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

by Murasaki Shikibu

  Her Cloistered Highness,23 to whom the Intendant's audacity had never been other than hateful and who did not wish him to live long, pitied him nonetheless when she heard the news. The way he had foreseen the birth of her son seemed to her to confirm that that dreadful incident had indeed been foreordained, and such were her many fears and sorrows that she, too, burst into tears.

  The skies were mild since it was the third month, and the time had come to celebrate the little boy's fiftieth day. Very fair and pretty, he was advanced for his age and babbled already. Genji came. “Are you feeling better now?” he asked. “What you did was such a waste! How gladly I would have seen you like this when you were as you used to be! It was cruel of you to leave me that way.” There were tears in his eyes, and his tone was bitter. He came daily, and now at last he began to treat her with the highest consideration.

  The fiftieth-day celebration of Kaoru's birth

  On the fiftieth day the baby's own parents were supposed to feed him mochii,24 and because of her unusual guise Her Highness's women were wondering what to do when Genji arrived. “Where is the difficulty?” he said. “His mother's habit might mean bad luck only if he were a girl.” He had a little room beautifully done up on the front, south side. The little boy's nurses were splendidly dressed, the things before him—fruit baskets and cypress partitioned boxes—were nicely done in all sorts of lovely colors, and the women inside and outside his blinds fussed over him with innocent pleasure, having no idea of the truth; and Genji watched it all and thought, What a dismally shameful business!

  Her Highness arose and turned away from Genji, acutely embarrassed that he had set aside the curtain that stood between them, to brush from her forehead the troublesome, thickly spreading ends of her hair. She was smaller and slighter than ever, and from the back one could hardly tell that there was anything different about her, since her hair had been left quite long, since it had seemed a pity to cut it.25 In her layer after layer of gray under a plum red veering to yellow, and with her profile that still hardly seemed a nun's, she more resembled a pretty child. Her figure conveyed an impression of charm and grace. “You are a sight!” Genji said. “It is a dull and depressing color, gray. I am glad I shall go on seeing you, even as you are now, but for various reasons I am extremely sorry to gather that my own stubbornly helpless and foolish tears are what made you forsake me like this. I only wish you could take it back.” He sighed. “If you leave me now, sorrow and shame will convince me that you yourself really did reject me. Please still have pity on me!”

  “I hear that someone like me, now, knows little of human feelings. What can I possibly say, then, since I have never known them anyway?”

  “Oh, what is the use? You certainly have had occasion to learn something about them!” Genji said no more and watched the little boy instead.

  The many nurses in waiting on him were both noble and handsome. Genji summoned them and instructed them on how to look after him. “Alas, to think that he has come into the world when I myself have so little time left!” he said. The baby was deliciously fair and plump, and he smiled winningly when Genji took him in his arms. He did not look much like what Genji remembered of the Commander at this age. The Consort's26 children favored His Majesty their father, and they had a properly imperial distinction, although they were not otherwise strikingly attractive. He was touched to find this little boy not only noble but charming, with lovely eyes and a ready smile. Perhaps it is just my imagination, he thought, but he really does look very much like him. Those eyes of his will have an extraordinarily lofty serenity, and what a delightful face! Her Cloistered Highness saw little of what he did, and her women knew nothing at all; it was therefore only in the secrecy of his own heart that he sighed and thought, Ah, how short a while he was destined to live!

  His tears threatened to fall like rain while he pondered the fragility of life, but he stealthily wiped them away because the character of the day forbade them,27 and he hummed to himself, “I have long known the sorrows of silent thought.”28 He felt as though his life were over, even though he was ten years younger than the poet, and melancholy absorbed him. He must have felt like adding the warning “Do not take after your father!”29

  One or two of her women must know what happened. How I wish she would understand me! But no, to her I probably look like a fool. Never mind my own part in this, though—I feel sorrier for her than for me. Genji's face betrayed none of these thoughts. How do that innocent babbling, those sweet eyes, and that dear mouth look to someone who does not know? The resemblance is very close, though. And to think that he left no more than this pitiful and completely unknown legacy—a child he could never have shown his parents, even though they were no doubt weeping for him to have one. Proud and accomplished as he was, he brought about his own destruction! Pity and regret drove the affront from Genji's heart, and he burst into tears.

  He approached Her Highness while all the women were elsewhere. “What does he mean to you? Are you really glad to have given up a child like this to turn your back on the world? What a thing to do!” She sat there, blushing.

  “Should anyone ask who it is who, in his time, cast that seed abroad,

  what reply will he then give, the pine planted on the rock?30

  I pity him,” he whispered; but she lay down without answering. He understood and did not press her further. What can she be thinking? She may lack depth, but even so, this cannot mean nothing to her! The effort to divine her feelings was very painful.

  The Commander longed to know what that hint the Intendant had felt impelled to give him could possibly mean. He would have let me know enough to work it out, since he had gone that far anyway, if only his mind had remained clear a little longer. What a sad end, and at how unfortunate a time, leaving his story unfinished that way! The Commander could not forget how his friend had looked then, and he was far more affected than the Intendant's brothers. Her Cloistered Highness was not that seriously ill when she renounced the world, he reflected, and she certainly had no difficulty making up her mind! And anyway, would His Grace have allowed it? I hear that when his lady was dying at Nijō, she begged him in tears to grant her the same thing, and the idea upset him so much that in the end he refused. The Commander pondered every clue. Yes, there must have been times when the Intendant failed to master that obvious leaning of his. He managed to maintain an unruffled surface, and he remained far more circumspect than most men, so much so that his composure made it hard to tell what he was thinking and even troubled those who knew him, but he had rather a weak side to him as well, and he was too emotional—that must be why. Passion or not, how could he have allowed a forbidden desire to overwhelm him at the cost of his own life? What a terrible thing for her! What business did he have to go and destroy himself? Perhaps that was his destiny after all—who knows?—but it was a foolish, monstrous thing to do! Such were the Commander's private reflections, but he said nothing about them even to his wife, and he could not broach the subject to Genji either, without sufficient reason. Still, he looked forward to seeing the expression on Genji's face when he told Genji that the Intendant had brought it up.

  The Intendant's mother and father remained lost in tears and knew nothing even of the sad passage of the days, and so they left arranging the vestments for the funeral, fitting out the room, and making all the other preparations to their sons and daughters. The Right Grand Controller was charged with looking after the scripture texts and the sacred images. Whenever anyone drew his attention to the seventh-day scripture readings, His Excellency would only say vacantly, like one no longer among the living, “Please do not speak to me about it. My anguish might only detain him on his way.”

  The Princess at Ichijō was naturally hurt that she had not seen the Intendant before he died, and although his most trusted retainers still came to offer her their services, her large residence seemed lonelier and more deserted with every passing day. The sight of the grooms and falconers wandering aimlessly and disconsolately in an
d out with his favorite hawks or horses often reminded her how endlessly sorrow can be renewed. There were the furnishings he had favored, and the biwa and wagon he had liked to play, now unstrung and mute: how painful her solitude was now!

  One forlorn and dreary day she was gazing sadly at the garden's budding trees and at the flowers that always return in their time, surrounded meanwhile by women in mourning gray, when an escort's loud warning shouts were heard outside, and someone stopped before her house. “Oh, I thought it was my late lord!” one of the women exclaimed, weeping. “I had forgotten!” It was the Commander, who sent in word that he had arrived. The Princess had assumed that it must be the Controller, the Consultant, or one of the others as usual, but then in he came, as dauntingly elegant in his person as he could possibly be.

  A seat was prepared for him in the aisle outside the chamber. He was far too grand to be treated like any other guest, and the Haven herself received him.

  “This tragedy affected me even more than those who were naturally bound to feel it,” he began, “but the constraints of custom prevented me from offering my condolences earlier, and by now I mourn him more as another might. He entrusted me at the end with certain instructions that could not leave me indifferent. No one escapes life's sorrows, but now that he is gone, I mean for as long as I live to show you in every way within my power that I remain devoted to you. It might not have been proper for me to confine myself long in your company at a time when there were so many rites addressed to the gods,31 and I delayed calling on you for that reason, because I would only have been disappointed to have to remain standing in your presence.32 The darkness in any parent's heart is one thing, but what I have seen and heard of His Excellency's suffering suggests vividly how deeply your daughter must feel about all that she and the Intendant shared, and I confess that I am overcome.” He often wiped his eyes and blew his nose as he spoke. Despite his dazzling distinction he was very warm and kind.

  The Haven answered him with tears in her voice. “Sorrows are the way of this fickle world. No pain they cause us can ever be new, and in that spirit I try to be brave, burdened though I am by the years, but I fear for her in her despair, because she seems unlikely to survive him long, and after all I have endured, I tremble that I may have lived on only to see the end of everyone dear to me. I did not welcome him at first, as he may have told you, since you both were so close, but I found His Excellency's enthusiasm difficult to deny, and since His Cloistered Eminence, too, seemed quite satisfied, I gathered that my feelings would not prevail. I therefore accepted him, although to my great regret I conclude from this nightmare that I would have done well to insist more on my own opinion. I never imagined things turning out as they did. I am old-fashioned enough to believe that as a rule it ill becomes a Princess to marry, regardless of the outcome, but I doubt that it would do her reputation any harm if she were now to mingle her smoke with his, since it has in any case been her destiny to be caught betwixt and between. I most certainly cannot resign myself to the idea, however, and I still give her my tenderest care. Your warm and repeated expressions of concern, which I doubtless owe to your friendship with him, have been a great comfort, and I wish you to know how grateful I am. He was not as attentive to her as I could have hoped, but those touching last words he spoke to you are a ray of light in the darkness.” He gathered that she was weeping bitterly.

  He could not immediately stop his own tears. “Perhaps this was indeed the way so remarkably accomplished a man was destined to meet his end,” he replied, “because two or three years ago he began looking very downcast and melancholy, and I often warned him, despite my own want of sense, that a man who sees too far into life and thinks about things too deeply becomes too detached from them to be attractive and only loses whatever luster he may have had; but he seemed merely to find my opinion shallow. My heart goes out above all to Her Highness, if I may say so, in the quite natural intensity of her grief.” After speaking very warmly and kindly, and staying a little longer than he might have done, he took his leave.

  Although five or six years older than the Commander, the Intendant had retained all the grace and charm of youth. The Commander himself surpassed everyone else, thanks to his robust dignity and to a figure so manly that his face alone conveyed youth's true beauty. It gave the young gentlewomen a little relief from their sorrows to watch him go. Near the house stood a magnificent cherry tree that reminded him of the poem “I beg you, just this year!”33 but that one had an unlucky ring, and instead he hummed, “I shall see you no more.”34

  “When that season comes, it still blossoms as before with beauty unchanged,

  this familiar cherry tree that has yet lost a great branch.”35

  He voiced the poem casually, and while he stood there, the Haven promptly replied,

  “Now that spring is here, the fresh-budding willow fronds gleam with dewdrop pearls,

  for they know not what awaits blossoms scattered from the bough.”36

  Although not as deep as some, she had been known as an Intimate for her stylishness and wit. It seemed to the Commander that she indeed deserved her reputation.

  He went on to His Excellency's, where he found many of His Excellency's sons. Upon being invited in, he entered the reception room, where His Excellency composed himself sufficiently to receive him. His Excellency's still handsome figure was more sadly wasted than any filial son's, and his beard was more ragged with neglect.37 The sight was too painful to endure, but the Commander shrank from any unbridled display of tears and strove to conceal them. His Excellency wept and wept to think how particularly close the Commander had been to his son. They talked at length.

  His Excellency wet his sleeves more thoroughly still, as though with drops from the eaves in heavy spring rain, when the Commander described his visit to Ichijō. The Commander had written the Haven's “budding willow fronds” down on a piece of folding paper that he now gave to His Excellency. “I cannot see!” His Excellency lamented, wiping his eyes. The tearful expression with which he read it bore embarrassingly little resemblance to his usual look of stalwart pride. The poem was not actually remarkable, but “gleam with dewdrop pearls” so touched him that for some time his own tears overflowed. “That autumn when your mother passed away, I felt as though there could be no greater sorrow, but this restriction and that mean that a woman is seldom seen and most of the time never appears at all, so that my grief for her remained invisible as well. The Intendant's ability left much to be desired, but His Majesty always thought well of him, and when at last he became a man, a large number of people naturally began to look to him for appointment and promotion. Each of them in his own way must feel shock and sorrow. My own grief, though, has nothing to do with promotion and all that, or with what the world thought of him. I simply miss him unbearably, just as he was. I wonder how I shall ever recover.” His Excellency gazed up into the sky.

  The evening clouds were a misty gray, and he noticed only now that the branches were bare of flowers. He wrote on the same folding paper,

  “Wet with falling drops that rain from the trees above, it is upside down

  that this spring has clothed me in a cheerless garment of mist!”38

  The Commander replied,

  “He whom we have lost surely never imagined leaving you behind

  as though to say you should wear a garment of evening mist.”

  And the Right Grand Controller,

  “Ah, it is too cruel! When that blossom fluttered down before his own spring,

  who is it he meant to wear such garments of misty gray?”

  The funerary observances were unusually impressive. Naturally, the Commander's wife, but especially the Commander himself, added to the scripture readings deeply fond touches of their own.

  The Commander called often at the Princess's Ichijō residence. The skies of the fourth month somehow lifted the heart, and the color of the budding trees was lovely everywhere, but for that house, plunged in mourning, all things fed a life of
quiet woe, and he therefore set off there as he did so often. The grounds were filling with new green, and here and there in shadowed places, where the sand was thin, wormwood had made itself at home. The near garden, once so carefully tended, now grew as it pleased. A spreading clump of pampas grass grew bravely there, and he made his way through it moist with dew, mindful of the insect cries that autumn would bring.39 The outside of the house was hung with Iyo blinds,40 through which he caught cooling glimpses of the new season's gray standing curtains and of pretty page girls' hair and dark gray skirts—all of which was very pleasant were it not that the color was so sad.

  This time he sat on the veranda, where he was provided with a cushion. The women felt that it was rude to leave him there, and they tried to persuade the Haven to receive him as usual, but she had been feeling unwell lately and was half reclining. While they did what they could to divert him, he looked out sorrowfully on the trees that grew in the grounds, indifferent to human cares. There stood an oak and a maple,

  Veranda and blinds

  fresher in color than the rest and with their branches intertwined. “I wonder what bond they share, that their mingling branches should promise them both so happy a future?” he said, and he quietly went to them.

  “If that were to be, I would gladly share these boughs' close friendship with you,

  for the god who guards their leaves has declared that it is meet!41

  It is galling to be left this way outside your blinds!” he said, leaning on the lintel.

  The women nudged each other. “What a graceful, languishing figure he makes!”