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

by Murasaki Shikibu

  How could such a girl come to that pass in a place inhabited otherwise only by country people? she wondered. Perhaps her stepmother or someone like that took her on a pilgrimage and then deceitfully left her behind when she became ill. After that one request to “throw me in the river” she had not said a word more, which baffled the younger nun and made her long to restore the poor thing to health. Alas, the young woman never sat up at all but lay so strangely absorbed that she seemed unlikely to live, although the idea of abandoning her was too painful to contemplate. His Reverence's sister spoke of that dream she had had, and secretly she had the Adept to whom she had first appealed for prayers burn poppy seeds.12

  So the fourth and fifth months went by. In despair over her failure to bring about any improvement, she wrote to His Reverence: “Come back down from the Mountain! Please save her! That she is still alive at all suggests that she is not meant to die, but whatever it is that has possessed her apparently refuses to leave. My dearest and most saintly brother, you may well wish to avoid the City, but surely it can do you no harm to come here!”

  She implored him in such terms as these, and he reflected how strange it all was. What if I had abandoned her at the start? That I discovered her in the first place surely means that a tie already links me to her. Yes, I must do all I can to save her, and if I fail, I shall simply take it that her allotted span of life was over. He came down from the Mountain.

  His sister thanked him reverently and described the young woman's condition during the past months. “Anyone who remains ill this long could naturally be expected to suffer a good deal,” she said, “but her condition is no worse now than it was at the start. She has kept all her lovely looks, nothing about her is in the least distressing, and while she appears to be dying, she is, as you see, nonetheless still alive.” She wept bitterly.

  “She astonished me from the very moment I first saw her,” he replied. “Come, then.” He peeped in at her. “Yes, she is remarkably beautiful! It must be her reward for good deeds in the past to have been born with such looks! I wonder what slip of hers can have brought her so low. Have you not heard anything to suggest an answer?”

  “No, nothing at all. Well, actually, she is a gift from the Kannon of Hatsuse.”

  “Surely not! The Buddha vouchsafes such guidance in accordance with karmic ties, and in the absence of any such tie I do not see how it is possible!” With such wondering words as these he began his rites.

  Considering that His Reverence turned away requests even from the palace, it seemed to his sister that it might not redound to his credit if it were to be noised about that he had left deep retreat on the Mountain to pray earnestly for a woman who really meant nothing to him at all, and since his disciples agreed, she urged them to silence.

  “No, no, my worthies,” he said, “I will have no more of this from you. As a monk I am hopeless enough already, and I am sure that I violate this precept or that all the time, but I have never suffered reproach over a woman, nor have I ever erred in that direction. If I do so now, when I am over sixty years old, it will only have been my destiny.”

  “But, Your Reverence, the Buddha's teaching will suffer if evil-tongued people spread malicious rumors,” his disciples protested. They were not pleased.

  His Reverence made a mighty vow that the rite he was about to undertake would succeed, whatever it cost him, and he went at it the entire night. At dawn he successfully got the spirit to flee into the medium,13 whereupon he and the Adept, his disciple, redoubled their efforts to make it say what sort of power it was and why it was tormenting its victim this way.

  After months of refusal to declare itself, the conquered spirit now began to rant, “I am not someone you may force here and subdue. Once I was a practicing monk,14 and a little grudge against this world kept me wandering until I settled in a house full of pretty women. I killed one of them, and then this one chose to turn against life and kept saying day and night that she wanted only to die. That gave me my chance, and I seized her one dark night when she was alone. Somehow, however, Kannon managed to protect her after all, and now I have lost to this Prelate. I shall go.”

  “What is speaking?” But perhaps the possessed medium was weak by then, because there was no useful answer.

  The young woman's mind now cleared, and she returned somewhat to her senses and looked around. She did not see a single face she knew, and surrounded this way by decrepit old monks, she felt the loneliness of one who has come to an unknown land. She could not clearly recall where she had lived or who she was. I threw myself into the water (didn't I?) because I could bear no more. But where am I now? She tried and tried to remember, and at last it came to her that she had been in dark despair. They were all asleep, and I opened the double doors and went out. There was a strong wind blowing, and I could hear the river's roar. Out there all alone I was frightened, too frightened to think clearly about what had happened or what was to come next, and when I stepped down onto the veranda, I became confused about where I was going; I only knew that going back in would not help and that all I wanted was to disappear bravely from life. Come and eat me, demons or whatever things are out there, do not leave me to be found foolishly cowering here! I was saying that, sitting rooted to the spot, when a very beautiful man approached me and said, “Come with me to where I live!” and it seemed to me that he took me in his arms. I assumed that he was the gentleman they addressed as “Your Highness,” but after that my mind must have wandered, until he put me down in a place I did not know. Then he vanished. When it was over, I realized that I had not done what I had meant to do, and I cried and cried. She could get no further, for, she thought, After that I remember nothing. They say many, many days have passed, and here I am, a miserable foundling, now being tended by people I do not even recognize! Acutely ashamed, she regretted ever coming back to life. Despite being unconscious during her long illness, she had still taken a little food sometimes, but now she was upset enough to refuse everything, even the tiniest drop of medicine.

  Double doors

  “Why must you still be so frail?” His Reverence's sister asked in tears. “You used always to have a fever, and I am so happy that it is gone and that your mind seems to have cleared!” She never left her side and tended her devotedly; and her women looked after her equally lovingly, not wishing such beauty to be lost.

  At heart the young woman still wanted only to die, but life remained stubborn in her even after everything she had been through, and by and by she lifted her head and began once more to take nourishment, although her face continued to grow thinner and thinner. She said to His Reverence's sister, who was happily anticipating her full recovery, “Make me a nun, please! That is the only way I can go on living!”

  “How could I do that? It would be such a shame!” She had just a little hair cut from the top of her head and had her given the Five Precepts. Her young charge was not satisfied, but she was too vague and wavering to insist on better.

  “That will do, then. Just look after her now,” His Reverence said, and went back up the Mountain.

  For His Reverence's sister it was like a dream to devote herself to caring for such a young woman, and she was so happy that she made her sit up and combed her hair herself. It was not seriously tangled, despite having been neglected and left just lying, bound, beside her, and once properly combed, it proved to be beautifully lustrous. She made a dazzling sight here, where so many grizzled heads were only a year short of a hundred.15 It was as though the most exquisite angel had come down from the heavens.16 The thought disturbed His Reverence's sister a good deal.

  “Why do you seem to have so cruelly closed yourself against me, when I love you so much? Who are you? Where did you live, and how did you come to be where you were?”

  “I must have forgotten all that while I was in that strange state, because I remember nothing about what my life may have been before. My only dim memory is of sitting evening after evening staring out into the night and not wanting to live, unti
l someone appeared from under a great tree in front of me and, as it seemed to me, took me away. Otherwise I cannot even remember who I am.” She spoke with sweet innocence and added, weeping, “I do not want anyone to know that I am still alive. It would be too awful if anyone were to come looking for me.”

  The nun asked no further questions; they were obviously too painful. She was as wonder-struck as the old bamboo cutter must have been when he found Kaguya-hime, and she waited apprehensively to see through what crack she might vanish forever.

  His Reverence's mother, also a nun, had been a considerable lady. Her daughter, who had married a senior noble, had continued after his death to lavish care on their daughter and had married her advantageously to a cherished son-in-law; but then her daughter had died. The blow was so cruel that she turned inward, became a nun, and took up life in this mountain village, where, lonely and with little to do, she went on longing for someone to remind her of the daughter she so desperately missed, and she could hardly believe her good fortune now that so unexpected a treasure had come her way, one perhaps even lovelier than her own daughter had been. Astonished she was indeed, but also glad. Although now getting on in years, she retained her fine looks and an air of great distinction.

  The river ran more quietly here than at Uji, and the house had a certain charm. It stood in a handsome grove, and the near garden was prettily laid out and nicely tended. With autumn coming on, the sky had a moving quality, and young women sang their rustic songs while harvesting the rice fields nearby. There was something pleasing, too, about the sound of the bird clappers. It all reminded her of the East she had once known. The place was somewhat farther into the hills than that house of evening mists once inhabited by the mother of Her Highness, the wife of His Excellency of the Right, and it was built against a steep slope, so that the shadows were dark there beneath the pines, and the wind sighed mournfully. Quiet reigned while the nuns occupied themselves with their devotions. They had little else to do.

  On moonlit nights His Reverence's sister often played the kin, accompanied on the biwa by the nun known as Shōshō. “Do you play?” she asked her guest. “You have so little to occupy you!”

  Whenever these old women indulged in their pastimes, she recalled her unfortunate upbringing and the way she had never had the time for such things. Why, she thought, I grew up without acquiring a single accomplishment! It was very bitter to be so hopeless, and she wrote casually, as though for practice,

  “Oh, who built that weir across the river of tears, when in its swift stream

  I had cast myself to drown, and detained me in this life?”17

  She resented it deeply, and in fear of the future she recalled the moment with hatred.

  Every night when the moon was bright, the old women composed elegant poems and talked over their memories. Since she could not join in, she would gaze out absently at the sky.

  “It has been my lot to inhabit once again this world of sorrows,

  yet in the moonlit City nobody will ever know.”

  There had been many people whom she missed when she resolved to die, but she hardly remembered them now, apart from imagining her mother's anguish and the bitter disappointment of her nurse, who had always so longed to see her honorably settled. Where are they now? she wondered. How could they know that I am still alive? Sometimes there also came to her the memory of the Ukon with whom she had talked over everything, for she had had no one else with whom to share her feelings.

  A young woman cannot easily resign herself to giving up all other hope and shut herself away like this in the hills, and the only people in service here were seven or eight other nuns, all very old. Their daughters and granddaughters, some in service in the City and some not, came visiting from time to time. Any of them might be serving one of the gentlemen she herself had known, and she foresaw the acute shame she would feel if either chanced to learn that she was alive after all, since he would then imagine her reduced to the most demeaning circumstances. For that reason she kept completely out of sight.

  The nun who looked after her had given her two of her own women, Jijū and Komoki,18 but neither resembled in looks or wit the “city birds”19 she had known. She resigned herself to the thought that this must be just what the poem meant by “a place not in the world at all.”20 Her insistence on remaining hidden convinced the nun that she must have a compelling reason, and she told no one else in the household anything about her.

  The nun's former son-in-law was a Captain by now. His younger brother, a monk, had become His Reverence's disciple and was on retreat with him on the Mountain, where his brothers often went to visit him. The path to Yokawa took the Captain past the nun's house, and his escort's cries announced the arrival of a considerable gentleman. The young woman looked out at him, and what she saw recalled vividly the image of that lord who had come to her secretly at Uji. It was just as drearily quiet and lonely where she was now, but the nuns long resident here had made the place very pretty. The hedge was full of charming pinks and of maidenflowers and bluebells just coming into bloom, and there among them now were young men in hunting cloaks of many colors. Meanwhile their master, similarly dressed, sat gazing out sadly from the south aisle where he had been received. He was a fine-looking man of twenty-seven or -eight, visibly cultivated in manner.

  The nun spoke to him from behind a curtain placed in the sliding panel doorway. “The old days seem to recede farther and farther as the years go by,” she said, “and it is a wonder to me that I need not forget you even now but may still look forward to the light of your presence in this mountain village.”

  “My heart is as moved as ever by the memory of the past, which is always with me, but I regret that I frequently neglect you, now that you have so thoroughly removed yourself from the world. I often visit my brother on the Mountain, envying him his retreat there as I do, but so many people wish to come with me that I usually prefer to avoid inflicting them on you. Today, however, I have managed to reduce their number.”

  “It seems to me that when you say you envy your brother's retreat on the Mountain, you are only repeating sentiments that are in fashion these days, but there are nonetheless many times when I am grateful to you for not bowing sufficiently to the world's ways to forget everything that is over now.”

  She had her visitors served rice and so on, and for the Captain she brought out as well such delicacies as lotus seeds. Knowing her as he did, he felt no constraint, and when a shower discouraged him from continuing on his way, he stayed for a quiet talk. Why, she thought, he is even more admirable in character than my daughter, and it is very sad indeed to think of his becoming a stranger again. I wonder why my daughter never even left a child for me to remember her by. She missed her daughter so badly that even the Captain's rare visits seem to have set her off on interminable speeches about how much they touched and pleased her.

  The young woman, who by now was so like the nun's own daughter, looked utterly charming gazing out at the scene, filled with memories of when she had been properly herself. In her pitilessly plain white shift and the drab, dark trousers they gave her to wear, no doubt because everyone here wore ones the color of cypress bark, she suffered from the sad contrast between her present state and the one she had once enjoyed, although she looked quite lovely even in this stiff, rough cloth.

  “My lady,” the old nuns said as they attended their mistress, “it feels just as though your daughter were with us once more, and how wonderful it would be if his lordship the Captain were to agree! It would be so nice to have him coming again as he did then! They would make such a fine couple!”

  Oh, dear, no! the young woman thought. I will never marry, not for as long as I live! It would only remind me of what is past. No, I will never again have anything to do with that sort of thing!

  The nun went back into the house for a moment, and the Captain was anxiously watching the rain when he recognized the voice of the nun known as Shōshō. He called her to him. “I expect that all of you wh
om I knew then are still here,” he said, “but it is so difficult for me to make these visits that I am afraid you must think me very fickle.” Shōshō had once served him intimately, and her presence brought back the days when he and his wife were happily married. “When I came in past the end of that gallery, a puff of air opened the blind a moment, and I spied some long, long hair,” he said. “It seemed to me that she must be beautiful. It was a surprise, since all of you here have renounced the world, and I wondered who she could be.”

  Shōshō realized that he must have glimpsed her mistress's young lady from behind, just as she was leaving, and she wanted to give him a much better look; she knew that he would be impressed. Why, he seems not yet to have forgotten his wife, and she was not nearly as pretty! She replied, “My lady, whom nothing could ever comfort after her loss, has to her great surprise found a young lady who delights her eyes day and night. I wonder how you managed to see her in so unguarded a moment.”

  What extraordinary things can happen! the Captain reflected with growing interest. Who can she be? The very brevity of that delightful glimpse had graven it vividly in his memory. However, Shōshō gave him no real answer when he sought to discover more. “You will know all in good time”: that was all she would say, and he could hardly insist on questioning her further. Besides, his men were announcing, “The rain has stopped, and it is almost sunset!” At their urging he therefore prepared to go.

  He picked some maidenflowers that grew nearby and stood humming to himself, “How come the maidenflowers to bloom so beautifully?”21