Traditional Japanese Literature

by Haruo Shirane

  The old nun nodded vaguely.

  The girl went back to her room. She did not like the thought of having anyone except the bishop’s sister touch her hair, and she could not dress it without help. She loosened the cords that had bound it up for the night. Though of course she had no one but herself to blame for what was about to happen, she was sad that her mother would not see her again in lay dress. She had feared that her hair might be thinner because of her illness, but could detect no evidence that it was. Remarkably thick, indeed, it was a good six feet long, soft and smooth and beautifully even at the edges.

  “I cannot think,” she whispered to herself, “that she would have wished it thus.”205

  The bishop arrived in the evening. The south room had been readied for him. Suddenly full of shaven heads, it was an even less inviting room than usual. The bishop went to look in on his mother.

  “And how have you been these last months? I am told that my good sister is off on a pilgrimage. And is the girl still with you?”

  “Oh, yes. She didn’t go along. She says, let me see, she’s not feeling well. She’d like to take her vows, she says, and she’d like you to give them to her.”

  “I see.” He went to the girl’s room and addressed her through curtains. Shyly, she came forward.

  “I have felt that only a bond from a previous life could explain the curious way we met, and I have been praying my hardest for you. But I am afraid that as a correspondent I have not been very satisfactory. You will understand, I am sure, that we clerics are supposed to deny ourselves such pleasures unless we have very good reasons. And how have you been? It is not an easy life women lead when they turn their backs on the world.”

  “You will remember that I had no wish to live on, and my strange survival has only brought me grief. But of course I am grateful, in my poor way, for all you have done. Do, please, let me take my vows. I do not think I am capable of the sort of life other women lead. Even if I were to stay among them, I do not think I could follow their example.”

  “What can have brought you to such a conclusion, when you have your whole life ahead of you? No, it would be a grave sin. The decision may at the time seem a firm one, but women are irresolute creatures, and time goes by.”

  “I have never been happy, not since I was very young, and my mother often thought of putting me in a nunnery. And when I began to understand things a little better I could see that I was different from other people, and must seek my happiness in another world.” She was weeping. “Perhaps it is because I am so near the end of it all—I feel as if everything were slipping away. Please, reverend sir, let me take my vows.”

  The bishop was puzzled. Why should so gentle a surface conceal such a strange, bitter resolve? But he remembered that malign spirit and knew that she would not be talking nonsense. It was remarkable that she was still alive. A terrible thing, a truly hideous thing, to be accosted by forces so evil.

  “Your wish can only have gained for you the smiling approval of the powers above. It is not for me to deter you. Nothing could be simpler than administering vows. But I have come down on most pressing business, and must tonight be at the princess’s side. The services begin tomorrow. In a week they will be over, and I shall see that your petition is granted.”

  But by then the younger nun would have come back, and she would surely object. It must be made to appear that the crisis was immediate.

  “Perhaps I have not explained how unwell I am. I fear that vows will do me little good if I am beyond accepting them wholeheartedly. Please. I see my chance today, the only one I shall be blessed with.”

  Her weeping had touched his saintly heart. “It is very late. I used to have no trouble at all climbing up and down the mountain, but I am old, and matters are no longer so simple. I had thought to rest here awhile and then go on to the city. If you are in such a hurry, I shall see to your wishes immediately.”

  Delighted, the girl pushed scissors and a comb box toward him.

  “Have the others come here, please.” The two monks who had been with him that strange night at Uji were with him again tonight. “Cut the young lady’s hair, if you will.”

  It was a most proper thing they were doing, they agreed. Given the perilous situation in which they had found her, they knew that she could have been meant for no ordinary life. But the bishop’s favored disciple hesitated even as he raised the scissors. The hair pushed forward between the curtains was altogether too beautiful.

  The nun Shōshō was off in another wing with her brother, a prefect who had come with the bishop. Saemon too was having a chat with a friend in the party; and such modest entertainment as they were capable of providing for these rare and most welcome visitors occupied most of the household.

  Only Komoki was present. She scampered off to tell Shōshō what was in progress. A dismayed Shōshō rushed in just as the bishop was going through the form of bestowing his own robe and surplice upon the girl.

  “You must now make obeisance, if you will, in the direction of your father and mother.”

  The girl was in tears, for she did not know in which direction that would be.

  “And what, may I ask, are you doing? You are being utterly irresponsible. I cannot think what our lady will have to say when she gets back.”

  But the proceedings were at a point beyond which expressions of doubt could only disturb the girl. Shōshō said no more.

  “… as we wander the three worlds,”206 intoned the bishop.

  So, at length, came release. Yet the girl felt a twinge of sorrow: there had in fact been no bonds to break.

  The bishop’s assistant was having trouble with her hair. “Oh, well. The others will have time to trim it for you.”

  “You must admit no regrets for the step you have taken,” said the bishop, himself cutting the hair at her forehead. He added other noble admonitions.

  She was happy now. They had all advised deliberation, and she had had her way. She could claim this one sign of the Buddha’s favor, her single reward for having lived on in this dark world.

  The visitors left, all was quiet. “We had thought that for you at least,” said her companions, to the moaning of the night wind, “this lonely life need not go on. We had looked forward to seeing you happy again. And this has happened. Have you thought of all the years that lie ahead of you? It is not easy for even an old woman to tell herself that life as most people know it has ended.”

  But the girl was serene. “Life as most people know it”—she need no longer think about that. Waves of peace flowed over her.

  But the next morning she avoided their eyes, for she had acted selfishly and taken no account of their wishes. Her hair seemed to scatter wildly at the ends, and no one was prepared to dress it for her in charitable silence. She kept her curtains drawn.

  She had never been an articulate girl, and she had no confidante with whom to discuss the rights and wrongs of what had happened. She seated herself at her inkstone and turned to the one pursuit in which she could lose herself when her thoughts were more than she could bear, her writing practice.

  “A world I once renounced, for they and I

  had come to nothing, I now renounce again.

  “Finally, this time, I have done it.”

  The poem moved her to set down another:

  “I thought that I should see the world no more,

  and now, once more, ‘no more’ is my resolve.”

  The captain is disappointed to discover that the beautiful woman who has been hidden away among the elderly nuns has taken holy vows and is no longer within his reach. Meanwhile, the bishop visits the empress and informs her of the discovery of the mysterious woman at Uji. The empress realizes that the woman is the lover whom her brother Kaoru had lost and who is now presumed dead. Kosaishō, a female attendant to the empress, conveys this information to Kaoru, who is astounded.

  “It sounds very much like someone I had been wondering about,” Kaoru replied guardedly. “And is she still at Ono?”r />
  “The bishop administered vows the day he came down from the mountain. She insisted on it, even though everyone wanted her to wait until she had regained a little of her strength.”

  The place was right, and not one of the circumstances was at variance with what he knew. Half hoping he would be spared the knowledge that it was indeed she, he cast about for a way to learn the truth. He would present an awkward figure if he were to lead the hunt himself. And if he were to treat Niou to the sight of his restlessness, his friend would no doubt seek ways to block the path the girl had chosen. Had Niou extracted a vow of silence from his mother? That would explain her curious reluctance to talk about a matter so extraordinary. And if Niou was already part of the conspiracy, then however strong the yearning, Kaoru must once again consign Ukifune to the realm of the dead. If indeed she still lived, then some chance turn of the wind might one day bring them together, to talk, perhaps, of the shores of the Yellow Spring.207 He would not again think of making her his own.

  Though the empress was evidently determined not to discuss these events, he found another occasion to seek her out.

  “The girl I told you about, the one who I thought had died such a terrible death—I have heard that she is still alive. She has come on unhappy circumstances, I am told. It all seems very unlikely—but then the way she disappeared was unlikely too. I find it hard to believe that she hated the world enough to think of such desperate measures. And so the rumors I have picked up may not be so unlikely after all.” And he described them in more detail. He chose his words carefully when they touched upon Niou, and he did not speak at all of his own bitterness. “If he hears that I would like to find her he is sure to credit me with all the wrong motives. I do not propose to do anything even if I discover that she is still alive.”

  “I was rather frightened when I had the story from the bishop, and did not listen as carefully as I should have. But how could my son possibly have learned of it? I know all about his deplorable habits, and have no doubt that news of this sort would send him into a fever. The talk I pick up about his little escapades worries me terribly.”

  He knew that she would never, in what seemed to be the frankest of conversations, let slip something she had learned in confidence.

  The mystery haunted him, day and night. In what mountain village would the girl be? How might he with dignity seek her out? He must have the facts directly from the bishop of Yokawa. He made solemn offerings on the eighth of every month, sometimes at the main hall on Mount Hiei, sacred to Lord Yakushi.208 This time he would go on to Yokawa. He took the girl’s brother with him. He did not mean to tell her family for the moment, not until he had more precise information. Perhaps he hoped that the boy’s presence would bring an immediacy to an encounter that might otherwise seem unreal. If the girl in the bishop’s story should indeed prove to be Ukifune, and if, further, she had already been the victim of improper advances, even in strange new dress, off among strange new women—the truth would not be pleasing.

  Such are the thoughts that troubled him along the way.

  In the next and final chapter, “The Floating Bridge of Dreams,” Kaoru visits Yokawa and asks the bishop about the woman who took vows at Ono and comes to the conclusion that it must be Ukifune. Seeing Kaoru’s reaction, the bishop regrets having given Ukifune the tonsure. The next day, Kaoru sends Ukifune’s half-brother (Kogimi) to Ono with a message for Ukifune, who refuses to meet the visitor. The tale ends with Kaoru wondering if someone has been hiding Ukifune the way he had hidden her.

  [Translated by Edward Seidensticker]

  DAUGHTER OF TAKASUE

  The author of the Sarashina Diary was the daughter (b. 1008) of Sugawara no Takasue, a provincial governor and a direct descendant of Sugawara no Michizane, the noted literary figure and politician; she also was the niece of the author of the Kagerō Diary. In 1017, at the age of ten or so, the author went with her father to Kazusa Province (present-day Chiba Prefecture), where he had been appointed as governor. Then, at the age of thirteen, in 1020, she returned to the capital. The events of this journey are recorded in great detail at the beginning of the diary. In 1039, at the age of thirty-one, she went into court service as part of the entourage of Princess Yūshi, who was being raised in the Takakura Palace of her foster father, the regent Fujiwara no Yorimichi. A year later, the author’s marriage to Tachibana no Toshimichi brought her back to her parents’ home, but she continued to serve Yūshi intermittently, particularly while her husband, Toshimichi, was posted to Shimotsuke Province (present-day Tochigi Prefecture) in 1041/1042. Her marriage is only hinted at ambiguously in the diary itself, primarily with a sense of deep disappointment. It is apparent from the latter half of the diary, however, that her marriage and the subsequent birth of her son brought her both economic and spiritual security. She also continued to enjoy periodic visits to her colleagues at court, and her life provided ample opportunities for travel in the form of pilgrimages. But when her husband suddenly died in 1058, her situation took a turn for the worse, and in the latter part of the diary the author laments the loneliness of old age.

  SARASHINA DIARY (SARASHINA NIKKI, CA. 1059)

  The Sarashina Diary is known for its vivid, poetic description of the trip from Kazusa in the east to the capital, which occupies the first part of the narrative, and for its depiction of the author as a young girl absorbed in tales (monogatari). Indeed, the diary provides important evidence for the popularity of The Tale of Genji among readers one generation after its composition. In the Sarashina Diary, Daughter of Takasue reflects on more than fifty years of her life, making it, among the many kana diaries of the Heian period, the only work that covers such a long expanse, from girlhood to old age.

  As a person brought up in the back of beyond, even farther than the end of the road to the East Country,209 how uncouth I must have been, but however it was that I first came to know about them, once I knew that such things as tales existed in the world, all I could think of over and over was how much I wanted to read them. At leisure times during the day and evening, when I heard my elder sister and stepmother tell bits and pieces of this or that tale or talk about what the Shining Genji was like, my desire to read these tales for myself only increased—for how could they recite the tales to my satisfaction from memory alone? I became so impatient that I made an image of the Healing Buddha, in my own size, and performing purification rituals when no one else was around, I would secretly enter the room. Touching my forehead to the floor, I would pray with abandon, “Please grant that I should go to the capital as soon as possible where there are so many tales, and please, let me get to read all of them.” Then, the year I was thirteen, it did come about that we were to go up to the capital. On the third day of the Ninth Month, we made a preliminary start by moving to a place called Imatachi, Departing Now.210

  At sunset, a heavy unsettling fog drifted in and covered the house where I had been so used to playing for years; it was turned inside out with goods all dismantled and scattered about in preparation for our departure. Looking back, I was so sad to leave behind the Buddha standing there where I used to go when no one else was looking and touch my forehead to the floor, and without others knowing, I burst into tears.

  The place to which we decamped had no protective enclosures; it was just a temporary thatched hut without even shutters and the like. Bamboo blinds and curtains had been hung. To the south, one could gaze out far in the direction of the moor. To the east and west, the sea was nearby, so fascinating. Since it was wonderfully charming, when the evening mists rose over the scene, I did not fall even into a shallow slumber, so busy was I looking now here, now there. I even found it sad that we were going to have to leave this place. On the fifteenth day of that same month, as the rain poured out of a dark sky, we crossed the border of the province and stopped at a place called Raft, and indeed the rain fell so hard it seemed as though our little hut might float away. I was so frightened I could not sleep a wink. In the midst of the moor, there was a place
with a small hill on which there were only three trees standing. We stayed the day there drying out the things that had been soaked in the rain and waiting for the others in our party who had got off to a later start.

  We left early on the morning of the seventeenth. Long ago, a wealthy man named Mano lived in Shimousa Province. We crossed a deep river by boat where it is said there are the remains of the house where he had tens of thousands of bolts of cloth woven and bleached. There were four large pillars standing in the river’s flow that apparently were the remains of his old gate pillars. Listening to the others recite poems, I composed to myself,

  kuchi mo senu

  Not rotted away,

  kono kawabashira

  if these pillars in the river

  nokorazu wa

  did not remain,

  mukashi no ato o

  how could we ever know

  ikade shiramashi

  the traces of long ago?

  That night we stayed at a place called Kuroto, Black Beach. On one side, there was a wide band of hills, and where the sand stretched whitely into the distance, groves of pine grew thickly; the moon was shining brightly; the sound of the wind was thrilling and unsettling. Moved by the scene, people composed poems:

  madoromaji

  I will not sleep a wink!

  koyoi narade wa

  If not for this evening, then when

  itsuka mimu

  could I ever see this?

  Kuroto no hama

  Kuroto’s black beach beneath

  aki no yo no tsuki

  the moon of an autumn night.