The Tale of Genji, Page 34

  She went to the palace in the seventh month. His Majesty, who still thought highly of her, ignored the vicious gossip and kept her constantly with him as before, now chiding her for this or that, now asserting his love, and he did so with great beauty and grace; but alas, her heart had room only for memories of Genji.

  Once when there was music, His Majesty remarked, “His absence leaves a void. I expect many others feel it even more than I do. It is as though all things had lost their light”; and he went on, “I have not done as my father wished. The sin of it will be upon me.” Tears came to his eyes and, helplessly, to hers as well. “I have no wish to live long, now that I know life only becomes more cruel as one ages. How would you feel if something were to happen to me? I cannot bear it that such a parting would trouble you less than another, more benign, does already. No, I cannot think well of him who wrote, “‘While I am still alive…’”44

  His manner was so kind, and he spoke from such depth of feeling, that her tears began to fall. “Ah, yes,” he said, “for which of us do you weep?” He continued, “I am sorry that you have not yet given me any children. I should like to do for the Heir Apparent as my father asked, but that, I am afraid, would only have unpleasant consequences.” Those whose manner of governing offended him gave him many reasons to regret being still too young to have any strength of will.

  At Suma the sea was some way off under the increasingly mournful autumn wind, but night after night the waves on the shore, sung by Counselor Yukihira in his poem about the wind blowing over the pass,45 sounded very close indeed, until autumn in such a place yielded the sum of melancholy. Everyone was asleep now, and Genji had hardly anybody with him; he lay awake all alone, listening with raised46 pillow to the wind that raged abroad, and the waves seemed to be washing right up to him. Hardly even knowing that he did so, he wept until his pillow might well have floated away.47 The brief music he plucked from his kin dampened his spirits until he gave up playing and sang,

  “Waves break on the shore, and their voices rise to join my sighs of yearning:

  can the wind be blowing then from all those who long for me?”

  His voice awoke his companions, who sat up unthinkingly here and there, overcome by its beauty, and quietly blew their noses. What indeed could their feelings be, now that for his sake alone they had left the parents, the brothers and sisters, the families that they cherished and surely often missed, to lose themselves this way in the wilderness? The thought pained him, and once he had seen how dispiriting they must find his own gloom, he purposely diverted them with banter during the day and enlivened the hours by joining pieces of colored paper to write poems on, or immersed himself in painting on fine Chinese silk, which yielded very handsome panels for screens. He had once heard a description of this sea and these mountains and had imagined them from afar; and now that they were before him, he painted a set of incomparable views of an exceptionally lovely shore.

  “How nice it would be to call in Chieda and Tsunenori, who they say are the best artists of our time, and have them make these up into finished paintings!” his impatient companions remarked.48 He was so kind and such a delight to the eye that the four or five of them forgot their cares and found his intimate service a pleasure.

  One lovely twilight, with the near garden in riotous bloom, Genji stepped onto a gallery that gave him a view of the sea, and such was the supernal grace of his motionless figure that he seemed in that setting not to be of this world at all. Over soft white silk twill and aster49 he wore a dress cloak of deep blue, its sash only very casually tied; and his voice slowly chanting “I, a disciple of the Buddha Shakyamuni…”50 was more beautiful than any they had ever heard before. From boats rowing by at sea came a chorus of singing voices. With a pang he watched them, dim in the offing, like little birds borne on the waters, and sank into a reverie as cries from lines of geese on high mingled with the creaking of oars, until tears welled forth, and he brushed them away with a hand so gracefully pale against the black of his rosary that the young gentlemen pining for their sweethearts at home were all consoled.

  The near garden

  “Are these first wild geese fellows of all those I love, that their cries aloft

  on their flight across the sky should stir in me such sorrow?”

  Genji said.

  Then Yoshikiyo:

  “How all in a line one memory on the next streams across the mind,

  though the wild geese never were friends of mine in that far world.”

  The Commissioner of Civil Affairs:51

  “The wild geese that cry, abandoning of their own will their eternal home,

  must find their thoughts returning to that world beyond the clouds.”

  The Aide of the Right Palace Guards:

  “The wild geese that leave their eternal home to fly high across the sky

  surely find it comforting at least not to lag behind.

  What would happen to one that lost its companions?” His father52 had gone down to Hitachi as Deputy Governor, but he had come with Genji instead. At heart he was probably in despair, but he put up a brave show of unconcern.

  Genji remembered when a brilliant moon rose that tonight was the fifteenth of the month.53 He longed for the music at the palace, and the thought of all his ladies with their eyes to the heavens moved him to gaze up at the face of the moon. “Two thousand leagues away, the heart of a friend…”54 he sang, and as before his companions could not contain their tears. There came back to him with unspeakable yearning the occasion of Her Cloistered Eminence's poem, “Perhaps ninefold mists,” and he wept bitterly to remember his times with her. “It is very late,” they said, but he still would not go in.

  “That vision alone comforts me a little while, though it will be long

  till time brings me round again to the city of the moon.”55

  Genji recalled fondly how intimately that night His Majesty had spoken of the past and how much he had then resembled His Late Eminence, and he went in, singing, “Here is the robe he so graciously gave me…”56 It was true, he really was never parted from His Late Eminence's robe but kept it constantly with him.57

  “Bitterness alone: no, that is by no means all I feel in my heart,

  for the left sleeve and the right, both, are wet at once with tears.”58

  The Dazaifu Deputy was then on his way back up to the City. Traveling in grand style, with a vast entourage, he could not accommodate his many daughters, and his wife was therefore going by sea. They came along the coast from harbor to harbor and were pleased by Suma, for it was prettier than elsewhere; and the news of the Commander's59 presence there in such a plight made the younger, more romantic daughters blush most fancifully to be aboard ship, until they began in their hearts to primp and preen. The Gosechi Dancer was hoping desperately, and no wonder, that they would not be towed straight past, when there reached them from afar, down the wind, the notes of a kin; and such were the place, the man, and the poignancy of the music that all those alive to finer feelings wept.

  The Deputy sent his respects. “I had meant to wait on you as soon as I had returned from so far away and to talk over events in the City, and it is for me a matter of deep sorrow and regret to find myself, to my great surprise, passing the spot where you now reside. Alas, I must excuse myself for the present, for many people I know have come forward to greet me, including some members of my family, and considering the possible awkwardness involved, I think it preferable to refrain. I shall call upon you at an appropriate time.”

  The message came through his son, the Governor of Chikuzen. The young man, who owed Genji his appointment as a Chamberlain, was shocked and saddened, but many eyes were on him, and he bore rumor in mind and left quickly. Genji replied, “Now that I am absent from the City, I no longer see those to whom I was formerly close, and it is very good of you to have come so far…” He said the same thing in his answering letter. The Governor wept as he left, and his account of Genji's circumstances drew from the Deputy
and all those who had come to meet him an undignified flood of tears.

  The Gosechi Dancer managed somehow to send him,

  “Have you eyes to see in the towrope's tug and slack my own swaying heart

  helplessly drawn toward you by the music of your kin?

  Oh, do not reproach me!”60

  The devastatingly handsome Genji read this with a smile.

  “If such were your wish that your heart goes taut and slack as the towrope does,

  would you then pass straight on by, O wave along Suma Shore?”

  he wrote back. “I never thought to take fish from the sea!”61 There was once a man who spoke a verse to a stablemaster;62 and her only wish then was of course to disembark and stay.

  As the days and months slipped by, many in the City, not least the Emperor himself, had frequent occasion to regret Genji's absence. The Heir Apparent, who naturally thought of him constantly, quietly wept—a sight that aroused sharp pangs of sympathy in his nurses and even more in Ōmyōbu herself.

  Her Cloistered Eminence had always trembled for the Heir Apparent, and her alarm was very great now that Genji himself had been banished. His brothers the Princes and the senior nobles closest to him had all at first inquired after his health, but their affectionate correspondence with him, and the resulting evidence that he still enjoyed the world's esteem, drew strong words from the Empress Mother when she heard of it. “It is my understanding that one under imperial ban does not properly enjoy even the taste of food,” she said, “and for him to inhabit a fine house, to mock and slander the court, and to have his flatterers spouting the same nonsense as those who, they say, called a deer a horse…”63 Word of trouble spread, and for fear of the consequences Genji's correspondents lapsed into silence.

  The passage of time brought the mistress of Nijō less and less comfort. When his gentlewomen from the east wing first went to serve her, they wondered what all the fuss could be about, but the more they knew her, the more they were drawn to her kindness, her pleasant manner, her steadiness of character, and her profound tact, and not one of them left. Now and again she saw the more senior ones in person, and they were not surprised that he loved her more than he did anyone else.

  The longer Genji spent at Suma, the less he felt that he could bear it, but he kept reminding himself that since life there was hard penance even for him, it would be quite wrong to bring her there as well. Everything at Suma was different, and the very presence of the mountain folk, who were a mystery to him, constituted an affront and an offense. There was always smoke drifting past. He had assumed it was from their salt fires, but now he found that it was what people called “brush” burning on the slope behind his house. He said in wonder,

  “Ever and again, as the mountain folk burn brush on their humble hearths

  day after day, how I long for news of my love at home.”64

  Winter came, and blowing snow. Eyes on the forbidding skies, he made music on the kin while Yoshikiyo sang for him and the Commissioner of Civil Affairs played the flute. Whenever he put his heart into a beautiful passage, the others stopped to dry their tears. His thoughts went to that lady long ago, sent off to the land of the Huns,65 and he wondered what that was like, to send away one's only love; the thought was so chillingly real that he sang “A dream after frost.”66 Bright moonlight shone in, illumining every corner of his poor refuge. The floor afforded a view of the night sky,67 and the sinking moon evoked such solitude that he repeated to himself, “I merely travel westward”;68 and he said,

  “Where am I to go, wandering what unknown lands down what cloudy ways?

  Coming under the moon's gaze, I find myself filled with shame.”

  While as so often he lay sleepless beneath the dawn sky, he was moved by the plovers' piping:

  “While into the dawn plovers flocking on the shore lift their many cries,

  all alone I lie awake, knowing just a moment's peace.”

  No one else was up, and he said it to himself over and over again as he lay there. In the depths of the night he would rinse his hands and call the Buddha's Name, which to his companions was so wonderful and so inspiring that they never left him. They did not make even short visits to their homes.

  The Akashi coast was close enough69 that Lord Yoshikiyo remembered the Novice's70 daughter and wrote to her, but he got back only a message from her father: “I have something to discuss with you, and I would be grateful for a moment of your time.” He will never consent, though, Yoshikiyo reflected gloomily, and going to talk to him would only mean leaving empty-handed, looking foolish. He did not go.

  The Novice aspired to unheard-of heights, and although in his province an alliance with him was apparently thought a great prize, his eccentric mind had never in all the years considered a single such proposal; but when he learned of Genji's presence nearby, he said to his daughter's mother,71 “I hear that Genji the Shining, who was born to the Kiritsubo Intimate, is living in disgrace at Suma. Our girl's destiny has brought us this windfall. We must seize this chance to offer her to him.”

  “What an idea!” her mother replied. “According to people from the City, he already has a large number of distinguished women and he has in fact secretly violated one of His Majesty's. Would anyone who can start a scandal like that take any interest in a miserable country girl?”

  The Novice was angry. “You do not know what you are talking about,” he retorted with unrepentant and all too visible obstinacy. “I disagree. You must understand that. I will have to find a chance to bring him here.”

  The way he looked after both his house and his daughter yielded dazzling results.

  “But why must we start out with our hopes on a man, however magnificent, who has apparently been banished for his crimes?” her mother objected. “Besides, even if he does take a liking to her, nothing can possibly come of it.”

  The Novice's only reply was angry muttering. “In our realm or in China, people who stand out or who differ at all from the rest always end up under a cloud. What sort of man do you take this Genji for? His late mother was the daughter of my uncle the Inspector Grand Counselor. When she became known as an extraordinary beauty, they sent her to the palace, where His Majesty singled her out for favor until she died under the burden of others' jealousy. Fortunately, however, her son survived her. A woman must aim high. He will not spurn her just because I live in the country.”

  His daughter had no remarkable looks, but she was attractively elegant and had wit enough to rival any great lady. Knowing full well that her station left much to be desired, she took it for granted that no great lord would deign to notice her and that no worthy match would ever be hers; if in the end she outlived her parents, she would become a nun or drown herself in the sea. Her father overwhelmed her with fond attentions and sent her to Sumiyoshi72 twice a year. What he secretly expected was a boon from the gods.

  At Suma the New Year brought lengthening, empty days, and the little cherry trees that Genji had planted came into first faint bloom. Such memories assailed him under those mild skies that he often wept. The twentieth of the second month was past, and he desperately missed those who had aroused his sympathy last year when he left the City. Yes, the cherry tree before the Shishinden would now be in its glory. Everything now came back to him: His Eminence that other year at the party under the cherry blossoms, and the then–Heir Apparent's73 beauty and grace, and the way he had chanted Genij's own poem.

  “Never do I fail to call to mind with longing those of the palace,

  yet today more than any, when I wore cherry blossoms.”74

  Life was very dull. His Excellency's son the Captain,75 now also a Consultant, was a sufficiently fine young man to enjoy great esteem,76 but he still found the world a dreary place and missed Genji constantly, until he made up his mind that he did not care if he were discovered and charges were laid against him; suddenly he appeared at Genji's door. The sight of his friend aroused such joy and sorrow that tears of both spilled from his eyes.
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  Genji's house looked indescribably Chinese. Not only was its setting just like a painting, but despite their modesty the woven bamboo fence around it and its stone steps and pine pillars were pleasingly novel.77 One could only smile before Genji's beauty, for he dazzled the eye in his purposely rustic blue-gray hunting cloak and gathered trousers, worn over a sanctioned rose78 veering toward yellow, and all in the simple manner of a mountain peasant. He had kept his furnishings unpretentious, and his room lay open to view. Boards for Go and backgammon, assorted accessories, the wherewithal for tagi:79 he had chosen everything to remain in keeping with country life, and Buddhist implements showed that he called the Name.

  Genji made sure that their meal offered the delicacies proper to the place. The seafolk had brought a harvest of shellfish, and he invited them to come and show it off. When he had them questioned about their life on the shore, they told him of their perils and sorrows. Despite their impenetrable jargon80 he grasped sympathetically that their hearts moved as did his own, and that it must be so. He had them given robes, and in their joy they felt as though they had not lived invain.81

  Playing backgammon