The Tale of Genji

  One very misty morning when the still-sleepy Genji was at last taking his leave in response to insistent urging, though with many sighs, the gentlewoman Chūjō raised a lattice shutter and moved her mistress's curtain aside as though to say, “My lady, do see him off!” She lifted her head and looked out: there he was, standing before all the colors of the garden as though he did not wish to miss their beauty. No, there was no one like him.

  Chūjō accompanied him toward the gallery.16 Silk gauze train neatly tied at her waist, over an aster layering17 perfect for the season, she carried herself with delicious grace. He glanced back and sat her down by the railing at the corner of the building. Her comely deference toward him, the length of her sidelocks18—all seemed to him a miracle.

  “I would not be known for flitting lightheartedly to every flower

  but this bluebell this morning I would be sad not to pick.

  What do you suggest?” he said, taking her hand; but she replied with practiced wit,

  “Your haste to be off before morning mists are gone makes it all too plain,

  so I should say, that your heart cares little for your flower,”

  so turning his poem to refer to her mistress. A pretty page boy, handsome in trousers that might have been made for this very moment and that now were wet with dew, wandered out among the flowers and brought him a bluebell. One would have liked to paint the scene.

  Whoever chanced to lay eyes on Genji was smitten by him. After one glimpse of the radiance that attended him, men of every degree (for the crudest woodcutter may yet aspire to pause in his labors beneath a blossoming tree) 19 wished to offer him a beloved daughter, while the least menial with a sister he thought worthy entertained the ambition to place her in Genji's service. It was therefore all but impossible for a cultivated woman like Chūjō, one who had had occasion to receive poems from him and to bask in the warmth of his beauty, not to be drawn to him. She, too, must have regretted that he did not come more often.

  Oh, yes, it must also be said that Koremitsu gave Genji a fine account of what he had learned from spying as ordered through the neighbors' fence. “I have no idea who she is,” he reported. “As far as I can tell, she is hiding from everyone. Her women have little to keep them occupied. They seem now and again to cross over to the southern part of the house—the one with the half-panel shutters—and the younger ones go to look whenever they hear a carriage. The one I take to be their mistress is brave enough to do the same.20 What I have seen of her face suggests that she is lovely. The other day a carriage passed with an escort, and a little page girl who was watching it cried, ‘Look, Ukon, look! It's his lordship going by!’ A rather older grown-up then came out, calling ‘Hush, hush’ and motioning her to be quiet. ‘How do you know?' she asked, and she added, ‘Come, I'll look myself.’ She was hurrying across what I suppose was the crossbridge when her skirts caught, and she stumbled and almost fell. ‘Goodness,’ she exclaimed, ‘the God of Kazuraki certainly didn't make that one very well!’21 I think they gave up watching after that. The girl said the gentleman in the carriage had been in a dress cloak, and to prove it had been the Secretary Captain22 she named several of the attendants and pages she had seen with him.”

  “I wish I had seen his carriage myself.” Genji wondered whether she might be the one the Secretary Captain could not forget.

  “I am doing well at courting one of the women there,” Koremitsu went on, smiling at Genji's obvious eagerness to learn more, “and I know the house by now, but the young women still talk to each other as though they were there by themselves, and I go about pretending to believe them. They think their secret is safe, and whenever a child threatens to blurt out something,23 they talk their way past the difficulty and keep up their show of being alone.”

  “Give me a look through that fence next time I call on your mother.” Judging from where she was living, at least for now, she must belong to that lower grade that his friend had so curtly dismissed. Yes, Genji thought, what if there really were a surprisingly pleasant discovery to be made there?

  Koremitsu, who could not bear to disappoint his lord, marshaled his own wide experience of courtship to devise a way at last to introduce him into the house. All that makes a long story, though, so as usual I have left it out.

  Having failed to discover who she was, Genji withheld his identity from her and pursued her in deep disguise,24 with such patient ardor that Koremitsu let him have his own horse and walked beside his lord. “I should be sorry to have the great lover seen approaching the house on foot, like a menial,” he complained; but Genji, who trusted no one else with his secret, had himself accompanied otherwise only by the man who had passed him the twilight beauty flowers and by a single page whose face no one in the house would know. He even avoided calling at the house next door, lest they guess after all who he was.

  In her bewilderment she had Genji's letter-bearer followed and tried to discover where Genji himself went after he left her at dawn, all in the hope of finding out where he lived, but he and his men always managed to evade hers, even as the thought of her so filled his mind that he could not be without her and was constantly appearing at her side, tormented by his unseemly folly.

  An affair of this kind may lead the most staid man astray, but so far Genji had always managed to control himself, and he had done nothing to merit censure. It was extraordinary, though, how leaving her in the morning or being away from her only for the day made him miserable enough to wonder whether he had lost his senses, and to struggle to remind himself that nothing about her required this degree of passion. In manner she seemed very young, for she was remarkably sweet and yielding, and hardly given to deep reflection; yet she knew something of worldly ways, and she could not be of very high birth. Again and again he asked himself what it was that he saw in her.

  He made a show of dressing modestly in a hunting cloak, of changing his costume, and of giving her no look at his face, and he never came to her until everyone in the house was asleep. He was so like a shape-changing creature of old25 that he caused her acute anguish, although his manner with her, and her own sense of touch, made her wonder how great a lord he might be. It must be that great lover I have to thank for this, she reflected, her suspicion falling on Koremitsu; but Koremitsu only feigned ignorance and went on lightheartedly visiting the house as though he knew nothing, until confusion overcame her and she sank into a strange melancholy.

  Genji assumed that she was in hiding only for the time being, and he wondered where he would seek her if she were to vanish after snaring him so artlessly. It worried him that he would never know on what day she might go, or where. She would have been just a passing distraction if he then failed to find her and accepted her loss, but he did not believe for a moment that he could forget her that easily. Every night when discretion kept him from her was such a trial that he thought of bringing her to Nijō whoever she might be, and if the resulting gossip embarrassed him, so be it. Despite himself he wondered what bond from the past could have aroused a passion so consuming and so unfamiliar.

  “Come,” he said, “I want to talk quietly somewhere where we can be alone.”

  “But that would be so strange,” she protested naively. “I understand your feeling, but that sort of thing is not done. The idea upsets me.”

  No doubt it does, Genji reflected with a smile. “Yes,” he said gently, “one or the other of us must be a fox: so just let me bewitch you.”

  She let him have his way and yielded completely. Her utter submissiveness, however curious, was extremely engaging. She must be the “gillyflower” described, as he now remembered, by the Secretary Captain, but if she was in hiding she must have her reasons, and he refrained from pressing her. He saw no sign that she might suddenly flare up at him and vanish—he foresaw no such change unless he neglected her badly—and he even fancied despite himself that a little coolness from him might add to her appeal.

  On the fifteenth night of the eighth month,26 bright moonlight poured th
rough every crack into the board-roofed house, to his astonishment, since he had never seen a dwelling like this before. Dawn must have been near, because he heard uncouth men in the neighboring houses hailing one another as they awoke.

  Fulling block

  “Goodness, it's cold!”

  “Not much hope for business this year—I'll never get out to the country!27 What a life! Say, neighbor, you on the north, d'you hear me?”

  She was deeply embarrassed by this chatter and clatter all around them of people rising and preparing to go about their pitiful tasks. The place would have made anyone with any pretensions want to sink through the floor, but she remained serene and betrayed no response to any sound, however painful, offensive, or distressing, and her manner retained so naive a grace that the dismal commotion might just as well have meant nothing to her at all. Genji therefore forgave her more readily than if she had been openly ashamed. Thud, thud, a treadle mortar thundered almost at their pillow,28 until he understood at last what “detestable racket” means. Having no idea what was making it, he only was aware that it was new and that it was awful. The assortment of noises was no more than a jumble to him.

  The sound of snowy robes being pounded on the fulling block reached him faintly from all sides, and wild geese were crying in the heavens. These and many other sounds roused him to painfully keen emotion.29 He slid the nearby door open, and together they looked outside. The tiny garden boasted a pretty clump of bamboo on which dew gleamed as brightly as elsewhere. Insects of all kinds were singing, and to Genji, who seldom heard even a cricket in the wall, this concert of cries almost in his ears was a bizarre novelty, although his love for her must have inclined him to be forgiving. She was engagingly frail in the modesty of her soft, pale gray-violet gown over layers of white, and although she had nothing striking about her, her slender grace and her manner of speaking moved him deeply. She could perhaps do with a touch of pride, but he still wanted very much to be with her in less constricting surroundings.

  “Come, let us spend the rest of the night comfortably in a place nearby. It has been so difficult, meeting nowhere but here.”

  “But I do not see how… This is so sudden…” she protested innocently. Never mind his promises that their love would outlast this life; her meek trust was inexplicably gone, and he could hardly believe that she knew worldly ways. He therefore threw caution to the winds, had Ukon call his man, and got his carriage brought up. This demonstration of ardor gave her anxious gentlewomen faith in him after all.

  It would soon be dawn. No cocks were crowing. All they heard was an old man's voice as he prostrated himself full-length, no doubt for a pilgrimage to the Holy Mountain.30 The labor of throwing himself down and rising again sounded painful. Genji wondered what in this dewlike world he so desired that he insisted on such strenuous prayers.

  “Hail to the Guide who is to come!”31 the old man chanted. Genji was moved. “Listen to him: he, too, is thinking beyond just this life.

  “Let your own steps take the path this good man follows so devotedly

  and in that age yet to come still uphold the bond we share.”

  He had avoided the old lines about the “Hall of Long Life” and turned “sharing a wing”32 into a prayer that they should greet the Age of Miroku together. It was a grand leap into the future.

  “Such are the sorrows that make plain what fate past lives require me to bear

  that I have no faith at all in better from times to come.”

  Her reply, such as it was, was forlorn.

  While he sought to persuade her, since she could not make up her mind to launch forth so boldly under the slowly sinking moon, the moon suddenly slid behind clouds and the dawn sky took on great beauty. He hurried out as always, lest day betray his doings to the world, and lifted her easily into the carriage. Ukon got in, too.

  They soon reached a certain estate,33 and while waiting for the steward they gazed at the ferns along the old gate's ruinous eaves. All was darkness under the trees. The fog hung wet and heavy, and Genji's sleeves were soaked merely because he had put up the carriage's blinds. “I have never done anything like this,” he said. “It is nerve-racking, isn't it?

  Once upon a time could it be that others, too, lost their way like this?

  I myself have never known such strange wanderings at dawn.

  Have you ever done this before?”

  She answered shyly,

  “The wayfaring moon uncertain what to expect from the mountains' rim,

  may easily fade away and disappear in mid-sky.34

  I am afraid.”

  It amused him to see her so tremulous and fearful. He assumed that she just missed the crowd always around her at home.

  He had the carriage brought in and its shafts propped on the railing35 while their room was made ready in the west wing. The excited Ukon thought back over the past, because the way the steward rushed officiously about showed what sort of man her mistress's lover was.

  They left the carriage as day was beginning to restore shape and color to the world. The place was nicely arranged for them, despite their sudden arrival.

  “I see you have no one else with you, my lord,” said the steward, a close lower-level retainer in service also at His Excellency's. “This makes things rather difficult.” He approached and asked through Ukon whether he should summon a suitable entourage.36

  Genji quickly silenced him. “I came here purposely to hide. Say not a word about this to anyone.” The man hastened to provide a morning meal, although he did indeed lack staff to serve it.

  Genji had never slept away from home quite like this before, and he assured her over and over that he would love her even longer than the Okinaga River would flow.37 The sun was high when they rose, and he lifted the shutters himself. The unkempt and deserted garden stretched into the distance, its ancient groves towering in massive gloom. The near garden and shrubbery lacked any charm, the wider expanse resembled an autumn moor, and the lake was choked with water weeds. The place was strangely disturbing and quite isolated, although there seemed to be an inhabited outbuilding some distance off.

  “The place is eerie,” he said, “but never mind: the demons will not trouble me.”

  She was thoroughly offended that he still had his face covered, and he agreed that this was unnatural by now.

  “The flower you see disclosing now its secrets in the evening dew

  glimmered first before your eyes in a letter long ago,”

  he said. “Does the gleam of the dew please you?”

  With a sidelong glance she murmured,

  “The light I saw fill the dewdrops adorning then a twilight beauty

  was nothing more than a trick of the day's last fading gleam!”

  He was delighted. When at his ease he really was extraordinarily beautiful— in this setting, in fact, alarmingly so. “The way you kept your distance hurt me so much that I meant never to show you my face. Do tell me your name now. You frighten me, you know.”38

  “But you see, I am only a diver's daughter,”39 she answered mildly, as always refusing to tell him more.

  “All right, I suppose the fault is mine.”40 He spent the rest of the day now reproving her, now whispering sweet nothings in her ear.

  Koremitsu managed to find them, and he brought refreshments. He avoided waiting on Genji in person because he did not want to hear what Ukon would say to him. It amused him that Genji had resorted to bringing her here, and, assuming that her looks deserved this much trouble, he congratulated himself rather bitterly (since he could quite well have had her himself) on his generosity in ceding her to his lord.

  While gazing at the ineffably peaceful sunset sky, Genji remembered that she disliked the gloom inside the house. He raised the outer blinds41 and lay down beside her. They looked at each other in the twilight glow, and despite her anxiety she forgot her cares and charmingly yielded to him a little. She had now lain by him all day, piercingly young and sweet in her shy terror.

&nb
sp; He lowered the lattice shutters early and had the lamp lit. “Here we are,” he complained, “as close as we could possibly be, but at heart you are still keeping yourself from me. I cannot bear it.”

  He knew how anxiously His Majesty now must be seeking him, though he could not imagine where his men might be looking. How strange a love this is! And on Rokujō, what a state she must be in! She above all stirred his guilt, and he understood her anger, however painful it might be. The more fondly he dwelled on the artless innocence before him, the more he longed to rid her a little of the pride that so unsettled him.

  Late in the evening he dozed off to see a beautiful woman seated by his pillow. She said, “You are a wonder to me, but you do not care to visit me: no, you bring a tedious creature here and lavish yourself upon her. It is hateful of you and very wrong.” She began shaking the woman beside him awake.

  He woke up, aware of a heavy, menacing presence. The lamp was out. In alarm he drew his sword and laid it beside her, then roused Ukon. She came to him, clearly frightened, too.

  “Go,” he commanded, “wake the guard on the bridgeway and have him bring a hand torch.”

  “But how can I, my lord, in the dark?”

  “Don't be silly!” Genji laughed and clapped his hands. Eldritch echoes answered.

  No one could hear him, no one was coming. She was shivering violently, helplessly. Soaked with perspiration, she seemed to be unconscious.