His household was distraught, while more messengers came from the palace than raindrops from the sky. He was very sorry to know that he was causing His Majesty such concern, and he did his best to rally his own strength. His Excellency visited him daily, and thanks perhaps to his attentive ministrations, Genji's indisposition all but vanished after twenty days and more of grave illness, and he seemed bound for recovery.
That night the seclusion imposed on Genji by his defilement came to an end, and he repaired to his apartment at the palace out of consideration for His Majesty, who had felt such anxiety on his behalf. His Excellency came for him there in his carriage and inquired solicitously about his period of seclusion. Genji felt for a time as though all this were unreal and he had returned to life in an unknown world.
By the twentieth of the ninth month he was quite well. He was extremely thin, it is true, but for that very reason his beauty had acquired a new and special grace. He was also prone to spells of vacant melancholy and of tears, which inspired curiosity and gave rise to the rumor that he must be possessed by a spirit.
Early one quiet evening he had Ukon come to him for a chat. “I still do not understand,” he said. “Why did she keep me from knowing who she was? It would have been cruel even of ‘a diver's daughter,’ if she had really been one, to ignore my obvious love and to keep me so much at a distance.”
“Why should she ever have wished to hide who she was from you, my lord? When might she have seen fit to tell you her own, wholly insignificant name? You came to her from the start in a guise so strange that, as she herself said, she could not quite believe you were real. Your very insistence on keeping your identity from her made it clear enough who you were, but it hurt her that you seemed so obviously to be seeking only your own amusement.”
“What an unfortunate contest of wills! I had no wish to remain distant from her. But, you see, I still have very little experience of the kind of affair that others might criticize. In my position I must be cautious about a great many things, for fear above all of reproof from His Majesty, and I simply do not have the latitude to go courting any woman I please, because whatever I do could so easily open me to reproach. Still, I was so strangely drawn to her after that first evening's chance exchange that I risked visiting her after all, which I suppose was proof enough that the bond between us was foreordained. How sad it all is, and how bitter! Why did she take such complete possession of my heart, if she and I really were destined to be with each other so briefly? Do tell me more about her. Why withhold anything now? I am having images made every seven days for her memorial services: to whom should I silently dedicate them?”69
“Very well, my lord, I see no reason not to give you the answers you seek. I had only wished to avoid gossiping after my lady's death about things that she herself had kept hidden while she lived. Her parents died when she was still young. Her father, known as the Third Rank Captain,70 was devoted to her, but he seems to have suffered greatly from his failure to advance, and in the end he became too discouraged to live on. After his death it happened that his lordship the Secretary Captain, then a Lieutenant,71 began coming to see her, and he continued to do so quite faithfully for three years. Last autumn, though, she received terrifying threats from the residence of the Minister of the Right,72 and these so frightened her, for she was very timid, that she fled to hide at her nurse's house in the western part of the City. Life there was very trying, and she wanted to move to the hills, but this year that direction became closed for her,73 and she avoided it by making do instead with the poor place where to her dismay, my lord, you at last came upon her. She was so exceptionally shy that she felt embarrassed to be seen looking unhappy, and she pretended to be untroubled whenever she was with you.”
So that was it! Genji now understood, and her memory touched him more deeply than ever. “I have heard the Secretary Captain lament losing a child. Was there one?”
“Yes, my lord, born in the spring the year before last: a lovely little girl.”
“Where is she? You must not tell anyone else about her—just give her to me. It would be such joy to have her in memory of her mother, who meant so much to me.” And he continued, “I should really tell the Secretary Captain, but then I would only have to put up with his pointless reproaches. I see no reason why I should not bring her up. Please make up a story for the nurse who must have her now, and bring her here.”
“I shall do so gladly, my lord. I do not like to think of her growing up so far out in the west of the City. My lady left her there only because she had no one else to look after her properly.”
While peaceful twilight dimmed to evening beneath a lovely sky, a cricket sang falteringly from the fading garden, and here and there the autumn colors glowed. Surveying the pleasures of this scene, so like a painting, Ukon wondered to find herself in such delightful surroundings and blushed to recall the house of the twilight beauties.
A dove's throaty call from amid the bamboo brought back to Genji, with an affectionate pang, her look of terror when one had called that night at the old mansion. “How old was she? I suppose it was clear enough from her extraordinary frailty that she was not to live long.”
“I believe my lady was nineteen. Her nurse's death left me an orphan, and when I remember now how kind my lady's father was, and how he brought me up with his own daughter, I hardly know how I shall go on living. By now I wish I had not been so close to her. I spent such long years depending on a mistress who was after all so very fragile!”
“It is frailty that gives a woman her charm, though. I do not care for a woman who insists on valuing her own wits. I prefer someone compliant, perhaps because I myself am none too quick or self-assured—someone easy for a man to take advantage of if she is not careful, but still circumspect and happy enough to do as her husband wishes. I know I would like such a woman more, the more I lived with her and formed her to my will.”
“I am very, very sorry, my lord,” said the weeping Ukon, “when I think how perfectly my mistress matched your ideal.”
The sky had clouded over, and the breeze had turned cold. Genji murmured in blank despair,
“When the clouds to me seem always to be the smoke that rose from her pyre,
how fondly I rest my gaze even on the evening sky!”
Ukon could give him no answer, and she thought with an aching heart, If only my lady were still alive!
In memory Genji treasured even the noise of the fulling blocks, which he had found so intolerable at the time. “The nights are very long now,”74 he sang to himself as he lay down to sleep.
The young boy from the Iyo Deputy's household still went now and again to wait on him, but he no longer brought his sister the same sort of messages, and she decided unhappily that Genji had finally given her up. Still, she was sorry to learn that he was ill. Her impending departure on the long trip to her husband's province was causing her such misery that she tested Genji to find out whether he had really forgotten her.
“I gather that you are not well,” she wrote, “yet I cannot properly express my wishes for you.
You have failed so long to inquire why I have failed to ask about you,
perhaps you will understand all the turmoil of my thoughts.
‘But I am the one’ is perfectly true.”75
Her letter was a surprise, but he had not forgotten his feeling for her. “Nothing now to live for? Are those your words or mine?
Once I learned from you how trying this world can be, this cicada shell,
and see how I again hang upon your every word!
Mine is a very slender hope!” The meandering writing from his trembling hand was extremely engaging. It both pleased and pained her that he had not forgotten the shell the cicada had left behind in her flight, but she had not meant to draw him closer, despite the warmth of this exchange; her only wish had been to remind him that she was not after all unworthy of his interest.
Genji heard that that other young woman had accepted the Chamberlain Lieu
tenant, and he wondered uncomfortably what the man could be thinking.76 At the same time he wanted to know how she was getting on, and so he wrote to her via the boy: “Do you know how I pine for you?
Had I not at least tied that little knot around the reed by the eaves,
what excuse would I have now to voice my dewdrop complaint?”77
He tied the note to a tall reed and cautioned the boy to be careful. Still, as he assured himself with reprehensible self-satisfaction, the Lieutenant will probably be forgiving if the note unfortunately comes to his attention and he sees who sent it.
The Lieutenant was away when the boy gave it to her. Her hurt at Genji's neglect was tempered by pleasure that he had remembered her, and she gave the boy an answer for which her only excuse was that she had composed it in haste:
“Whispers on the wind murmuring of bygone ties leave the lowly reed
stricken with melancholy and half prisoner of frost.”78
She made up for her poor handwriting with elaborate touches that lacked any quality at all. He recalled her face in the lamplight. Ah, that partner of hers, so primly seated across from her, was the one he could not dismiss! Still, this artless creature had carried on so brightly and confidently that she made a pleasant memory, too.
No, he had not yet learned his lesson, and he seemed as susceptible as ever to the perils of temptation.
On the forty-ninth day79 he secretly had the Sutra read for her in the Lotus Hall80 on Mount Hiei, providing the vestments and every other accessory that a generous performance of the rite might require. Even the text and altar ornaments were of the finest quality, and Koremitsu's elder brother the Adept, a very saintly man, did it all beautifully.
Genji asked a Doctor, a former teacher he knew well, to come and compose the dedicatory prayer.81 When he wrote out what he wished to have in it, not naming the deceased but stating that since one dear to him had passed away he now commended her to Amida's mercy, the Doctor said, “It is perfect as it is, my lord; I see nothing to add.” Genji's tears flowed despite his effort to control himself, and sorrow overcame him.
“Who can she have been?” the Doctor asked. “Lacking any clue to who she was, I can only wonder at the loftiness of the destiny that led her to inspire such grief in so great a lord.”
Genji called for the trousers that he had secretly had made as an offering,82 and he murmured,
“Amid streaming tears today a last time I knot this, her trouser cord—
ah, in what age yet to come will I undo it again?”
He understood that until now she had been wandering restlessly, and as he called passionately for her on Amida, he wondered what path she might at last have taken.83
His heart beat fast whenever he saw the Secretary Captain, and he wanted to tell him that the “little pink” was growing up, but fear of his friend's reproaches kept him silent. At the house of the twilight beauties the women longed to know where their mistress had gone, but they could discover nothing; they could only lament the strangeness of what had happened, since no word reached them even from Ukon. Among themselves they whispered that judging from his deportment the gentleman must have been you-know-who, though of course no one could be sure, and so they presented their complaint to Koremitsu; but Koremitsu ignored them, claimed complete ignorance, and pursued his affair as before, leaving them more confused than ever. They decided that he had been the amorous son of a provincial Governor who had whisked her off to the provinces for fear of the Secretary Captain.
The house belonged to a daughter84 of the nurse who lived in the west of the City. With vehement tears this nurse's three children all accused Ukon, to them an outsider of not telling them what had become of their mistress because she did not care about them. Ukon herself well knew the scolding they would give her, and Genji's determination to keep the secret prevented her from even asking after the little girl, of whose fate she therefore remained painfully ignorant.
Cypress-wood fan
Genji always hoped to dream of his lost love, but instead, on the night after the forty-ninth-day rite, he glimpsed the woman who had appeared beside her in the deserted mansion, just as she had been then, and with a shiver of horror he realized that the tragedy must have occurred because she haunted the ruinous old place and had taken a fancy to him.
The Iyo Deputy started down to his province early in the tenth month. Genji sent particularly generous farewell presents, “since the ladies are traveling with you.” He also had special gifts—unusually pretty combs, fans in abundance, and elaborate offering-wands85 —conveyed privately to a certain lady in the party,86 together with that gown of hers that he had been keeping.
“This has been to me a mere token of yourself till we meet again,
but my tears in all that time have crumbled the sleeves away,”
he wrote, together with many others things too tedious to record.
Genji's official messenger returned without a letter from her, but by her little brother she sent him a reply about the gown:
“Now cicada wings are cast off and we have changed out of summer clothes,
I cannot help shedding tears, seeing this gown back again.”
Genji kept thinking that it was after all her own extraordinary stubbornness that had distanced him from her.
Today was the first of winter, and of course cold rain was falling from a mournful sky. He spent the day staring despondently before him, murmuring,
“One of them has died, and today yet another must go her own way,
bound I know not to what end, while an autumn twilight falls.”
No doubt he understood by now how painful a secret love can be.
I had passed over Genji's trials and tribulations in silence, out of respect for his determined efforts to conceal them, and I have written of them now only because certain lords and ladies criticized my story for resembling fiction, wishing to know why even those who knew Genji best should have thought him perfect, just because he was an Emperor's son. No doubt I must now beg everyone's indulgence for my effrontery in painting so wicked a portrait of him.
5
WAKAMURASAKI
Young Murasaki
Waka means “young,” while mura-saki, a plant whose roots yield a purple dye, means also the dye and its color. In poetry murasaki purple stands for close relationship and lasting passion. In this chapter Genji comes across a little girl very like Fujitsubo (she is Fujitsubo's niece), who to him is murasaki, and whom he immediately wants for himself.
“How glad I would be to pick and soon to make mine that little wild plant
sprung up from the very root shared by the murasaki.”
Murasaki comes in time to refer to the girl herself and to work more or less as her name.
RELATIONSHIP TO EARLIER CHAPTERS
“Young Murasaki” begins in the spring when Genji is eighteen, while “The Twilight Beauty” ends late in the previous year, but there is little narrative link between them.
PERSONS
Genji, a Captain in the Palace Guards, age 18
A holy man
His Reverence, a distinguished Prelate (Kitayama no Sōzu)
The son of the Governor of Harima, a retainer of Genji's (Yoshikiyo)
A former Governor of Harima, around 50 (Akashi no Nyūdō)
His daughter, 9 (Akashi no Kimi)
Koremitsu, Genji's foster brother and confidant
A girl of about 10 (Murasaki)
A nun, the girl's grandmother and the Prelate's sister, past 40
(Kitayama no Amagimi)
Shōnagon, Murasaki's nurse
His Highness of War, Murasaki's father, 33 (Hyōbukyō no Miya)
The Secretary Captain, Genji's brother-in-law and great friend (Tō no Chūjō)
The Left Controller, a half brother of Tō no Chūjō (Sachūben)
His Majesty, the Emperor, Genji's father (Kiritsubo no Mikado)
His Excellency, the Minister of the Left, Genji's father-in-law, 52 (Sadaijin)
Her Highness, Princess Fujitsubo, 23
Ōmyōbu, Fujitsubo's gentlewoman
Genji, who was suffering from a recurrent fever, had all sorts of spells cast and healing rites done,1 but to no avail; the fever kept returning. Someone then said, “My lord, there is a remarkable ascetic at a Temple in the Northern Hills. Last summer, when the fever was widespread and spells failed to help, he healed many people immediately. Please try him soon. It would be dangerous to allow your fever to become any worse.” Genji sent for him, but the ascetic answered that, being now old and bent, he never left his cave.
“Then I shall have to go very quietly to see him.” He set off before daybreak with only four or five especially close retainers.
The place was a little way into the mountains. The blossoms in the City were gone now, since it was late in the third month,2 but in the mountains the cherry trees were in full bloom, and the farther he went, the lovelier the veils of mist became, until for him, whose rank so restricted travel that all this was new, the landscape became a source of wonder.
The temple impressed him as well. The holy man lived near a high peak amid forbidding rocks. Genji climbed there without announcing who he was and quite plainly dressed, but there was no mistaking him.
“Ah, this is too great an honor!” the holy man exclaimed in great agitation. “You must be the gentleman who desired my presence the other day. I have lost all interest in this world by now, and I have given up my healing practices altogether. What has brought you all this way, my lord?” He smiled as his eyes rested upon Genji.
The Tale of Genji: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (Junichiro Breakdown of Genji) Page 14