The Tale of Genji

  Sewing

  Genji felt Shonagon's predicament keenly when Koremitsu returned and told him what he had heard, but the thought of visiting her regularly still upset him, because if people learned what he was up to, they would certainly condemn his dubious eccentricity, and that idea did not appeal to him at all. No, he decided, he would take her home. He sent repeated notes and dispatched Koremitsu there after sundown, as before, to say that he hoped they would not take it amiss if certain difficulties prevented him from coming in person.

  “We are very busy now because we have just heard from His Highness that he suddenly plans to take her to his residence tomorrow,” Shōnagon explained. “I hate after all to leave this tumbledown old place where I have lived so long, and the others are upset, too.” She had little more to say and seemed preoccupied only with her sewing.75 Koremitsu returned to Genji.

  Genji was at His Excellency's, but the lady there refused as usual to receive him. He toyed in frustration with a wagon76 and sang to himself in a pleasant voice, “In Hitachi here I've my field to hoe…”77 Then Koremitsu arrived. Genji called him in and asked for his news.

  Koremitsu's report alarmed him. If she went to her father's, any attempt to remove her from there would appear indecent, and he would be accused of having abducted an innocent child. No, he would have to silence her women for the time being and take her before that could happen.

  “I shall go there before daybreak,” he announced. “The carriage will do very well as it is, and I shall want you to bring one or two men.” Koremitsu left to do as he asked.

  Genji now wavered, reflecting anxiously that if anyone found out, he would be considered debauched; that a man would look normal in comparison if people assumed that the woman involved had been old enough to know what was what and had acted in concert with him; and that he would have no excuse for himself when His Highness discovered the truth. But despite this whirl of misgivings he could not let the opportunity pass, and he therefore prepared to leave while the night was still dark. His lady was displeased as always, and she had no forgiveness for him.

  “You see, I just remembered something urgent I must go back and look after. I shall not be gone long.” Not even her women knew it when he left. In his own room he donned a dress cloak, and then he drove off with only Koremitsu riding beside him.

  He had a man of his knock at the gate, and a servant who knew nothing opened it. He ordered his carriage quietly brought inside. Koremitsu then rapped at the double doors and cleared his throat. Shōnagon came out when she recognized his voice. “His lordship is here,” he announced.

  “But she is asleep! He seems to be out very late.” She took it for granted that Genji was on his way home from elsewhere.

  “I hear she is to move to her father's, and I have something to tell her before she goes,” Genji explained.

  “What in the world could it be?” Shōnagon smiled. “And how could she possibly give you a proper answer?”

  To her dismay he came straight in. “But there are unsightly old women just lying about in here!”

  “I suppose she is still asleep. Come, I shall get her up. There is no excuse for sleeping through such a beautifully misty dawn.” He went in through her curtains. There was no time even for them to cry out.

  The little girl was lying there, oblivious to everything. Genji put his arms around her to wake her, and when she woke up she was still so sleepy that she took him for her father, come to fetch her. She did not realize her mistake until Genji tidied her hair and said, “Come! Up! I am here from His Highness!” and in her surprise she took fright. “Now, now, I might just as well be your father,” he said, reemerging with her in his arms.

  “My lord, what are you doing?” Taifu, Shōnagon, and the others cried.

  “I have already told her I want to take her where I can be more comfortable with her, because I do not like being unable to come here often; and now, you see, I learn to my consternation that she is to move to her father's, which will make it even harder for me to keep in touch with her. I want one of you to come with me.”

  “My lord,” the distraught Shōnagon answered, “today is just not the day for this! What would you have us tell His Highness when he comes? Everything will surely work in the fullness of time, if you are to have what you wish, but as it is, you have not left us a moment to think, and you are putting us all in an impossible position.”

  “Very well, someone may come and join her later.” With this, to their utter amazement, he had his carriage brought up. She was alarmed and crying. Shōnagon, who could do nothing to stop him, changed into better clothes and got into the carriage, carrying the things she had been sewing the evening before.

  Nijō was not far away, and the carriage reached it before daylight. Genji had it drawn up to the west wing and alighted. He easily lifted her down in his arms.

  Shōnagon hesitated. “I still feel as though I am dreaming. What would you like me to do?”

  “Whatever you please. Now I have brought your young mistress here, I will see you home again if you want.”

  With a wry smile Shōnagon stepped out of the carriage, too. The suddenness of it all had dazed her, and her heart was pounding. She wept to think of His Highness's displeasure, of her charge's perilous future, and, above all, of the child's pathetic plight now that she had lost all those who could claim her trust; but she mastered her feelings as well as she could, despite her tears, so as not to blight this moment78 with ill-omened grief.

  The wing lacked a curtained bed and other such furnishings, since Genji did not live in it. He summoned Koremitsu and had him put one up, together with screens and so on. Apart from that, there was no need to do more than let down the standing curtains and tidy the place up a little. He sent to the east wing for nightclothes and lay down.

  The little girl wondered fearfully what he might have in mind for her, but she managed to keep from sobbing aloud. “I want to sleep with Shōnagon!” she declared in a childish tone.

  “No.” Genji was firm. “That is not the way you are to sleep anymore.” She lay down, weeping with unhappiness. Her nurse, who could not sleep at all, sat up in a daze.

  Looking around as day came on, Shōnagon was overwhelmed not only by the opulence of the building and its furnishings but even by the sand in the garden, which resembled a bed of jewels and seemed to give off light; and she began to feel like an intruder, even though no other women were actually present. Only household guards were stationed outside the blinds, since Genji lodged no more than the occasional guest here. One of them had heard that Genji had just brought a lady home. “Who can she be?” he whispered. “He must be extremely keen on her!”

  Washing water and breakfast79 were brought in. The sun was high when Genji arose. “She will need her gentlewomen,” he said to Shōnagon. “This evening she must call for the ones she prefers.” He sent off to the east wing for some children. “I especially want little ones,” he added. So it was that four very pretty little girls appeared.

  She was lying wrapped in a shift, and he insisted that she get up. “You must not be so unfriendly,” he said. “Would I be looking after you this way if you did not mean a great deal to me? A woman should be sweet and obedient.” And so began her education.

  She looked prettier than ever here. Genji chatted disarmingly with her, showing her all sorts of nice paintings and toys that he had had brought from the east wing and doing all he could to please her. At last she got up and looked properly at what he was showing her. She made such an engaging picture in her layering of soft, dark gray,80 wreathed in innocent smiles, that Genji found himself smiling, too, as he watched her.

  With Genji off to the east wing, she went for a look81 at the park's lake and trees. The near garden, now touched by frost, was as pretty as a painting, and the unfamiliar whirl of fourth- and fifth-rank gentlemen, bustling in and out,82 convinced her that she had come to a very nice place. In no time she was happily distracted by the fascinating pictures on the screens. r />
  Genji did not go to court for two or three days; he devoted himself instead to making her feel at home. He wrote or painted all sorts of things to show her, no doubt with the thought of making them up for her straightaway into a book,83 and he turned them into an extremely attractive collection.

  She took out an exceptionally beautiful “Talk of Musashi Plain arouses my complaint…”84 that he had written on murasaki-colored paper; and he had added in smaller writing,

  “Her root is unseen, and yet I do love her so, the kin to that plant

  the dews of Musashi Plain put so far beyond my reach!”85

  “Come now,” he said, “you write one.”

  “But I do not know how to write very well yet.” She looked up at him with the most engaging artlessness.

  He smiled. “Still, you cannot write nothing at all. I shall teach you.” Her manner of turning away to write and the childish way she held her brush so entranced him that he wondered at himself.

  “Oh, I made a mistake!” She tried in embarrassment to hide what she had written, but he insisted on having a look.

  “Why you should complain I have not the least idea, and that troubles me:

  who, then, is the kin you mean, and what plant have you in mind?”

  The generous lines of her letters were certainly immature, but they showed great promise.86 Her hand closely resembled the late nun's. It seemed to him that she would soon write beautifully, as long as she had an up-to-date copybook. As far as dolls went, he made her one dollhouse after another, and he found his games with her the perfect distraction from his cares.

  For the women who had not come with her, it was acutely embarrassing to have nothing to say when His Highness arrived and wanted to know what had become of his daughter. Genji had warned them to keep the secret for the time being, and Shōnagon, who agreed, had insisted that they remain silent. They told His Highness only that Shōnagon had taken his daughter off to hide her; they did not know where. He was obliged to assume that since the late nun had never approved of sending him her granddaughter, the girl's nurse had taken it upon herself in an excess of zeal to jeopardize her charge's whole future by spiriting her away instead of objecting openly, and he returned to his residence in tears. “Please let me know if you ever have any news of her!” he said, to their intense discomfort. He also made fruitless inquiries at the residence of His Reverence. He was sorry to have lost so remarkably attractive a daughter, and he continued to miss her. Even his wife was disappointed, since her antipathy toward the girl's mother had faded by now, and she had been looking forward to making the most of her authority.

  By and by the gentlewomen gathered around their young mistress. Her playmates—young girls in service as pages or even smaller ones87—gladly lost themselves in games with so striking and stylish a pair. The young lady might still cry for her grandmother on evenings when her friend was away and she was lonely,88 but she retained no special memory of her father. Never having been used to living with him anyway, she now cared only for this second father, to whom she became deeply attached. She would always go straight to greet him when he came home, chatting prettily and snuggling into his arms, and she was never in the least reserved or bashful with him. As far as that sort of thing went, she was as sweet with him as she could possibly be.

  A woman may be so querulous and so quick to make an issue of the smallest lapse that the man takes a dislike to her, fearing that whatever he does may unleash bitter reproaches, until an estrangement that neither had wished for becomes a reality; but not so for Genji with his delightful companion. No daughter by the time she reaches this age can be as free with her father, sleep so intimately beside him, or rise so blithely with him in the morning as this young lady did with Genji, until Genji himself must have wondered at being able to lavish his affection on so rare a treasure.

  6

  SUETSUMUHANA

  The Safflower

  Suetsumuhana (“safflower”) is a yellow or orange flower that yields a scarlet dye, and this chapter, in which scarlet is a recurrent motif, features a woman known to readers as Suetsumuhana. Her name comes from a poem by Genji:

  “This is not at all a color to which I warm; what then did I mean

  by letting myself brush sleeves with a safflower in full blush?”

  The chapter makes Genji's hidden meaning plain.

  RELATIONSHIP TO EARLIER CHAPTERS

  “The Safflower” covers about the same period, the year when Genji is eighteen, as “Young Murasaki,” but no narrative connection between the two appears until the end of the chapter. It extends into the first month of the following year.

  PERSONS

  Genji, a Captain in the Palace Guards, age 18 to 19

  Taifu, a young gentlewoman

  Her Highness, the daughter of the Hitachi Prince (Suetsumuhana)

  The Secretary Captain, Genji's brother-in-law and great friend (Tō no Chūjō)

  His Excellency, the Minister of the Left, 52 to 53 (Sadaijin)

  Nakatsukasa, a gentlewoman in service at His Excellency's

  Jijū, Suetsumuhana's gentlewoman

  Murasaki, roughly 10 to 11

  No, despite the passing months he could not forget how someone he still loved had gone like dew from a twilight beauty, and those proud, fastidious ladies who always withheld themselves from him1 were so demanding that he yearned particularly for the one who had touched his heart by yielding to him utterly.

  How he longed, incorrigible as ever, to find someone dear and sweet, with no great name to uphold and with whom he need never feel required to be on his best behavior! He missed no news of any likely prospect, and one may assume that if he detected any further sign of promise, he sent her at least an encouraging line. Who by now can doubt that very few rebuffed him or received him with indifference? Those who remained willfully cool simply failed, in the prim and proper heartlessness of their ways, to know their place; nor did they often persist long in their pride, for they would then collapse ignominiously into marriage with one nobody or another. He dropped many for that reason.

  Now and again he recalled that woman of the cicada shell with irritation. She of the reed,2 too, must have been surprised sometimes by a note from him, whenever a favorable breeze blew her way. He would gladly have seen her again at her ease in the lamplight. On the whole, he was not one to forget any woman he had once known.

  The daughter of Nurse Saemon, his favorite after Nurse Daini,3 was now serving at court, where she was known as Taifu, the Commissioner's Myōbu.4 Her father, the Commissioner of War, was of imperial descent. Genji himself sometimes called on her for one errand or another, since she was a young person much given to gallantry. When not at the palace she lived at her father's, now that her mother had gone down to the provinces as the wife of the Governor of Chikuzen.

  Taifu once happened to tell Genji how the last and best-loved daughter born to His Highness of Hitachi5 was living in sad circumstances now that her father was gone.

  “What a shame!” Genji, intrigued, asked to hear more.

  “I know little about her character or looks. She is so shy and reticent that when I visit her of an evening, I speak to her through curtains and so on. Her one real friend seems to be her kin.”

  “That is one of the ‘three friends,’ though I can think of another that would ill become her.6 Please let me hear her. His Highness her father played so well that I cannot imagine she is no better than anyone else.”

  “I wonder whether her music would really interest you,” she answered, although she spoke in a manner designed to pique his interest.

  “You are trying to tempt me, aren't you! I shall go there secretly one of these nights when the moon is veiled.7 You must come with me.”

  Taifu had not wanted to get in this deep, but she still went there one fine spring evening when all was quiet at the palace. Her father had taken up residence elsewhere and visited the place only now and again, but Taifu, who had never felt comfortable at her stepmother's,
had become a familiar presence there.8

  Genji arrived, as he had said he would, at the prettiest hour for the moon of the sixteenth night.9 “What a pity!” Taifu exclaimed. “This is not at all the kind of night to bring out an instrument's tone.”

  “Do go to her, though, and get her to play a little. I would hate to leave again without hearing her at all.”

  Taifu installed him in her own comfortably casual room and set off, guilty and nervous, for the main house. The lattice shutters were still up, and Her Highness was gazing out at a deliciously fragrant plum tree. Taifu judged the moment to be propitious. “I could not resist the promise of so beautiful a night, my lady, when I realized how lovely your kin would sound. I so regret that in the rush of all my comings and goings I am never able to hear you play.”

  “I gather that some people really do appreciate the kin,” Her Highness answered, “but how could my playing possibly interest anyone who frequents His Majesty's Seat?” She sent for her instrument, and Taifu trembled to think how she might sound to Genji.

  She played very softly. It was quite nice. Not that she was any sort of master, but her instrument was so superb in tone that Genji was not displeased by what he had heard. That so great a lord should have brought up his daughter so tenderly, to manners strict and now long abandoned, in a house so sad and neglected, and all for nothing! Ah, what regrets she must have! Why, in the old tales this is just the kind of place that provides the setting for all sorts of moving scenes! Such musings encouraged him to want to approach her, but fear that she might think him forward made him hesitate after all.

  Taifu, whose wits were always about her, had no wish to give him his fill of the Princess's music. “The sky seems to be clouding over, my lady,” she said. “A guest of mine said he would be coming, and he might suspect me of having no use for him. Soon, though, when I have the time… Do let me put the shutters down!” And off Taifu went without encouraging her further.