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

by Murasaki Shikibu

  Genji smiled. “Then who else but me will pity your sad fate?” he said. Her reply struck him as not at all unworthy.

  He went away after giving Ukon a series of instructions.

  Genji was delighted to be so pleased with her, and he told the lady who reigned over his household all about her. “I was all ready to deplore her sad state, considering the way she grew up among mountain rustics, but not at all—she actually impressed me. I must let people know I have a girl like this here and confound those gentlemen—His Highness of War, for example—who are so fond of coming to call. The gallants are all very prim and proper when they turn up, but that is only because there has been no one like that here to set them off. I shall make a great fuss over her. We shall see how gallant they really are.”

  “You make a strange father. Your very first thought is to get people all worked up. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

  “Why, yes, I should have fussed over you and tested them the same way, if only I had had a mind for it then. What a fool I was! I missed my great opportunity!” He laughed, and she blushed most youthfully and beautifully. Drawing an inkstone near, he jotted down,

  “Yes, my love lives on, just as it did long ago; yet, O tendril wreath,

  say what long and winding stem led you all the way to me!50

  Dear me!” he sighed to himself, and he really did strike her as deeply affected by this reminder of someone whom he had once loved very much.

  He described the young lady he had discovered to the Captain, too, and he commended her to his affection. The Captain accordingly went to visit her. “You should have called on me, although I am hardly worthy, because I am at your service,” he gravely declared. “I can only apologize for having failed to present myself on the occasion of your move.” It was a painful speech for those who knew the truth.51

  Her room in Tsukushi had been beautifully done up, but now they saw as plain as day how thoroughly the place belonged to the country. The rooms here were so perfectly appointed, all in the height of fashion, and in dress and looks the gentlemen who now accepted their mistress as family were so dazzling that even Sanjō now despised the Dazaifu Deputy.52 The mere memory of the Audit Commissioner's attitude and manner was of course unspeakable. The young lady fully acknowledged all that the Bungo Deputy's devotion meant to her, as did Ukon, who often mentioned it, too. Genji himself selected and trained her household staff, fearing that any laxness might cause trouble. The Bungo Deputy joined them. He who had spent so long in rustic obscurity, and to whom a great lord's residence was normally inaccessible, now all at once was going in and out day and night, doing things and giving orders, and this pleased him very much. His Grace's most kind attention to every detail was greater than one could ever have been entitled to expect.

  As the year came to a close, Genji pondered his new arrival's New Year furnishings and the clothing for her gentlewomen, as he did for the greatest of his ladies, although he assumed disparagingly that her upbringing would have given her somewhat rustic tastes. He was meaning to give her these things, but when he saw all the stuffs that the weavers had so eagerly and magnificently supplied, all the long dresses and dress gowns in every color and style, he remarked to the lady of his house, “What a lot there are! We must let everyone have some, so that there are no hurt feelings.” He had brought out everything that his wardrobe staff or she herself had made. She was a great expert at this sort of thing, and her dyeing yielded such superb colors and shadings that he viewed her work with wonder. Looking over the beaten silks from both sources, he chose dark purple ones, red ones, and so on, put them in clothing chests or boxes, and with the help of experienced gentlewomen made them up into sets for each recipient.

  She looked on. “There is really very little to choose among them. When you make such a gift you have to consider the person's looks. It is all wrong when the costume fails to suit the wearer.”

  Genji smiled. “You are trying to find out what they all look like, aren't you, without letting on! Well, which would you like for yourself?”

  “But I know only what the mirror tells me,”53 she replied as bashfully as always.

  She got a grape-colored dress gown with a nice clear pattern in plum pink, over beautiful plum red; while a cherry blossom long dress over a glossy, softened gown went to her little girl. A sky blue “seaside” dress gown, beautifully woven but discreet in quality of color, over a softened, deep red-violet were for the lady of summer,54 and he allotted a kerria rose long dress over clear red to the new resident in her west wing.55 His companion imagined the young lady's appearance, all the while pretending not to watch. As far as she could make out (for Genji had been quite right), she was probably like her father, the Palace Minister: arrestingly handsome but lacking in grace.

  Her expression betrayed nothing, but it still upset Genji to see her so intent. “Oh, come,” he said, “your assimilation of their clothes to their looks might very well annoy them. These are fine garments, certainly, but their colors go only so far, while looks, even when less than perfect, can sink only so low.” With a secret smile he chose for the safflower a willow silk woven with a Chinese tendril pattern,56 and a very pretty one at that. With disapproval for the personal distinction they suggested she watched him set aside for Akashi a white dress gown, Chinese in flavor, with birds and butterflies flitting among plum branches, over glossy gowns in a deep purple. For the nun of the cicada shell57 he picked out a very handsome blue-gray dress gown and, from what he had chosen for himself, gowns of yellow and sanctioned rose; and he sent each a letter asking her to wear her gift on the day.58 Yes, His Grace meant to see how each of them looked.

  They replied with great care and rewarded Genji's messenger thoughtfully, but the safflower, who lived in Genji's east pavilion59 and so should have responded more coyly,60 being somewhat farther away, instead stuck precisely to convention, like the prim and proper person she was, and laid across the messenger's shoulders an orphan61 kerria rose gown with horribly grimy sleeves.

  Her letter was on thick, heavily perfumed Michinokuni paper, yellowed with age: “Forgive me, but this gift is not necessarily what I would prefer.

  When I have you on, bitterness is my reward: robe from far Cathay,

  I would gladly turn you back, now your sleeves are wet with tears.”62

  The writing was strikingly out of date. Genji, his face set in a grim smile, simply could not put it down, and she wondered what had got into him. Shock and distress at what his messenger had received gave him so black an expression that the messenger stole away. The gentlewomen were all busily whispering and laughing. Considering how impossible she was, with her hopelessly ancient ways, he wished despairingly that she had given the man nothing at all. His glance was forbidding.

  “Those old poets could never give up their ‘robe from far Cathay’ or their ‘sleeves wet with tears, could they,” he said. “Oh, I suppose I am one of them, too. No doubt there is something admirable about keeping to that single rut and never allowing oneself to stray into any freshness of language. Mention being among friends, for instance, and in a formal assembly of poets before His Majesty you must be sure to talk of ‘gathering in a ring.’63 And in those wonderful old contests of love, you could rest assured that your words went trippingly if only you got ‘O cruel tormentor!’ in at the break.”64 He laughed.

  “One can hardly sound very different from them if one absorbs all the manuals and lists of hallowed place-names65 and never deviates in one's own poems from the words they supply. She once gave me a book that His Highness of Hitachi,66 no less, had written on utility paper, and it was crammed with bits about ‘the essence of poetry’ or ‘defects to avoid’—so many that I was afraid it might paralyze a simpleton like me forever, so I gave it back. It was just too much trouble. For someone who knows all about poetry, hers is decidedly trite.” His amusement at the poor lady's expense was so unkind!

  “But why did you return the book?” she asked gravely. “You should have copied
it and shown it to our little girl. I had some like that, but the bugs ate them all. People who miss out on them really do not know what they are doing.”

  “I cannot imagine what good it would have done her. It is never becoming for a woman to identify herself too closely with something she especially likes. Not that one can approve her being wholly ignorant either. To please, a woman need only be poised, calm, and self-assured.”

  He showed no sign of composing a reply.

  “‘I would gladly turn you back,’ she wrote—it would be quite wrong of you not to return her favor yourself.”

  He therefore wrote something after all, as kindly as ever. There was no need to try very hard.

  “You would, so you say, turn that gift robe inside out—ah, how my thoughts go

  to the sleeves you spread alone through night after endless night!

  How well I understand!”

  23

  HATSUNE

  The Warbler's First Song

  The chapter title, which means “first song [of the year],” is from a poem that the lady from Akashi sends with a New Year's gift to the daughter whom she has not seen since Murasaki adopted her:

  “One who through the years has clung to a single hope, O let her today

  pine no more and hear at least the little warbler's first song!”

  RELATIONSHIP TO EARLIER CHAPTERS

  “The Warbler's First Song” follows “The Tendril Wreath.” “The Tendril Wreath” ends at the close of the year when Genji is thirty-five, and “The Warbler's First Song” takes place in the first month of the following year.

  PERSONS

  His Grace, the Chancellor, Genji, age 36

  Genji's lady, 28 (Murasaki)

  Chūjō, Murasaki's gentlewoman

  Genji's daughter, 8 (Akashi no Himegimi)

  The lady in the summer quarter (Hanachirusato)

  The young lady in the west wing, 22 (Tamakazura)

  Akashi, 27 (Akashi no Kimi)

  Her Highness of Hitachi (Suetsumuhana)

  The cicada shell (Utsusemi)

  The Captain, 15 (Yūgiri)

  The Controller Lieutenant (Kōbai)

  The sky on New Year's Day was bright and perfectly cloudless. Within the lowliest hedge fresh green now glimmered amid the snow, a promising haze of buds swathed the trees, and people's hearts, too, naturally seemed to swell with gladness. What delights there were to be seen, then, in the jewel-strewn garden before Genji's residence, and how poorly mere words convey the exquisite beauty of the gardens of his ladies! The one before the spring quarter, where the scent of plum blossoms mingled with the fragrance within the blinds, especially recalled the land of a living buddha, although actually the mistress of the place lived there in peace and quite at her ease. She had given her little girl the pick of the younger women in her service, and the ones who were somewhat older, hence all the more pleasingly dignified in manner and dress, were now clustered here and there, amusing themselves celebrating long life. They had even brought in mirror cakes1 to praise a year rich with the promise of a thousand more.2 Just then Genji peered in. “Oh, no, we are caught!” they cried, snatching their hands from the breast fold of their robes.3

  “How nicely you are all assuring your own good fortune! I expect each of you has her wishes. Tell me some of them. I shall look after praying for them.” To their eyes his smiling figure summed up all the felicity of the New Year.

  “We were talking about ‘even now I see,’4 my lord, and about what the mirror shows. Why, what could we possibly wish for ourselves?” the outspoken Chūjō5 replied.

  Crowds of visitors kept Genji busy all morning long, but toward sunset he prepared to call on his various ladies, for which purpose he dressed and groomed himself so beautifully that he certainly was well worth seeing. “I envied the women this morning, amusing themselves together that way, and I must show my lady one of those cakes,” he said and proceeded to sing the celebratory poems for her, sprinkling in a few risqué remarks as well.6

  “A thin sheet of ice has melted from the mirror of the garden lake,

  and I see reflected there two incomparable forms,”

  he said. They made a truly beautiful couple.

  “Plain as plain can be, I see there in the mirror of the pristine lake

  two forms destined to endure, spotless for ten thousand years.”

  So they exchanged as sweetly as you please promises to be each other's forever. Today was the day of the Rat7—indeed the day on which to look forward to a thousand springs.

  When Genji reached his daughter's, the page girls and maids were playing about on the garden hill, uprooting seedling pines, and the young gentlewomen were clearly impatient to join them. They were presenting their mistress with fringed baskets and partitioned boxes apparently sent specially from the northwest quarter.8 The warbler intriguingly perched on a magnificent branch of five-needled pine must have looked especially significant.9

  “One who through the years has clung to a single hope, O let her today

  pine no more and hear at least the little warbler's first song!

  The village where none sings…’”10 the lady had written, and Genji, who understood, was very sorry. He looked as though the ban on ill-omened words would be too difficult for him.11

  “You must answer her yourself. You cannot keep your ‘first song’ from her.” He provided her with an inkstone and made sure that she wrote. Her engaging looks never wearied even those who saw her day in and day out, and he felt guilty and sad for having kept her mother from her all this time.

  “Many years have passed since she was taken from you, yet the warbler still

  knows that she will not forget the pine whence she first took flight.”

  Child that she was, she naively did her assignment.12

  The summer quarter seemed extremely quiet, perhaps because it was out of season, and it nicely conveyed its occupant's13 unassuming yet dignified mode of life. The passage of time had only brought the two closer together and made them fonder of each other. Genji no longer insisted on intimacy between them. They confined themselves to exchanging unusually affectionate assurances of mutual regard. A curtain separated them, but she was still there when Genji moved it a little to one side. The sky blue was discreet, as he had foreseen, and her hair had known better days. She was quite acceptable as she was, but, he thought, she really ought to wear a wig—anyone else would be put off by looks like hers, though I myself am happy to stay by her this way. What if she had been less faithful and rejected me? Whenever he was with her, he took pleasure above all in his loyalty to her, as well as in her own steadiness of heart. He conversed with her at length about the year just past and then went on to her west wing.

  The young lady there had hardly settled in yet, but even so her style of life was pleasant to see. Her pretty page girls made a graceful picture, her gentlewomen were many, and while her furnishings no more than met her needs, handsome accessories, though still incomplete, still added distinction to her surroundings. She herself was dazzling in her perfectly chosen kerria rose. Her brilliance banished every shadow until all was light and loveliness, and one wished only to gaze at her. Her hair thinned out somewhat toward the ends, perhaps because of the trials she had suffered, and it fell with a beautiful, clean grace. She was in all ways so striking that Genji keenly appreciated what he would have missed if he had not known her, and he also understood how little he would be able to let her go. Although accustomed to being with him this way, face-to-face, she felt on reflection that many matters still came between them, matters sufficiently awkward to give her manner a delightful reticence.

  I feel as though I have known you for ages, he said. It is a pleasure to be with you, because, you see, my wish has been fulfilled. Please make yourself quite comfortable here, and come visiting over there, too, if you like. A certain young person there is taking her first koto lessons, and I hope that you will join her. No one there will look askance at you or show you any disrespect
.”

  “I shall do as you suggest,” she replied. It was just the right answer.

  As darkness fell, he went on to visit Akashi. When he opened the door from the nearby bridgeway, the breeze from within her blinds wafted him a sweet fragrance, and it seemed to him that this was where true distinction was to be found. She herself was not to be seen. He looked about him, wondering where she might be, and noticed papers and notebooks scattered beside the inkstone. He picked them up and glanced at them. A kin rested on a sitting cushion impressively bordered with Chinese brocade, while jijū incense smoldered in a strikingly fine brazier, perfuming all around it, and mingled deliciously with ebi fragrance.14 The scattered practice sheets displayed a writing of great interest and originality. Not that she had pretentiously shown off her learning by mixing in a lot of cursive characters;15 no, she had simply written naturally and pleasingly. The answering poem about the pine had been such a precious treat for her that among various touching old poems he found,

  Brazier

  “Ah, how rare a joy! From the blossoms where she lives, the little warbler,

  tree to tree, has come again to the valley she first knew!

  I had waited so long to hear her song!” There were also lines, like “My house is by the blossoming hill,”16 which she had written out for her own consolation. Genji's figure as he held the papers, smiling, was enough to put anyone to shame.

  He had just wetted a brush and begun to write when she slipped in, and he thought how very discreet she still was in her deportment, indeed how pleasantly so, and how unlike anyone else. She was wearing the white, and the sharp sweep of her hair, thinning modestly as it did toward the ends, so heightened her fondly remembered grace that he spent the night there, despite some apprehension about the trouble he might let himself in for at home. Others, elsewhere, deplored the favor she enjoyed. Some in the southeast quarter objected to her even more strongly.