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

by Murasaki Shikibu

  Ben assumed that they had not far to go, but it turned out that they were off to Uji. The Commander had provided for a change of oxen. By daybreak they had left the bank of the Kamo River and reached Hōshōji.46 Now that Jijū could see him a little, she forgot every demand of decent manners and gave in to rapt and longing wonder.

  The young woman herself lay facedown, dazed by the shock. “The rocky places are very difficult,” he said, taking her in his arms. The silk gauze long dress hung to divide the carriage47 glowed in the light of the newly risen sun, and the nun felt excruciatingly out of place. Ah, she reflected sadly, it is His Late Highness's eldest daughter I should have seen like this with the Commander! What strange surprises old age can bring! Her face puckered up, and despite her best efforts she wept. The heartless Jijū thought her perfectly horrid. Why, she thought, she doesn't belong here anyway at the happy start of a marriage! What business does she have blubbering away like that? She just took it for granted that old people are all too given to tears.

  The young woman was his now, and the Commander certainly found her very nice, but under such skies his sense of loss only mounted, and the farther they went into the hills, the more thickly the mists seemed to rise around him. His sleeves as he leaned on an armrest, lost in thought, trailed away out of the carriage, one on the other, wet with the mists of the river. The scarlet of the gown looked wrong against the petal blue of the dress cloak:48 he noticed it at the top of a steep slope and drew them both in.

  “Now that she is mine, to keep fresh that memory, how the morning dew

  settles in fast-falling drops on these sadly moistened sleeves!”

  he murmured unconsciously. At this the nun only drenched her sleeves the more, to young Jijū's disgust and dismay, for it seemed to her that their happy trip had taken on a thoroughly dismal character. Ben's stifled sniffling started the Commander quietly blowing his nose as well.

  Concern for the feelings of the young woman beside him prompted him to observe, “It saddens me, somehow, to think how often I have taken this path over the years. Do sit up a little and look at the colors on the hills. You are so silent!” He made her sit up, and the way she looked out shyly, her face prettily hidden behind her fan, struck him as remarkably similar, except that she seemed all too worryingly meek and mild. His lost love had had a childlike quality, too, but also what depth of reflection! His sorrow, which still had nowhere to go, seemed capable of filling the vast, empty heavens.49

  He thought when they arrived, Ah, perhaps her spirit is still lingering here, watching me! And whose fault is it, then, if I myself am still wandering back and forth this way? After alighting he made sure that she was comfortable before going off elsewhere. He was so kind, and he spoke to her so gently, that despite bitter sighs over what her mother might be thinking, she plucked up the courage to get down as well. The nun took care not to alight at the same spot but had the carriage brought round to her gallery, which the Commander thought excessive in a setting that really required no such punctiliousness. From his estates he summoned as usual a bustling throng of men. The nun provided the young woman's meal. The journey had taken them through dense and gloomy woods, but here all was bright and open. After those days spent in dreary isolation, she enjoyed seeing how the design of house and grounds took advantage of the riverside setting and of the colors of the hills, but she still wondered nervously what he meant to do with her.

  He sent letters to the City. “I had left the altar decorations unfinished, so I hurried down here today, since the day is propitious. Now, however, I am feeling unwell, and I have also remembered that I should be in seclusion. I shall take care to stay here today and tomorrow.” So he wrote, more or less, both to his mother and to Her Highness his wife.

  She was shy when he came in looking even better in casual dress, but she sat there without feeling any need to hide her face. The layered colors she had on were ones that she thought became her, but they had a touch of the country about them, and all he could think of was her noble grace then, in those comfortably soft clothes she wore. However, he could appreciate the lovely sweep and neatly trimmed end line of her hair. Her Highness had had particularly beautiful hair, but this was just as good. What am I to do with her, though? he wondered. I do not like to imagine how people will talk if I make much of her and take her into Sanjō50 but at the same time I do not want just to treat her as one more gentlewoman. No, I must keep her hidden here awhile. Out of sympathy with her loneliness in his absence, he spent the rest of the day with her in intimate talk. He touched on the subject of His Late Highness and told her all sorts of amusing things about those days, but she remained so desperately shy and so bashfully unresponsive that he felt disappointed. Never mind, he thought, reconsidering, it is better to have her unfinished this way. I must teach her things. She would be no double of her if she liked to show off as rustics do, and if she were coarse and talked too fast.

  He called for the kin and the sō no koto that were in the house. Alas, he did not for a moment suppose that she could play them, and he therefore tuned them himself. He himself was surprised to touch such instruments here, not having done so for ages—not since His Late Highness had died. The moon rose while he toyed nostalgically with the strings. His Late Highness's music on the kin, although never powerful, was always so beautiful and so profoundly moving! That came back to him now, and he went on to say, “You would have a little more depth if you, too, had grown up here while they were both alive. Even I, who am no relation, remember His Highness with great affection. Why did you have to spend so many years in a place like that?”

  Her profile as she lay beside him, deeply embarrassed and fingering her white fan, was itself perfectly white, and the graceful lines of her hair brought her most poignantly to mind. Yes, he thought, I must cultivate in her a taste for such music. “Have you ever played an instrument like this, just a little?” he asked. “‘Ah, my darling!’—that koto51 is one you must have learned.”

  “How could I, when I never even learned Yamato speech properly?”52 she replied. She was not slow, he could see that. It would be painful for him, too, now, he knew, to have to leave her here and not to be able to come as he pleased. Yes, he certainly must have felt unusually strongly about her.

  He pushed his instrument away. “On the terrace of the King of So, music of an evening kin,”53 he sang; and the listening Jijū, who had known only men who draw the bow, was profoundly impressed. Actually, her admiration was somewhat misplaced because the color of the fan meant nothing to her—she did not know the story.54 It is all very well, the Commander thought, but why did I sing those lines?

  Refreshments arrived from the nun. Colored leaves, sprigs of ivy, and so on had been quite prettily disposed in the lid of a box, and the bright moonlight revealed that the paper on which they rested bore sturdy brush strokes.55 His haste to read them when he noticed them made him look unusually hungry.

  “A change of color has come over the ivy, now that it is fall,

  and yet how the past lives on in the brilliance of the moon!”56

  she had written in an old-fashioned hand. Moved and somewhat ashamed, he replied,

  “The name of this place means what it has always meant, yet the love I knew

  has assumed another face in the moonlight of our room.”57

  It was not really meant to be an answer, but they say Jijū took it to the nun.

  51

  UKIFUNE

  A Drifting Boat

  Ukifune (“drifting boat,” “boat adrift”) is Ukifune's simile for herself in her poem of reply to Niou as they cross the Uji River together in this chapter:

  “The enduring hue of the Isle of Orange Trees may well never change,

  yet there is no knowing now where this drifting boat is bound.”

  RELATIONSHIP TO EARLIER CHAPTERS

  “A Drifting Boat” begins where “The Eastern Cottage” and “The Ivy” end, and covers the beginning of Kaoru's twenty-seventh year.

 
; PERSONS

  The Commander, age 27 (Kaoru)

  His Highness of War, 28 (Niou)

  Her Highness, the wife of His Highness of War, 27 (Naka no Kimi)

  A young woman, her half sister, around 22 (Ukifune)

  A page girl of Naka no Kimi

  Shōshō, Naka no Kimi's gentlewoman

  The Chief Clerk and Deputy Commissioner of Ceremonial,

  Lord Michisada, Niou's retainer

  Nakanobu, the Chief Clerk's father-in-law and Kaoru's retainer

  Tokikata, the Deputy Governor of Izumo and Niou's retainer

  Ukon, Ukifune's gentlewoman

  Jijū, Ukifune's gentlewoman

  Ukifune's nurse, Nanny

  Ukifune's mother, the wife of the Governor of Hitachi (Chūjō no Kimi)

  Ben, a nun at Uji (Ben no Ama)

  Kaoru's messenger, a member of his escort

  Niou's messenger

  His Excellency, the Minister of the Right, 53 (Yūgiri)

  A Constable

  His Highness never forgot that all too approximate twilight encounter. She seems not to have been anyone of any great moment, he reflected, but in herself she was certainly very nice; and he chafed, ever the incorrigible gallant, at that frustration of his desire.

  “What a fuss you will make over a little thing like that! I would never have thought it of you!” he complained scornfully. Her Highness considered in her dismay telling him the whole story but then thought better of it. No doubt he has not given her the most elevated reception,1 she reflected, but he is sufficiently attached to her to keep her hidden away for himself, and if I were to tell His Highness about her, I cannot imagine him letting the matter pass. He is impossible. He has done each of the women here—every one who has at all caught his fancy—the injury of pursuing her even to her own home, and in her case he is quite certain to do something awful sooner or later, considering how long he has been smitten. If he gets news of her from somebody else, there it is—the result could be disaster for both, but there is simply no stopping him, and her being a relation would just make it worse. No, I will not have anything go wrong through any fault of mine. She therefore reluctantly told him nothing, and since she was not one to dissemble, she lived her life as might any other silently jealous woman.

  The Commander meanwhile maintained a most remarkably leisurely attitude. It always pained him to imagine her looking forward to his coming, but his situation gave him little latitude, and in the absence of any plausible reason for making the journey, it was harder for him to do so than if the gods themselves had forbidden it.2 I am going to look after her properly, he assured himself nevertheless. She will be my consolation in that mountain village, that much I have decided, and I must devise errands that will allow me to spend several quiet days with her there. Yes, now that I have her living where no one else can find her, I need only bring her round to seeing that it is all for the best; that way no one will have anything to say against me. Discretion is what matters. I would hate to have people thinking that it happened suddenly and wondering who she is and when it all began; that would not be what I have in mind. Besides, I do not like to imagine how the lady at His Highness's would feel when she found out; I would seem to have abandoned forever the place where I knew her and to have forgotten the past completely. Perhaps he was as usual being altogether too nonchalant. Still, he laid plans for bringing the young woman to the City and secretly had the necessary building work done.

  Fringed basket

  To the considerable surprise of Her Highness's women, he continued to wait on Her Highness as faithfully as before, although he seemed quite taken up otherwise by a great many things. She had come to know the world rather better, and the more she saw and heard of him, the more she admired a steadfast loyalty to the past that struck her by now as the very model of enduring homage to a cherished memory. But while age conferred growing personal merit and public esteem on him, her husband's waywardness often made her wonder at destiny's strange ways. Why had she ended up not at all as her sister had wished, but given over instead to these anxieties and cares?

  Still, she could not receive the Commander often. Too many months and years had come between what was now and what had once been, and to someone who did not know what he meant to her, she might look like an utter commoner for keeping up an old friendship that way, and considering who she was, she would do better to avoid flouting convention; besides, increasingly painful sensitivity to His Highness's endless suspicion made her so wary that she could not help distancing herself from him. Nevertheless, he continued to feel exactly the same regard for her as before. Meanwhile, quite apart from the strange unpleasantness provoked by his wanton nature, His Highness treasured his little son more and more as the irresistible child continued to grow, for he doubted that he would have another like him from anyone else, and his especially warm affection for his son's mother, with whom he felt so much more at home, allowed her to feel a little more secure than before.

  He came to her once the early days of the first month were past, and he was playing with his son, now a year older, when toward midday a little page girl came tripping in carelessly to Her Highness with a wrapped letter done up in thin, deep green paper, a fringed basket attached to a seedling pine, and a formal, straight-folded letter.

  “Where is all that from?” His Highness asked.

  “‘From Uji, for Mistress Taifu,’ the messenger said, but he did not quite know what to do with it, so I took it—I thought it should go to my lady as usual,” the girl replied. She seemed quite excited.

  “The basket is all colored metal,3 and the pine is so well done it looks almost real!” the girl explained brightly, wreathed in smiles.

  “Come, I want a look, too!” His Highness laughed, motioning for the things.

  “Take the letters to Taifu,” she said in dismay. She was blushing, which suggested to His Highness that they might be nicely disguised messages from the Commander; the fact that they were supposed to come from Uji certainly suggested as much. He took them himself. Still, he realized, it would be very awkward indeed if they were. “I shall open them, then,” he said. “Will you be angry with me?”

  “It is wrong, though! What business is it of yours to read casual letters between gentlewomen?” She spoke with affected calm.

  “In that case I shall read them! Now, what could a woman's letter be like?” He opened one. The writing was very youthful.

  “The year is over, and I have been out of touch so long,” it read. “This mountain village is a dreary place. There is always mist clinging to the hills.” And along one edge the sender had written, “Please give these to your little Prince—not that they are worth much, I am afraid.” Nothing about it showed any particular character, but he could not imagine who it was from, and he therefore read the straight-folded letter with particularly eager interest. It, too, was indeed in a woman's hand.

  “How are you getting on in the New Year? There must be all sorts of things happening to keep you amused. Here, the house is really very nice, but I do not think that it suits my lady well. I wish she would call on Her Highness now and then, instead of moping all the time as she does. It would do her good, but the idea seems to make her too timid and nervous. She sends a hare mallet for the little Prince and says please to give it to him when His Highness is away.” It was a talkative letter, and the writer insisted on her dreary circumstances regardless of words out of keeping with the season.4 He read it over and over, wondering.

  “Now, tell me,” he said. “Who wrote this?”

  “They say that the daughter of one of the women who used to live in the mountain village has gone back there again lately for some reason,” she replied. However, he noted that “she” seemed not to be just another woman in common service, and he thought back to that unfortunate incident.

  The delightful hare mallet was obviously the work of someone with a great deal of time on her hands. He found, tied to a branch of the forked seedling pine threaded with made
-up spearflower berries,5

  “While no breath of age has yet touched this little pine, I would have you know

  it carries every heartfelt wish for the health of my young lord.”6

  The poem had nothing unusual about it, but it caught his attention when he saw that it must be from the young woman who was so often on his mind.

  “Answer it. You really must. I see no reason why you should have kept it from me. Why are you looking so unhappy? Anyway, I shall be off,” he said, and left.

  Hare mallet

  She had a quiet word with Shōshō. “This means trouble, you know. How could that little girl have taken in letters that none of you even managed to notice?”

  “If we had noticed them, my lady, we would never have given them to you. That girl is a scatterbrain and much too forward. She does not promise well—the nice ones are the quiet ones.”

  “Now, now, you must not be angry with her. She is so little.” She had been given the girl as a page in the winter of the year before, and His Highness was extremely fond of her because she was so sweet and pretty.

  His Highness went off to his own rooms in the main house. How odd! he reflected. I hear the Commander has gone on making trips to Uji over the years, and someone was saying that now and again he secretly even stays the night. I thought at the time that it was going rather far for him to be spending nights off in a place where he should not be anyway, just to honor old memories, but now I see he must have someone hidden there! At last it all seemed to make sense.

  He summoned a Chief Clerk whom he employed as an authority on Chinese learning and who, he now remembered, had a close connection with the Commander's household. The man came. He asked him to take out some poetry collections for guessing rhymes and put them in a nearby cabinet. “By the way,” he said, “is the Right Commander still going to Uji? He has done the new temple beautifully, I hear. I should very much like to see it.”