The Tale of Genji

  When Genji's summons reached her little brother the next day, he let her know he was going and asked for her answer.

  “Tell him there was no one here to receive such a letter.”

  He only laughed. “How can I say that? He made himself perfectly clear.”

  She gathered that Genji had told him everything, and she recoiled. “I'll thank you not to be impertinent. Then just don't go.”

  He went anyway, though, saying, “He wants me—I cannot just ignore him.”

  Kii liked women too much not to think his stepmother's marriage a great shame, and he was always eager to please her, which is why he made much of her little brother and took him about everywhere.

  Genji called the boy in. “I waited for you all day yesterday. Getting on with me seems to mean nothing to you.” The boy reddened.

  “Well, where is it?”

  The boy explained what had happened. “It is really hopeless, isn't it,” Genji said. “She is impossible.” He handed him yet another letter.

  “You may not realize this,” he went on, “but I was seeing her long before that old man the Iyo Deputy. She probably thought me too spindly then to lean on, so she found herself a man of real substance to look after her, and now she is making a fool of me. Be a son to me, though. That fine husband of hers will not last much longer.” It amused him to see the boy so gravely credulous and impressed.

  He kept her brother with him all the time and took him even to the palace. He had those in charge of his wardrobe make clothes for him, and the boy really did treat him like a father. There was always a note for him to deliver. However, she worried that he was much too young, and that if unfortunately he lost one, she might find added to her present woes a light reputation unbecoming to someone in her position, and she therefore kept her answers formal, reflecting that what constitutes good fortune depends after all on where one stands in the world. Not that she failed to recall his figure and manner, extraordinary as these had been that one time when she had made him out through the gloom, but she concluded that nothing could come of her seeking to please him.

  Genji thought of her endlessly, with mingled consternation and longing. He could not keep from dwelling on how much her distress had affected him. He might risk slipping in to see her, but with so many people in the house his misbehavior would be discovered, and that, he saw with alarm, would be disastrous for her.

  While he was spending day after day at the palace, as always, a directional taboo favored him once more. Feigning an impromptu departure for His Excellency's, he turned off on the way there toward the house of the Governor of Kii. The surprised Kii took his visit for a gratifying tribute to the stream that he had diverted through his garden.

  Genji had brought her little brother into the plot that afternoon. In the evening he immediately called for him again, since he had him at his beck and call day and night. The boy's sister had heard from him as well. She did not underestimate the interest that his scheme revealed, but she still had no wish recklessly to yield him her whole, modest person or to add new troubles to those already heaped upon her by their first, dreamlike encounter. No, decidedly, she would not fall in with his machinations and receive him; and so, as soon as Genji called her little brother away, she announced that she disliked being so near where he was staying and that anyway she was feeling unwell. “I shall move farther off for a quiet massage,” she said, and she went to hide in Chūjō's room along the bridgeway.

  Genji, whose plans were laid, had his entourage retire early and sent her a note, but her brother could not find her. Only after hunting high and low did he go down the bridgeway and come across her at last. “He'll think I'm no use at all!” the boy cried, nearly weeping with anger and frustration.

  “I will not have you take this awful attitude!” she scolded him. “They say a child should never carry such messages. Tell him that I am not feeling well and that I have kept my women with me for a massage. Everyone will be wondering what you are doing here.”

  In her heart of hearts, though, she felt that she might receive Genji gladly, however seldom, if only she were not now settled for life but were still at home, where the memory of her late parents and of their ambitions for her lived on. Despite her resolve, she suffered acutely to think that he must find her adamant rejection outrageously impertinent. However, it was too late now for such thoughts, and she made up her mind to remain stubbornly unresponsive to the end.

  Genji lay waiting, eager to find out what her little brother might devise and at the same time nervous about his being so young. When he learned that there was no hope, her astonishing obduracy made him so detest his own existence that his distress was painfully obvious. For some time he was silent and only heaved great sighs. He was very hurt.

  “I who never knew what it was the broom tree meant now wonder to find

  the road to Sonohara led me so far from my way.72

  I have nothing to say,” he wrote at last.

  She, too, was still awake, and she answered,

  “Stricken with regret to have it known she was born in a humble home,

  the broom tree you briefly glimpsed fades and is soon lost to view.”73

  She did not like to have her brother roaming about like this, too upset over Genji's annoyance to sleep, because she was afraid that he might arouse suspicion.

  Genji's men slept soundly, as usual, while he alone gave himself over to vain, outraged ruminations. It infuriated him that her amazing resistance, far from disappearing, had instead risen to this pitch, and he was beside himself with outrage and injury, although he also knew perfectly well that strength of character was what had attracted him to her in the first place.

  So be it, he told himself, but he remained so unconvinced that he was soon saying, “All right, then take me to where she is hiding.”

  “She has shut herself up in a little room and has several women with her—I wouldn't dare,” her brother replied, desperately wishing he could do better.

  “Very well, then you, at least, shall not leave me.” Genji had the boy lie down with him. The boy so appreciated his master's youth and gentleness that they say Genji found him much nicer than his cruel sister.

  3

  UTSUSEMI

  The Cicada Shell

  Utsusemi means “the cast-off shell of a cicada.” In this chapter Genji continues pursuing the woman whom he sought vainly to tame in the last, and again she flees, shedding a gown as she does so. Genji picks it up and sends her the poem

  “Underneath this tree, where the molting cicada shed her empty shell, my longing still goes to her, for all I know her to be.”

  She writes as a private comment on his letter:

  “Just as drops of dew settle on cicada wings, concealed in this tree, secretly, O secretly, these sleeves are wet with my tears.”

  RELATIONSHIP TO EARLIER CHAPTERS

  “The Cicada Shell” continues seamlessly from “The Broom Tree.”

  PERSONS

  Genji, a Captain in the Palace Guards, age 17

  The boy, Utsusemi's younger brother, 12 or 13 (Kogimi)

  The wife of the Iyo Deputy (Utsusemi)

  The lady from the west wing, sister of the Governor of Kii

  (Nokiba no Ogi)

  An old woman in Utsusemi's service

  Genji could not sleep. “No woman has ever so rejected me,” he said. “Tonight at last I have learned that to love means to suffer, and I doubt that I can survive the shame of it very long.”

  The boy lying beside him wept. Genji thought him very sweet. Small and slender to the touch, with quite short hair, he resembled his sister, which was probably why Genji found him so pleasing. Genji knew the spectacle he would make if he insisted on looking for her, so he spent the night instead heartily condemning her, asked less of her brother than usual, and left while it was still pitch-dark. The boy was very sorry and disappointed for him.

  She, too, had her bitter regrets, but from him not a word. Perhaps he had learned his les
son, but still, it would be cruel of him to give up now, though there would be trouble unless he stopped his reprehensible behavior. Surely, she thought, it was time to put a stop to this when she could, but she often found herself lost in anxious musings.

  The exasperated Genji did not see how he could break it off now, nor did he like to play the fool. “She is cruel and she is hateful,” he kept saying to her little brother, “but I have lost every struggle to drive her from my mind. I cannot bear it. Find a good time and arrange somehow for me to talk to her.” The boy hardly knew how to do this, but he was pleased to have Genji ask it of him.

  He was on watch for an opening, in his childish way, when the Governor of Kii went down to his province; and so late one day, when dusk shrouded the lover's path1 and the women of the household were relaxing alone, he took Genji to the house in his own carriage. Genji worried about what might come next, since the boy was so young, but he could not contain himself, and he rushed off, plainly dressed, to get there before they locked the gates.

  The boy guided the carriage in through a deserted entrance and had Genji alight. Fortunately the watchmen almost ignored him, since he was a child, and they said nothing.

  Playing Go

  He posted Genji at the double doors to the east,2 went south around the corner to knock and call at the lattice shutters, and then entered. “You can see straight in!” Genji heard the older women complain.

  “It is so hot—why do you have the shutters down?” he asked.

  “The lady from the west wing3 came this afternoon. They are playing Go.”

  Ah, thought Genji, I want a look at her sitting across from her partner. He slipped in between the blinds.4 They had not yet secured the shutter through which the boy had entered, and a gap remained. Genji went to it and peered in toward the west. The nearer end of a screen was folded, and the heat probably explained why a curtain that should have blocked his view had been draped over its stand, so that he could see quite well.

  They had the lamp beside them. His first thought was that the one by the central pillar of the chamber,5 facing away from him, must be she. She seemed to have on two layered, silk twill shifts of a deep red-violet, with some sort of garment over them. Her slender head and slight build left no marked impression, and she was keeping her partner from getting any view of her face. She was also doing her best to conceal her strikingly slim hands.6

  Her opponent was facing east, toward Genji, and he could see all of her. She had on a pair of sheer white shifts and what seemed to be a violet outer gown, so casually worn that her front was bare all the way down to her scarlet trouser cord—a casual getup to say the least. Tall, very fair-skinned, and nicely rounded, striking in head and forehead and with a delicious mouth and eyes, she made an arresting sight. Her fine, thick hair was not long, but it flowed in handsome sidelocks to her shoulders, and there was in fact nothing about her to wish otherwise. She was a pleasure to look at. No wonder her father was so proud of her, although it occurred to Genji that her manner could do with a little restraint. She did not seem to be dull either, because near the end of the game, when the contest was on for the last unclaimed territory, she seemed quite clever and keen.

  “Just a moment,” her opponent said calmly, “that spot is out of play. Let us finish by doing the exchange.”

  “Oh, dear, I have lost, haven't I! Now, how many do we have here in the corners? Dear me! Twenty, thirty, forty,” she counted, crooking her fingers as though taking a census of all the hot-spring tubs in Iyo.7 She did lack a certain grace.

  Her opponent kept her mouth so carefully covered that her face hardly showed, but Genji's gaze never left her, and he glimpsed her profile. With her perhaps somewhat puffy eyes and a nose vague enough in form to age her, she had no looks. Not to put too fine a point on it, she tended toward the plain, but her exquisite manners made up for it, and she obviously had more to her than her prettier partner.

  Her partner had liveliness and charm, though, and the growing abandon of her gay laughter had a vivid appeal that made her delightful in her way. Yes, Genji thought, I am a rascal, but with his roving eye he saw in her one more woman whom he would not soon forget. The others he knew never let themselves go, all he ever saw being an artful expression on an averted face, and he who had never before spied on women going about their daily lives would have liked to watch these two forever, despite his guilt at having them in plain view without their knowledge. But her little brother was coming, and he stole away.

  Genji was leaning against the door onto the bridgeway.8 “She has a visitor, my lord; I cannot approach her,” the boy nervously explained.

  “You mean she is going to turn me away again tonight? This is awful. I cannot take it.”

  “Oh, no, my lord, I shall manage something once the visitor has gone.”

  Very well, he thought, perhaps he really can bring her round. He is only a boy, but he has sense enough to see how things stand and to gauge someone's feelings.

  The game of Go seemed to be over, for they heard a rustle of silks and the sounds of people leaving. “Where's the young master, I wonder? I'll close this shutter.” A clatter followed.

  “She must have retired,” Genji said. “Now, go and see what you can do.”

  The boy knew that his sister was too proper ever to be bent by persuasion, so he planned to bring Genji to her once she was more or less alone.

  “Is Kii's sister here, too? Let me have a look at her.”

  “But I cannot, my lord. There is a curtain in front of the shutter.”

  Ah yes; but nonetheless… Genji felt guilty, and despite his amusement he had no wish to let the boy know what he had seen. Instead, he spoke of how much he looked forward to later that night.

  This time the boy knocked on the double doors. They were all lying down. ‘I'll sleep here by the sliding door,” he announced, spreading a mat. “Come, wind, give me a breeze!” The older women must have crowded into the aisle on the east, and the little girl who had let him in went and lay down there, too.

  For a while the boy pretended to be asleep. Then he stood a screen near the lamp and led the way in softly through the gloom, and Genji, fearing disaster, followed. He lifted the curtain at the edge of the room and stole very quietly in— except that in the silence the rustle of his robes, though faint, was hard to miss.

  She had tried to be glad that he had forgotten her, but lately her mind lingered so much on that strange, dreamlike experience that she could hardly even sleep.9 During the day she mused sadly, while at night she often lay awake; it was not spring, yet there she was, forever in tears.10 Meanwhile her partner at Go, who had decided to stay the night, chattered on brightly until she lay down. She seemed to drop straight off into untroubled sleep.

  The boy's sister looked up when the rustle and the rich fragrance reached her, and through the darkness she saw movement past the garment draped over the crossbar of the standing curtain.11 Never pausing in her horror to think, she rose and silently slipped away, wearing only a gossamer silk shift.

  In he came, and to his relief he found her lying alone. Two of her women were asleep outside on the level below.12 When he drew the cover aside to join her, it seemed to him that there was rather more of her than he had expected, but even so the truth never dawned on him. What alerted him in the end was the strange soundness with which she slept, and despite his shocked recoil he understood that if this young woman ever guessed his mistake, she would be hurt and he would look a dunce. Never mind now pursuing the lady he had come for, because she would only evade him again and think him a fool for trying. But if this is that pretty girl in the lamplight, he decided, then so be it!—which was no tribute to his seriousness of character.

  At last she awoke, in dismay and surprise, and she seemed frightened, too, but she gave no sign of deep or upsetting alarm. Her inexperience encouraged playful compliance, and she kept her head. Genji preferred not to say who he was, but he knew that once she began to wonder what he had been doing there, he
r conclusion, which to him would not matter, might damage that cruel woman who so fiercely protected her name, and he therefore gave her a smooth explanation of just why that taboo had brought him here again and again. Anyone with a little wit would have seen through him, but for all her forwardness she was too young to understand.

  He did not dislike her, but he saw nothing in her to attract him either, and he remained preoccupied with his tormentor's maddening behavior. Where could she be hiding? She must think him a perfect idiot. Few women were so intractable, and he wished that he could turn his thoughts elsewhere. Meanwhile, the young woman's youthful innocence so touched him that despite his reservations he pledged her his love with a great show of feeling.

  “People used to say that it is more romantic to stay the way we are now than to make everything public,” he intoned. “Love me then as I love you. After all, we have reason to be discreet, and, you know, I am in no position to do as I please. It also hurts me to imagine how some people might disapprove. Please be patient and do not forget me.”

  “It is so embarrassing to think how the others would feel if they knew!” she guilelessly replied to this string of platitudes. “I cannot write to you!”

  “Of course it would be disastrous if anyone were to find out, but we can keep in touch through our little privy gentleman. Pretend that nothing has happened.”

  With this he left her, collecting on his way a sheer gown that she must have shed in her flight.13

  The boy was asleep nearby, and he awoke easily when Genji roused him, having been anxious when he lay down about how things might go.

  “Who's that?” an old woman's voice called as he softly opened the door.

  Bother! “It's me!”

  “Where are you off to in the middle of the night?” She started for the door.