses, resolves to have her.

  A Boat upon the Waters

  Ukifune’s boorish stepfather becomes angered by her mother’s partiality to the girl over his own children and disrupts her impending marriage to a guards lieutenant. The mother asks Nakanokimi to take the girl in, and Nakanokimi allows her to hide in the west wing of her house. The girl is shy and somewhat countrified, hut Nakanokimi is much moved by her resemblance to Ōigimi. The women of the household attempt to keep her presence there secret from Niou, but the incorrigible prince discovers her and makes advances to her. Nakanokimi’s women manage to thwart him, but Ukifune’s mother is horrified and moves the girl secretly to another residence. With the assistance of Bennokimi, Kaoru whisks Ukifune off to Uji and leaves her there while he prepares a house for her in the capital.

  Niou has been unable to forget the girl, and tries desperately to find out who she is. Eventually he succeeds in intercepting a letter from Ukifune to Nakanokimi and learns that Kaoru has a lady hidden at Uji. He sneaks off to Uji and gains admittance to the girl by pretending to be Kaoru. He notes Ukifune’s resemblance to Nakanokimi but is unable to discover her identity. Smitten, he spends two nights with her.

  Kaoru, meanwhile, having a brief respite from his duties, set off in his usual quiet way for Uji. He went first to pay his respects and offer a prayer at the monastery. In the evening, after distributing gifts to the monks whom he had put to invoking the holy name, he went on to the Uji villa. Though incognito might have been appropriate, he had made no attempt to hide his rank. In informal but careful court dress, he was the embodiment of calm nobility. How could she possibly receive him? thought Ukifune, in near panic. The very skies seemed to reproach her. The dashing figure of his rival came back to her. Could she see him179 again? Niou had said that she had every chance of driving all his other ladies away and capturing his affections for herself alone. She had heard that he was ill and had sharply curtailed his affairs, and that his house echoed with services for his recovery. How hurt he would be when he learned of this visit! Kaoru was very different. He had an air as of unsounded depths and a quiet, meditative dignity. He used few words as he apologized for his remissness and he said almost nothing that suggested loneliness and deprivation. Yet he did say, choosing his words most carefully, that he had wanted to see her, and his controlled earnestness moved her more than any number of passionate avowals could have. He was very handsome; but that aside, she was sure that he would be a more reliable support, over long years, than Niou. It would be a great loss if he were to catch word of the strange turn her affections had taken. Niou’s improbable behavior had left its mark, and she had to thank him for it; but he was altogether too impetuous. She could expect nothing of an enduring nature from him. She would be very sad indeed if Kaoru were to fling her away in anger.

  She was a sad little figure, lost in the turmoil of her thoughts. She had matured, acquired new composure, over the months. No doubt, in the boredom of country life, she
had had time for meditation.

  “The house I am building is almost finished.” His tone was more intimate and affectionate than usual. “I went to see it the other day. The waters are gentle, as different as they can be from this wild river, and the garden has all the flowers of the city. It is very near my Sanjō place. Nothing need keep us from seeing each other every day. I’d like to move you there in the spring, I think, if you don’t mind.”

  Niou could scarcely have known of his friend’s plans when, in a letter the day before, he had spoken of finding a quiet place for her. She was very sorry, but she should not yield further, she knew, to his advances. And yet his image did keep floating before her eyes. What a wretched predicament to be in!

  “Life was much easier and much pleasanter,” said Kaoru, “back in the days when you were not quite so given to tears. Has someone been talking about me? Would a person in my position come over such a long and difficult road if he had less than the best intentions?”

  He went to the veranda railing and sat gazing at the new moon. They were both lost in thoughts, he of the past, of days and people now gone, she of the future and her growing troubles. The scene was perfection: the hills were veiled in a mist, and crested herons had gathered at a point along the frozen strand. Far down the river, where the Uji bridge cut its dim arc, faggot-laden boats were weaving in and out. All the details peculiar to the place were brought together. When he looked out upon the scene it was always as if events of old were fresh before his eyes. Even had he been with someone for whom he cared nothing, the air of Uji would have brought on strange feelings of intimacy. How much more so in the company of a not unworthy substitute for Ōigimi. Ukifune was gaining all the while in assurance and discernment, in her awareness of how city people behaved, and she was more beautiful each time he saw her. At a loss to console her, for it seemed that her tears were about to spill over, he offered a poem: