The Tale of Genji: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (Junichiro Breakdown of Genji)

by Murasaki Shikibu

  Ben, a gentlewoman in the service of Fujitsubo

  A Master of Discipline, Genji's maternal uncle

  A Secretary Controller, nephew of the Empress Mother

  The Abbot of the Mountain, Fujitsubo's uncle

  The Captain, brother of Genji's late wife, Aoi (Tō no Chūjō)

  The Captain's second son, 8 or 9 when Genji is 25 (Kōbai)

  As the High Priestess's journey to Ise approached, her mother the Rokujō Haven felt increasingly miserable. Now that His Excellency's daughter, whose commanding rank she had so resented, was no more, people told one another that her time had come, and her own gentlewomen looked forward eagerly to the future; but when she considered Genji's subsequent silence and his shabby treatment of her, she recognized that something must really have happened to distress him, and she therefore put her feelings aside to prepare for a resolute departure.

  No Priestess had ever gone down to Ise with her mother before, but the Haven invoked anxiety over her daughter's welfare and held firm in her wish to put her troubled life behind her, even as Genji, disappointed that she really did mean to leave, now began at least sending her sympathetic letters. She felt unable to receive him in person. No doubt she sternly reminded herself that although he might think this decision unkind, seeing him would make things so much more difficult for her that she was not obliged to do so.

  Now and again she went home for a time, but so quietly that Genji never knew when to find her there. He was not free to call on her where she was living at present, and days and months therefore went by without a visit from him. Meanwhile His Eminence began often to feel unwell, although he was not alarmingly ill, and this burdened Genji with yet another care.

  Concern that she might condemn his cruelty and fear that others might actually agree decided him after all to set out for the Shrine on the Moor. He knew that she would be leaving soon, for it was the seventh of the ninth month, and she did indeed have a great deal to occupy her, but his repeated appeals to give him a moment whether or not he even sat down, coupled with her wish to avoid appearing too distant, overcame her misgivings and persuaded her that yes, she might converse with him as long as she kept something between them; and in this mood she began privately to look forward to his coming.

  Melancholy overwhelmed him as soon as he set out across the moor's vast expanse. The autumn flowers were dying; among the brakes of withering sedge, insect cries were faint and few; and through the wind's sad sighing among the pines there reached him at times the sound of instruments, although so faintly that he could not say what the music was. The scene had an intensely eloquent beauty. The ten or more close retainers in his escort were modestly outfitted, but he had dressed elaborately, despite the private character of his journey, and he looked handsome enough to give the setting a new charm for the young gallants with him. He asked himself why he had not come before and regretted having failed to do so.

  Brushwood fence

  Within a low, frail, brushwood fence stood a scattering of board-roofed buildings, very lightly built.1 The unbarked torii2 evoked a holy awe that reproved his own concerns, and the priests clearing their throats3 here and there or conversing with their fellows gave the precincts an air all their own. The fire lodge4 glowed dimly. With so few people about, a deep quiet reigned, and the thought that she had spent days and months here alone with her cares moved him to keen sympathy.

  He hid at a suitable spot by the north wing5 and announced his visit, at which the music ceased and he heard promising sounds of movement within. She showed no sign of receiving him in person, and he was not at all pleased to exchange mere commonplaces with her through a go-between. “You would not persist in keeping the sacred rope between us if only you knew how hard it is for me now to get away on so personal a quest,” he said earnestly. “A good deal is clear to me by now, you know.”

  His appeal moved her women to intercede for him with their mistress. “Yes, my lady,” they said, “it is a shame to leave him just standing there; one must feel sorry for him.”

  Oh, dear, she thought, I do not like the spectacle I am making—he can hardly think well of me for it; I would much rather not go out to him at all. She did not have the courage to treat him coldly, though, and at last she emerged amid reluctant sighs, delighting him with the grace of her form.6

  “I wonder whether, here,7 I might be allowed up on the veranda,” he said and promptly installed himself there. In the brilliant moonlight his movements had a charm unlike anyone else's. Too abashed now to make fluent excuses for his long silence, he slipped in to her under the blind a sakaki branch that he had picked, and he said, “This is the constant color8 that led me to penetrate the sacred paling, yet now you cruelly…”

  She answered,

  “When no cedar trees stand as though to draw the eye by the sacred fence,

  what strange misapprehension led you to pick sakaki?”9

  “This was where she was, the shrine maiden, that I knew, and fond memories

  made the scent of sakaki my reason to pick a branch,”10

  he replied. Despite the daunting character of the surroundings he came in halfway under the blind, and there he remained, leaning on the lintel that bounded the room.

  For years, while he could see her whenever he wished and she herself thought of him with longing, a proud complacency had made him somewhat indifferent to her; and then that shocking discovery of her flaw had cooled the last of his ardor and turned him away. Now, however, he was undone by all that this rare meeting brought back to him from the past, and he wept helplessly over what lay behind them and what might yet be to come. Her own failure to control emotions that she had seemed resolved never to betray affected him more and more, and he begged her to give up her plan after all.

  As he laid his whole complaint before her, his eyes on a sky perhaps lovelier still now that the moon had set, all the bitterness pent up in his heart melted away, and she, who had given up clinging to him, was not surprised to find her feelings in turmoil nonetheless. Meanwhile young scions of the great houses passed the time with one another while they wandered the grounds, presenting as they did so a scene of incomparable elegance.

  No one could ever convey all that passed between those two, who together had known such uncounted sorrows. The quality of a sky at last touched by dawn seemed meant for them alone.

  “Many dews attend any reluctant parting at the break of day

  but no one has ever seen the like of this autumn sky,”

  Genji said. Wavering and unwilling to leave, he very tenderly took her hand. An icy wind was blowing, and the pine crickets' faltering song so truly caught the mood of the moment that not even someone free of care could have heard it without a pang; no wonder, then, if in their deep anguish neither could find words of farewell.

  “There has never been a parting in the autumn untouched by sorrow,

  but oh, do not cry with me, pine crickets upon the moor!”

  she replied.

  Genji, who knew the vanity of all his regrets, heeded the coming dawn and left at last. The path he followed home was a very dewy one, while she, no longer resolute, mourned his going. His figure so recently glimpsed in the moonlight, that fragrance of his lingering nearby—her intoxicated young women threw discretion to the winds to sing his praises. “Oh, how can my lady set out on this journey,” they tearfully asked each other, “when to do so means leaving such a gentleman behind?”

  Genji's unusually expansive letter bent her wishes well enough to his own, but alas, she could not again reconsider her plans. He was capable of such eloquence in the service of romantic ambition, even when the affair did not interest him greatly, that regret and compassion must have truly inspired him when he reflected that someone who meant so much to him was now to leave and go her way.

  He gave clothing for the journey to her and even to her gentlewomen, as well as other furnishings of the finest, most ingenious design, but these things meant nothing to her. The nearer the day came,
the more continually she lamented, as though the thought were ever new, the cruel reputation she would leave behind and the sad fate that now awaited her. The High Priestess herself was young enough simply to be pleased that this often delayed departure should be settled at last. Some people in the world no doubt criticized the unprecedented step her mother was taking, even as others sympathized. Those whose standing spares them reproach in all they do are fortunate indeed. Alas, one singled out above the rest can act so seldom on her desires!

  On the sixteenth the High Priestess of Ise underwent purification in the Katsura River.11 His Majesty chose gentlemen of loftier ancestry and higher renown than usual for the imperial escort12 and the party of senior nobles. His Eminence's wishes, too, must have played their part in the matter.

  A letter came from Genji as the Priestess was setting out, one filled with the usual endless entreaties. It was attached to a mulberry-cloth streamer13 and addressed “To the High Priestess, in reverence and awe.”14 “The Thunder God himself would refrain, you know,”15 Genji had written.

  “Ye great gods of earth, who guard this Land of Eight Isles, if you can be kind,

  judge in favor of a pair to whom parting means such pain!

  I cannot think of you without wishing that you would not go.”

  He had answers, too, despite all there was to do. The Priestess had hers written by her Mistress of the Household:

  “If the gods of earth from aloft in the heavens issued their decree,

  they might hasten to denounce the lightness with which you speak.”

  Genji would have gladly gone on to the palace to witness what was to follow,16 but he thought that it might look odd of him to see off someone who was leaving him, and he therefore gave up the idea and lost himself in his musings. The High Priestess's reply, so grown-up in tone, made him smile. His interest aroused, he imagined her attractive beyond her years. Seduced as he always was by strange complications, he now rued his failure to see her for himself while she was young enough for that to be easily possible, and he assured himself that the vicissitudes of life might in time allow him to meet her after all.

  The personal distinction of mother and daughter had attracted many sightseeing carriages. The two arrived at the hour of the Monkey.17 For the Haven in her palanquin it was sad to see the palace again after so many years, and under circumstances so different from what her father, with his high ambition for her, had fondly brought her up to expect.18 She had married the late Heir Apparent at sixteen and been widowed at twenty. Now, as she again beheld His Majesty's dwelling, she was thirty,19 and this poem came to her:

  “No, I do not wish today to lament again a life I once knew,

  but deep in my heart I feel a vague, pervasive sorrow.”

  The High Priestess was fourteen. She was very pretty already, and her mother's careful grooming had given her a beauty so troubling that His Majesty's heart was stirred. He shed tears of keen emotion when he set the comb of parting in her hair.20

  A line of display carriages21 stood before the Eight Bureaus, waiting for the Priestess to come forth, and the sleeves spilling from them made a brilliant show that for many a privy gentleman evoked a painful parting of his own.22 She set out by night, and when the turn from Nijō onto Tōin brought her before Genji's Nijō residence, he was moved to send her mother this poem, caught in a sakaki branch:

  “Go then if you will, and abandon me today, but those sleeves of yours—

  will the Suzuka River not leave them wet with its spray?”23

  It was so dark then, and the commotion around the Haven so great, that Genji had no answer until the next day, from beyond the Barrier:24

  “Whether leaping spray from the Suzuka River wet my sleeves or not,

  whose thoughts will still follow me all the long way to Ise?”

  Her writing in this hasty note still conveyed great distinction and grace, but Genji wished that she might have shown a little more sympathy for his feelings. A thick fog shrouded all things this unhappy dawn as he stared before him, murmuring to himself,

  “I shall let my gaze rest upon where she has gone: this autumn at least,

  O mists, do not hide from me the summit of Ōsaka!”

  He did not go to the west wing but chose instead to spend the day in lonely brooding. What torments she must have known on her journey!

  Display carriage

  By the tenth month His Eminence's illness was serious, and all the world longed only to see him recover. His Majesty was acutely worried and called on him in person. His Eminence in his weakened condition spoke again and again of the Heir Apparent and then turned to the subject of Genji. “Keep nothing from him, great or small,” he said, “but seek his support in all things, as I have done while I lived. Despite his youth I believe that you need not fear to entrust him with government. He has the mark of one born to rule. That is why, considering the complexity of his situation, I did not make him a Prince but decided instead to have him serve the realm as a commoner. I beg you not to disregard my intention.”

  His last touching injunctions were many, but a woman has no business passing them on, and the little said of them here is more than enough. His Majesty was deeply saddened and promised repeatedly never to contravene his father's wishes. He was so handsome and so agreeably mature that His Eminence looked on him with happy confidence. The visit then had to end, and His Majesty hastened homeward more than ever burdened with sad forebodings.

  The Heir Apparent had wished to accompany His Majesty, but his doing so would have caused such a stir that he changed his visit to another day. He was very grown-up and attractive for his age,25 and he loved his father so much that his innocent happiness when he saw him again made a touching sight. His Eminence was greatly troubled to see his Empress dissolved in tears. He instructed the Heir Apparent on a wide range of matters, but the future of so young a boy still worried him greatly. On Genji, too, he urged repeated advice on how to serve the realm, as well as admonitions to look after the Heir Apparent. The Heir Apparent withdrew only late in the evening, his visit having caused no less of a commotion than His Majesty's own. Even then His Eminence could hardly bear to let his little son go.

  The Empress Mother had meant to call on His Eminence, too, but Her Majesty's presence beside him gave her pause, and while she vacillated, he quietly passed away. The court was distraught. Despite having renounced the throne he had continued to wield the powers of government just as he had during his reign, and now, with His Majesty so young and His Majesty's grandfather, His Excellency of the Right, so testy and impatient, the senior nobles and privy gentlemen all groaned to imagine what might await them when His Excellency came into his own.

  Her Majesty and Genji were even more stricken with grief. It goes without saying that everyone was profoundly moved to see Genji, the most brilliant presence among all his father's Princes, so devotedly perform the memorial rites. His beauty was perfect even in drab mourning. Last year the spectacle of mortality had convinced him that this world is dross, and this year he learned the same lesson, but although this loss confirmed him in his resolve,26 many ties yet restrained him.

  His Eminence's Consorts and others remained at his residence until the forty-ninth day, but they dispersed once it was past. On the twentieth of the twelfth month, under a lowering sky that threatened to seal off the world, Her Majesty found herself beset by stubbornly gathering gloom. Knowing the Empress Mother's mind as she did, she understood how painful it would be to inhabit a palace subject to this lady's will, and she saw that she could not remain forever as she was, absorbed in the memory of that noble presence whose intimate she had been for all those years. Now, when the others were going home, her sorrow knew no bounds.

  She was to move to her Sanjō residence, and His Highness of War came to accompany her there. Snow was blowing on a stiff wind, and by the time Genji arrived, His Late Eminence's residence was all but deserted. He began to speak of the past. His Highness observed that the five-needled pine befo
re Her Majesty's rooms was weighed down by snow and that its lower branches had died. He said,

  “Alas, that great pine whose broad shade inspired such trust seems to live no more,

  for the year's last days are here, and the lower needles fall.”27

  The poem was no masterpiece, but it caught their feelings so well that Genjis tears moistened his sleeves.

  Seeing the lake frozen from shore to shore, Genji added,

  “That face I once saw, clear in the spotless mirror of this frozen lake,

  I shall never see again, and I am filled with sorrow.”

  His quite artless words merely gave voice to his heart.

  Ōmyōbu offered,

  “The year soon will end, the spring there among the rocks is caught fast in ice,

  and the forms we knew so well vanish from before our eyes.”

  Many others put in poems of their own, but one could hardly record them all.

  The protocol for Her Majesty's return followed custom; perhaps it was her own state of mind that made the move unusually sad. She felt when she arrived that, far from having come home, she must have set out on a journey, because it came to her that she had hardly been back in all these years.

  The New Year had come, but without any festive display. All was quiet. Genji had heart only for solitude at home. When the time came for the appointments list,28 the horses and carriages that had of course thronged to his gate during his father's reign, and even more so in recent years, were few and far between, and few, too, the sets of bedding put out for his retainers on duty; instead, the sight of no one but trusted household officials, obviously with little urgent to do, reminded Genji unpleasantly that this was what things were to be like henceforth.