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

by Murasaki Shikibu

  “Look how cautious he is being, lest we gossip about him!” the old women said to each other admiringly. “What a fine, handsome gentleman he has turned out to be! How nice if we could welcome him into the household again!”

  “They say that he often goes to the Fujiwara Counselor's, but that he is not really that eager and spends most of his time at his father's house,” their mistress observed; and to her new daughter she went on, “It is very unkind of you, you know, to keep us at such a distance. I hope you will agree that this was meant to be and treat him with favor. For five or six years I never for a moment left off mourning my daughter, but I have forgotten all about her now that I have you. I have no doubt that those who loved you are alive, but by now they must assume that you yourself are no longer in this world. The deepest griefs fade in time.”

  Tears sprang to the young woman's eyes. “I do not wish to keep anything from you, but coming so strangely back to life again has made everything seem a confusing dream. This must be the way one feels when reborn in an unknown world. There may still be people who knew me, but I do not remember them. The only person who means anything to me now is you.” How sweet and innocent she was! The nun sat gazing at her, smiling.

  The Captain arrived on the Mountain, to His Reverence's surprise, and the two spent some time in conversation. After deciding to stay the night, he had monks with fine voices chant the scriptures and spent the rest of the night making music. He mentioned during a long talk with his brother that he had stopped at Ono. “It was really very touching,” he said. “I know she has given up the world and all that, but even so, few women have her wit and taste.” And he went on, “A breeze lifted a blind a moment, and through the gap I caught a glimpse of a pretty girl with very long hair. I just got a look at her back as she was leaving—I suppose that she knew she might be seen—but there certainly was something remarkable about her. It seems to me that a girl of good family does not belong in a place like that. Nuns are all she ever sees, day in and day out. She probably thinks nothing of it by now, but it is a great pity.”

  “It must be the young woman whom I gather she found this spring under unusual circumstances, while she was on her pilgrimage to Hatsuse,” his brother replied, although he said no more because he had not seen her himself.

  “How extraordinary! Who can she be? I suppose that she must have decided to hide there because she wants no more of the world. It sounds like an old romance, doesn't it!”

  He could not resist calling at Ono again the next day, on his way back. The nun was prepared for him this time, and Shōshō's warm welcome, so reminiscent of bygone days, delighted him despite the color of her sleeves. The nun kept him company, too, and she was more than usually prone to tears. In the course of their conversation he ventured to ask, “Who is it that you have so discreetly living here?”

  His question troubled the nun, but he had clearly caught a glimpse of her, and it would only seem strange of her to deny it. “I could never forget my daughter, you know,” she replied, “and that seemed to me a very grave sin, but for the past several months she has consoled me for that loss. She seems to have many cares, although I do not know what they are, and she seems acutely distressed to think that anyone might find out she is alive. I cannot imagine anyone looking for her in the depths of this valley, though, and I wonder how you found out about her.”

  “I confess that a mere whim has brought me to you, but I hope that a traveler in these mountains may put his plea to you. I do not believe that you can remain insensitive to it, if she really is to you what another once was. Who is she, and what has led her to reject the world? I should so like to comfort her!” He was eager to know more.

  Before leaving again, he wrote on a sheet of folding paper:

  “Bend not to the breeze that flatters Adashino, O maidenflower,

  for my garden you shall be, though you are so far away.”22

  He had Shōshō take it to her.

  “Do answer him,” the nun urged her when she read it. “He is such a fine man—you need not mistrust him.”

  “But my writing is so poor! How could I?” She would not do it, which the nun thought very awkward.

  “As I told you,” she wrote back in her note, “she is more unworldly than anyone I have ever known.

  What I am to do I know not, who have planted a maidenflower

  here at the hut of grasses where I have renounced the world.”

  He understood that the young woman should feel that way, this first time, and on his way home he did not hold it against her.

  He hesitated to insist on sending her letters, but still, he could not forget that glimpse, and even though he knew nothing of her sorrows, the thought of her so absorbed him that a little after the tenth of the eighth month he took advantage of a hunt with small falcons23 to visit Ono again.

  As usual he called for Shōshō. “My heart, you see, has been troubled ever since I first saw her,” he explained; but the nun's new daughter gave no sign of replying to him on her own, and the nun herself sent out to him, “I think of ‘Mount Matsuchi’ when I see her.”24

  At last the nun received him. “Concerning the young lady who, I gather, now finds herself in such painful circumstances,” he said, “I hope that you will tell me more. My life goes so little as I would wish that I, too, should like to retire into the hills if I were not prevented from doing so by those whose opinion I am bound to respect. I am afraid that my gloomy character makes me a poor match for a person without a care in the world.25 I should prefer to confide my feelings to someone who has sorrows of her own.” Judging from the way he spoke, he was serious about her.

  “As to your desire for someone with her own cares, I believe that her conversation would please you, but the strength of her bitterness against this life makes her very unusual indeed. Even I, who have so few years left me, found it very painful when I actually came to turn my back on the world, and it is difficult for me to believe that she, whose youth promises her a fine future, will really persist in her present resolve.” She spoke as though she were indeed the young woman's mother.

  “You are not being kind,” the nun reproached her when she went back in. “Please answer him at least a word. It would only be right for someone living in a place like this to respond feelingly to the lightest remark.”

  Every attempt at persuasion failed, however. “I do not know how to talk to people, and as I am, there is no point in my trying.” She lay there, ignoring the nun completely.

  “What? That is too hard! Your talk of ‘plighted to a lover this autumn’26 was meant only to put me off!” He was angry enough to add,

  “I came from afar, drawn by the pine cricket's call and promised welcome,

  only to wander again through dew-laden fields of reeds.”27

  “The poor man! Surely you can at least answer this!” the nun pressed her; but she could not bear the thought of engaging in such banter, and besides, once she started, he would be after her again and again, and she did not like that idea at all. Her complete failure to respond disappointed everyone. The nun must have called on memories of a livelier past to answer,

  “You whose hunting cloak is wet with the many dews of the autumn moors,

  never seek to blame a house lost among these wastes of weeds!

  I gather that she finds this sort of thing distasteful.”

  The other nuns, within, could not conceive how painful it would be for their mistress's new daughter if against her wishes word were to begin to spread that she was still alive, and they remembered the gentleman with such fond pleasure that they did all they possibly could to move her. “But an obliging reply from you on so trifling an occasion does not mean that he would ever dream of doing anything to upset you!” they protested. “Perhaps you have no taste for such worldly ways, but do at least respond well enough not to be uncivil!”

  But no, she did not trust these ancient nuns with their distressingly youthful airs and their fashionable pretensions to broken-backed
verse. She reflected as she lay there, How cruelly I survived after all, when I had wished to put an end to my dire misfortune! What dismal wanderings lie before me now? If only they might all be sure that I am dead and then forget me! Meanwhile the Captain sighed deeply over her undoubted suffering. He quietly played a little on his flute and hummed to himself “the belling of the stag,”28 thus showing himself clearly to be a man of feeling.

  “Not only am I beset by sad memories of the past,” he said as he prepared unhappily to leave, “but my hope for a new, tender love now seems to be dashed. No, I can hardly believe any longer in mountains untouched by worldly cares!”29

  “But why will you have no more of this beautiful night?”30 the nun protested, slipping out toward him.

  “Why, I have tested the feelings of yonder village,”31 he lightly replied. He had no wish to insist on pursuing his gallantry. That little glimpse I had of her struck me, and during my leisure moments I have recalled it with pleasure, but she is simply too distant and too reserved for a place like this! he said to himself, preparing to go. The nun, however, knew that she would miss even the music of his flute, and she said,

  “Does a glorious moon shining from the depths of night mean nothing to you,

  that you should not wish to stay, here beside the mountains' rim?”

  She remarked of this somewhat ill-formed verse, “That is what the young lady wishes to say to you.”

  That caught his interest:

  “Then I shall watch on, till behind the mountains' rim the bright moon goes down,

  and be blessed perhaps like rays slipping through your chamber roof.”

  Meanwhile the old nun, His Reverence's mother, had caught the distant music of the Captain's flute, and she now came forth after all. Voice quavering and speech broken by coughing, she never even mentioned the past because she probably did not recognize him. “Come,” she said to her daughter, “you must play your kin! How lovely a flute sounds in the moonlight! Here, you women, bring her the kin!”

  Why, it is she! The Captain knew her voice. But what is she doing hidden away in a place like this? Ah, the treachery of life! Moved, he played very prettily in the banshiki mode.

  “Now it is your turn,” he encouraged the old lady's daughter.

  “I should say that you play much better than you used to,” she remarked, for she knew something about music herself; “or perhaps it is just that all I ever hear is wind down the mountain. But I shall, I shall, though I know my instrument is out of tune.” To the Captain her music was a rare pleasure, for the kin is no longer favored these days, and fewer and fewer people play it. The wind in the pines gave it a specially beautiful quality, and the accompanying voice of the flute seemed to elicit new brilliance from the moon. More and more delighted, the old lady sat on and on and never felt sleepy at all.

  Playing the flute

  “Once upon a time I played the wagon very nicely,” she said, “but I suppose tastes have changed by now, because His Reverence says my playing grates on his ears; and besides, he tells me, I should only call the Name, since everything else is folly. He makes me feel so guilty about it that I no longer play at all. My wagon has a lovely tone, though.”

  She was clearly longing to play, and the Captain answered with a smile, “Surely His Reverence does wrong to discourage you! After all, in the place they call Paradise the bodhisattvas play instruments like these, and the angels dance, and that, they say, is very holy. What sin could there be in your doing the same when you are not at your devotions? I should love to hear you tonight!”

  His winning words pleased her. “Come, then, my Dame of the Chamber,32 fetch me my wagon!” she cried, and was racked by a fit of coughing. Her embarrassed women were too pained to reprove her for her tearful complaint against His Reverence. She drew the instrument to her and began playing just as she pleased, without a thought for the Captain's flute music of a moment ago, in the azuma mode and in a very sprightly style. The other instruments fell silent, which she took for a tribute to her own performance. “Takefu chichiri chichiri taritana,”33 she went as she swept through her flourishes. It was all terribly old-fashioned.

  “How delightful! One never hears that song anymore!” The Captain's praise escaped her, however, because she was deaf, and she had to ask someone beside her what he had said.

  “Young people nowadays seem not to appreciate that sort of thing,” she complained. “Look at that young woman we have had with us all this time—she is very pretty and all that, I know, but she refuses to join in any of these amusements. She seems to do absolutely nothing at all!” She gave a raucous, self-satisfied laugh, to her daughter's consternation. The life went out of the party, and the Captain started back. The lovely music of his flute, carried to them on the mountain wind, kept them all up till dawn.

  A note came from him early the next morning: “I apologize for having hurried away so soon. I had many things on my mind.

  Alas, how I wept for days never forgotten, and for the music

  of a bitter, bitter night spent so cruelly ignored!

  Please teach her to understand others' feelings a little! Why should I go on courting her affection if she really cannot bear it?”

  The old nun's daughter, more and more at a loss what to do, could not help weeping as she wrote,

  “The notes of your flute brought so vividly to mind days forever gone,

  and then, when you went away, once again tears wet my sleeves.

  I expect you heard my mother talking in her heedless way of how little this young lady of mine appears to understand life's sorrows.” It was a tedious reply, he thought, with nothing to commend it, and he undoubtedly put it down immediately.

  Letters kept coming from him, as often as autumn winds rustle the reeds, which to her was an endless trial. She was remembering now all those moments that had taught her how impossibly single-minded men are. “Please, please allow me now to assume that guise before which he must give up all such intentions!” she begged, and she set herself to learning to chant the scriptures. She also prayed to the Buddha in her heart. So thoroughly did she reject the things of this world that the nun missed in her all the pretty ways of youth and concluded that melancholy was in her nature. She forgave her these shortcomings, however, because of her enchanting looks, and she took pleasure in gazing at her morning and night. Each of her rare smiles was a wonder and a delight.

  The ninth month came, and the nun made a pilgrimage to Hatsuse. During all these years of feeling so sadly alone, her every thought had gone to the daughter she had lost, and now that she had the comfort of another very like her, she wanted to thank Kannon for so great a blessing.

  “Do come with me!” she urged her new daughter. “No one need ever know. Of course one may pray to Kannon here as well, but many examples show what blessings may come from doing so at so holy a temple.” Alas, the young woman's mother, nurse, and others had been fond of saying just the same thing, and she had been to Hatsuse several times. But it never did me any good at all! she said to herself. I could not dispose of my life as I wished, and I have suffered terrible misfortune! Besides, she was afraid to take a journey like that with someone she did not know.

  “I do not feel well,” she said, “and I hesitate to travel that way; I am afraid that it might not be good for me.” The nun quite understood her anxiety and did not insist further.

  Among the sheets of paper on which her new daughter had been practicing writing, the nun found this:

  “Lingering this way in a life so hateful now, no, I shall not go

  where the Furu River flows, to any twin-trunked cedar!”34

  “That twin-trunked cedar must mean that there is someone you still want to see again,” the nun ventured lightly; at which the stricken young woman blushed, looking particularly entrancing.

  “Of that twin cedar along the Furu River I can say nothing,

  save that now you are to me the very daughter I lost!”

  There was nothing notewort
hy about the nun's rapidly spoken reply.

  The nun had said that she wanted to travel discreetly, but the whole household was eager to go with her, and it consequently troubled her to leave so few people at home. She therefore had two sensible women, the nuns Shōshō and Saemon, stay behind with a page girl.

  The young woman watched the party go, lamenting her cruel fate as before. There is no help for it now, she thought, but how hard it is to have no one in the world!

  The tedium of her days was interrupted by a letter from the Captain. “Please read it!” Shōshō urged her, but she refused.

  With so few people in the house, the lack of anything to do left her at full leisure to contemplate gloomily what was past and what might come. “It hurts to see you so melancholy,” Shōshō said. “Do let us play Go!”

  “I was never any good at it,” she said, but she decided to play anyway, and Shōshō sent for the board. Shōshō let her go first, assuming that she herself was the better player, but she found herself outclassed, and she went first next time.

  She was quite excited. “I wish my mistress would come back soon!” she said. “I look forward to showing her how you play. She used to be very good at it, too. His Reverence has loved the game all his life, and he thought he was not bad at it—not that he ever went about challenging people as though he were the Holy Master of Go.35 He assured her that she could not outplay him, but in the end he was the one who lost, twice. You are better than the Holy Master, though. I am amazed!”

  The young woman regretted her indiscretion, for she did not relish the prospect of playing Go with an unbecomingly eager, shaven-headed old nun. She said that she felt unwell and lay down.