by Fumiko Enchi
“That was some chance she took. If I were you, I’d have dragged her off the train at Atami or somewhere.” The clear assumption of passivity on his part made Ibuki smile grimly, curling the corners of his mouth.
“Let me borrow that article,” he said. “I want to look it over. Are you calling from the hospital?”
“Yes, but the neuropsychiatry society is meeting today, and I’m about to head over to that coffee shop near your office. We won’t be able to talk, but stop by on your way home, and I’ll give it to you there.”
“Good. Half an hour okay?”
“I’ll take a taxi and be there in less than ten minutes.” That settled, Mikamé then asked, “Did Yasuko come to class today?”
“Not since we got back. I suppose she’s tired out from the trip.” He felt the chill of the concrete floor creep slowly up through his feet.
—
At home that evening, Ibuki began to read the pamphlet containing the article. He knew that Mieko Toganō was a tanka poet of the romantic school, with roots in the Shinkokinshū aesthetic of “mystery and depth,” and he had a high regard for the lyrical immediacy of her poems. But the sudden appearance—after a score of years in oblivion—of a prose work such as this, in a style that lay somewhere between a discursive essay and a memoir, had thrown him off balance.
His new closeness to Yasuko made him jealous of her devotion to Mieko, which showed so plainly in her speech and conduct. Part admiring, part fearful, she seemed indeed to be under the other woman’s spell. The thought of this filled him now with a compelling desire to learn all that he could about his rival.
The attachment to Mieko that Yasuko had developed after Akio’s death appeared to him to consist of more than the simple rechanneling of love for her husband into a tender sympathy for his grieving mother. And he had been right, it would seem, in guessing that the first to take up the study of spirit possession had been neither Akio nor Yasuko, but Mieko herself.
After its appearance in Clear Stream, “An Account of the Shrine in the Fields” had been reprinted separately at the author’s expense. The date of publication was October 1937, just after the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War. Mieko’s husband would have still been alive when she wrote it. Akio and Harumé would have been small children. The prospect of glimpsing Mieko as she had been then fired his curiosity.
An Account of the Shrine in the Fields
As we know from The Tale of Genji and other sources, the Shrine in the Fields, located in Sagano in western Kyoto, was a sacred place where unmarried daughters of the emperor or of imperial princes would retire for a period of purification before leaving the capital to serve as high priestesses at the Grand Shrine in Ise. In shamanism, transmitters of the divine oracle are customarily female, and so it seems likely that the choosing of an imperial princess for such a post reflects the influence of ancient shamanistic tradition in Japan.
On a recent visit to Kyoto, after seeing Arashiyama I decided to investigate what remained of the shrine so familiar to me from its mention in The Tale of Genji and No drama. Inquiring here and there along a narrow trail that wound through bamboo groves, I came before long to a stone marker on the left which bore the inscription “Shrine in the Fields.” Inside the deserted precincts, on a slight elevation, stood the shrine building—a small and unassuming edifice, its thatched roof green with moss, even to the crossed logs atop the ridgepole. It was flanked on one side by a rock inscribed “Shrine of the High Priestess,” on the other by a stone lantern; around it was a low brushwood fence with a torii gate of unfinished, worm-eaten wood. To the rear was a large grove of cedars and oaks, some lying fallen over sideways. Dead leaves, unswept, covered the ground. The scene had an air of dreary abandonment. Spotting an old stone well nearby, I went over and peered inside, but deep in the colorless water I could make out nothing save the pale and blurred outlines of my own face. Well water flowed through a trough into a stone basin with dipper, though surely few people came by to use it. At the shrine office across the way I learned that the torii gate is made of a certain oak that grows on Mount Atago, thus preserving a small vestige of the shrine’s original appearance-thanks largely, it seems, to references in The Tale of Genji and Nō plays to “a gate of black wood, a low brushwood fence.” The old man in the office, a local native, told me also that more bamboo is found near the shrine than anywhere else in Sagano, and that its quality is the best in all Japan.
Having long felt a romantic attraction to the Shrine in the Fields, I was at first disappointed to find no suggestion of the imposing place it must once have been. But the system of sending high priestesses to Ise disappeared in the Middle Ages, and with it the need for a temporary shrine where a life of preparatory abstinence might be led. From the Ōnin War*7 on, moreover, Kyoto had suffered repeatedly from the ravages of fiery wars. That the old shrine on the city outskirts should have been abandoned, its fame lingering only on the pages of classical literature, seemed no cause for wonder.
My own interest in the spot, indeed, derives not from its historical significance but from the intense sympathy I feel for the character of the Rokujō lady in The Tale of Genji.
Recent work by scholars such as Professors I. and T. tends to treat Kiritsubo, Fujitsubo, and Aoi as major characters, while dismissing the Rokujō lady as a minor character—or, like Empress Kokiden, a mere villainess. To me, however, the role she plays is vastly more significant than this. Such casual treatment is an affront to a great lady, and compels me to speak out on her behalf. While the author’s primary interest appears unquestionably to lie in Genji’s relationships with other women (among them Fujitsubo, Aoi, and the Third Princess), focusing in particular on Genji’s “oedipal complex” and the gradual maturing of his personality, it seems to me equally beyond question that the Rokujō lady, too, has enormous influence over Genji, an influence that is, in essence, shamanistic. Her presence recurs as a strongly discordant motif, a unifying element in the symphony of The Tale of Genji.
Initial reference to the Rokujō lady comes in the “Evening Faces” chapter, where abruptly in the opening line we learn, indirectly, that young Genji has already struck up an amorous liaison with this lady who is eight years his senior and the widow of the former crown prince. By contrast, other female characters are introduced only after remarkably careful groundwork; in Genji’s first encounters with the lady of the evening faces, the lady of the locust shell, and Oborozukiyo, each lady has the distinctive beauty of a particular flower. That the beginning of Genji’s romance with the Rokujō lady alone should be missing seems odd indeed, and leads one to suspect rather that it may have been lost. Motoori Norinaga found the omission so disturbing that he himself wrote a chapter entitled “The Armpillow,” based on deductions from later chapters, to describe how Genji pursued and won the Rokujō lady (an expression, one senses, of the intensity of Norinaga’s own regard for her).
The Rckujō lady first came to court at sixteen, bride of the then crown prince; her husband was a younger brother of the Kiritsubo Emperor, the reigning monarch and father of Genji. Her father appears only as “the Minister,” but since the consort of the crown prince would one day be empress, the center of palace life, we may be sure she had few peers in beauty, breeding, or lineage. Shortly after the birth of their daughter, her husband suddenly stepped down as crown prince to take up the burden-free life of a wealthy young nobleman, thereby denying the Rokujō lady, his wife, the glittering future that had awaited her. The setback dealt a grave wound to her pride, for like any beautiful young Heian lady, she would have long dreamed of the day when she might, as empress, command the homage of all. Shortly thereafter her husband died, leaving his young widow and small daughter alone in the world.
Genji’s father, the Kiritsubo Emperor, took pity on the young widow and urged her to come live in his palace along with her daughter, but she declined the invitation. Doubtless her pride made her reject the prospect of becoming the second- or third-ranking imperial concubine.
Having already succeeded in meeting clandestinely with his father’s consort, the empress Fujitsubo, Genji must have felt little compunction about making advances toward the widow of the former crown prince. Her famed wit and beauty, her status as one who had nearly been empress, even her eight-year superiority in age—surely all these were incitements to advance, not retreat. Burning with unrequited love for Fujitsubo, six years his elder, Genji pursued the Rokujō lady as the one closest to his ideal. Her cool dignity and reserve must only have intensified her resemblance to Fujitsubo, and her desirability.
Trouble arose with the consummation of their love. Whatever qualities of refinement, beauty, and cultivation Fujitsubo and the Rokujō lady may have shared on the surface, at heart they were altogether different. Fujitsubo had learned to mold herself to a man by dissolving her identity in his; the Rokujō lady, in contrast, possessed a spirit of such lively intensity that she was incapable of surrendering it fully to any man. However tastefully clad in layers of sophistication, that spirit could not stay hidden for long once she had given herself to a man of Genji’s rare sensitivity.
“At Rokujō he had overcome the lady’s resistance—and now, alas, his longing had cooled. People saw fit to wonder at the rapid dwindling of his ardor once he had made her his own.” Thus remarks the author, in deliberately oblique fashion, on the start of their difficulties.
Commentators generally agree that the Rokujō lady was jealous and vindictive—traits, they say, which Genji abhorred and which drove him from her. This view is colored by Buddhist teaching. As passion transforms the Rokujō lady into a living ghost, her spirit taking leave of her body again and again to attack and finally to kill Genji’s wife Aoi, the commentators see in her tragic obsession a classic illustration of the evil karma attached to all womankind.
Yet, it seems to me, the author of The Tale of Genji does not despise the Rokujō lady. Quite the contrary; there is much evidence of a basic sympathy. The estrangement between Genji and the Rokujō lady that came about after Aoi’s death was probably inevitable, since Genji had witnessed one of the attacks by her spirit, but just over a year later, on learning of the Rokujō lady’s decision to accompany her daughter to Ise, he is shown calling in farewell at the Shrine in the Fields, in a scene that is one of the gems of the novel, filled with the grief of parting. Equally moving are his superb farewell poem, sent after the two by courier on their departure day, and the Rokujō lady’s rejoinder, scribbled in haste at a roadside shelter.
The unhappy stiffness that grew between Genji and the Rokujō lady was due to the intensity of her ego—an intensity that the attentions of Genji, not to mention those of lesser men, were powerless to diminish. Inhibited by the upbringing given to all young Heian princesses (one firmly discouraging any sort of direct action), the Rokujō lady turned unconsciously to spirit possession as the only available outlet for her strong will. Genji himself seems surprisingly tolerant and forgiving of her behavior, as though conceding some justification for it. But Aoi’s attacker was, unquestionably, the spirit of the Rokujō lady in life, and the appearances later of what is taken to be her ghost, visiting the sickbeds of Genji’s subsequent wives, might instead be seen as the spontaneous workings of Genji’s own conscience (the “devil in his heart”), the consequences of his failure to make suitable reparation to her for her sufferings. While she is alive, he wearies of her aloofness, yet he fears her feminine psychic powers. After her death he attempts a reconciliation by uniting her daughter, Akikonomu, with the Reizei emperor, thus enabling the daughter to realize what had once been the destiny of her mother; it seems his sense of guilt is not to be assuaged so simply, however. How else to explain that the ghost of the Rokujō lady confronts him in his moment of supreme mental anguish, to exact a cruel revenge?
After the Third Princess has taken the tonsure, having given birth to the child of another man, the voice of the Rokujō lady addresses Genji gleefully through a woman servant: “At last I made one of them a nun! When Murasaki’s life was spared, I couldn’t bear to see how happy you were, so I lingered in the house, hiding—but now I am satisfied, and I will go.” One had assumed long before this that the Rokujō lady had been mollified by her daughter’s success, but here the author revives her as the sole lady in the tale who remains at odds with Genji.
In this way, whereas Fujitsubo and Murasaki are women who dissolve their whole beings in the anguish of forgiving men, and thereby create an image of eternal love and beauty in the hearts of the men they love, the Rokujō lady is instead a Ryō no onna: one who chafes at her inability to sublimate her strong ego in deference to any man, but who can carry out her will only by forcing it upon others—and that indirectly, through the possessive capacity of her spirit.
Encountering the words “Ryō no onna,” Ibuki was startled. A sensation of being watched stole over him, as if from somewhere in the room the toothless, sunken-cheeked mask he had seen that day on the Nō stage at Yorikata Yakushiji’s was staring down at him with hollow eyes.
The essay continued.
He tried to remember, as his eyes returned to the page before him, how Mieko had reacted that day to the sight of the Ryō no onna mask, but he could not; his memory was blank. As evidence that Genji had truly loved the Rokujō lady, the author of the essay went on to point out various resemblances she bore to the Akashi lady, who spent the remainder of her life happily in Kyoto as Genji’s favored companion.
After the departure of the Rokujō lady and her priestess daughter for Ise, Genji is dogged by ill fortune: the death of his emperor father increases the violence of factions hostile to him; Fujitsubo becomes a nun; his affair with Oborozukiyo*8 comes to light. Finally, he is stripped of rank and sent into exile at Suma, there to enter upon the most dismal period of his life. All this might well be taken as an extension of the curse of the Rokujō lady, but she, of course, has scarcely meant to bring disaster on the man she loves, and so their correspondence continues without a pause, even after she has gone to Ise.
The unconscious nature of her spirit-possessing powers can be told from a particularly vicious attack on Aoi—one in which she thrashes the sick woman cruelly and pulls her hair—and during which she herself has not the least thought of inflicting such injury. The hatred she feels toward her rival, the curses she calls down upon her, are intensely real, but always they remain secret, kept sealed within her own heart. And so, she believes, her strongest imprecations can never be translated into deeds, until one day her inner obsession takes bold and unequivocal shape, descending on and abusing the object of her enmity with such ferocity that she is overcome by her own power.
As Genji settles into a secluded and monastic life at Suma, his numerous ladies send him letters to cheer him in his solitude. Longest and most ardent of them all, written in an exquisite hand on sheet upon sheet of finest Michinoku paper, are those from the Rokujō lady. Pity for “one fallen lowest under heaven” arouses her lyrical powers to their fullest. Genji, his fortunes at a nadir, is for his part deeply moved by the beauty of her writing, and often his thoughts stray quietly to distant Ise. Here the Rokujō lady’s egoistic love ceases to express itself in attacks of spirit possession and instead melts into a lyrical beauty. Yet her soul alternates uncertainly between lyricism and spirit possession, making no philosophical distinction betwee
n the self alone and in relation to others, and is unable to achieve the solace of a religious indifference.
One knows Genji has all but forgotten his displeasure with the Rokujō lady when (after moving from Suma to Akashi) he first meets the Akashi lady and senses, in her faint whispers and refined air, a strong resemblance to his former love. Far from losing interest, he begins the tender sort of dalliance that has been missing briefly from his life, and later, after she has borne him a daughter, he summons her to Kyoto and makes of her there a cherished companion, second in his affections only to Murasaki.
Deeply ashamed of her provincial upbringing and of being the daughter of a mere provincial governor, far lowlier in station than Genji’s other ladies, the Akashi lady leads a self-effacing life in Kyoto, yet she has a pride of spirit far keener than the others. On koto and biwa she is as accomplished as the finest master, and despite her mean opinion of her parentage, she does not forget that among her forebears were imperial princes and ministers. Her modesty is, in short, an inferiority complex that grows in reaction to her very egotism. She is of an altogether different mold from another of Genji’s paramours, the lady of the orange blossoms (a pitiful type, who is convinced from the start of her inadequacy and unworthiness to receive Genji’s love, and whose low self-esteem brings on quite another denouement).
When Genji arranges for his wife Murasaki to take charge of the little Akashi princess, to see that she is trained properly to become empress, the Akashi lady gives her consent willingly, despite many tears, aware that she is guaranteeing her child the brightest possible future. Her natural mother’s love is tempered by farsighted concern for the girl’s welfare. Moreover, she is level-headed and practical enough to view her own situation with dispassion. Unlike the Rokujō lady, the Akashi lady is endowed with a sufficiently keen intellect and enough common sense to avoid squandering her mental energy in spirit possession, turning instead to literary creation as the ideal means of exercising her powers. We find her in the chapter entitled “The First Warbler” writing “something like a novel”—a sign of the literary gifts which she shares with the Rokujō lady.