The Tale of Genji

  “His lordship summoned me, and I went there this morning. I only just got back. While conveying his wishes on this and that, he told me that he has not sent any guards of his own while the young lady is here because he knows my men are on watch through the night and on into dawn, but that recently he had a report of an unidentified man visiting one of the women here; and that, he said, is inexcusable. He maintained that those on guard must know all about it, since he did not see how they could have failed to notice. When he questioned me about it, I told him that I had not heard, since I have been ill and have not stood guard duty myself for months, so that I knew nothing. I have assigned good men to do the job properly there, I said,48 and if anything like that happened, I cannot imagine not being told. He answered that I had better be careful, because if there is any incident, I will feel the full weight of his anger. I shudder to think what he may mean.”

  Ukon got a worse fright than from the hoot of an owl. She answered not a word but went straight to her mistress. “I knew it!” she cried. “Listen to me: this is exactly what I told you must have happened! His lordship has obviously found out. You have not even heard from him, and that is why!”

  “I am very glad to hear of his lordship's new orders,” remarked the nurse, who had caught a little of this. “There are supposed to be a lot of bandits around here, and the guards are not working the way they used to. They are all just filling in for someone else—he sends nothing but menials so useless that they cannot even manage their rounds at night!”

  This is the end, then, the young woman said to herself; whereupon a message most unfortunately arrived from His Highness, burning with impatience and filled with protestations about ravaged moss.49 One way or the other, then, something awful is going to happen to one of them! The only decent way out is for me to die. Women have drowned themselves before, when they could not choose between suitors.50 If I live, I will have cause to regret it, so why should I not wish to die? My mother will be upset and will mourn me awhile, but she has many other children to think about, and she will of course come to pluck the grasses of forgetting. It will be worse for her if my fall comes while I am still alive and I am lost for good after being roundly mocked. So her thoughts ran. Her upbringing had given her little true pride or knowledge of the ways of the world, and perhaps that is why she had been able, despite her air of girlishly mild innocence, to conceive of taking this almost brutal step.

  She tore up any compromising papers, and rather than dispose of them grandly, all at once, she burned them little by little in the flame of the lamp or had them taken to be thrown in the river until they were all gone. The women, who did not know what she was up to, assumed that she was destroying a casual collection of bits of practice calligraphy, accumulated over the months, in preparation for her move to the City.

  “What are you doing that for?” Jijū asked when she found her at it. “Of course you do not want anyone to see letters lovingly exchanged between you and someone else, but it is a moving pleasure for anybody, high or low, to look now and then at old letters safely kept in the bottom of a box. What a terrible thing to do, to tear up his letters, when he has written you so many beautiful things, and on such beautiful paper!”

  “It is just that I do not feel well, you see, and I doubt that I shall live much longer. They would embarrass him, too, if anyone found them later on. I would be so ashamed if anyone were to tell him that I willfully insisted on keeping them.” It was also that the more she contemplated the dismal act she planned, the more she wondered whether she really had the courage for it. She reflected, too, on what even she had heard, that it is a very grave sin to precede one's parents in death.

  The twentieth of the month had come and gone. The owner of the house to which His Highness meant to take her was due to go down from the City on the twenty-eighth.

  “I will come for you that night,” he wrote. “Make sure your women and servants guess nothing. I promise not to betray our secret from my side. Never doubt me!” But ah, she lamented, I will never be able to speak to him again, even if he tempts fate and comes! I shall have to send him back without even seeing him! Why, I cannot even invite him here for a little rest! She imagined him going back again, disappointed and angry, and as so often she seemed to see him before her, until sorrow overwhelmed her. She pressed his letter to her face, and after a brief attempt to control herself she burst into bitter weeping.

  “Oh, my dear!” Ukon cried, “people will see what is happening if you go on like this! Some of them must be wondering already. Please make up your mind and give him whatever answer you wish! I am here, and as long as I devise some mad scheme, I am sure I can have him come down from the sky—you are such a slip of a thing anyway—to fetch you!”

  Her mistress stopped her tears a moment. “I wish that you would not keep talking that way! It would be easy enough if I thought that was the thing to do, but I know quite well it is not, and meanwhile he makes things impossible by writing as though I were the one whose only thought was that he should come for me, until I hardly know what to expect of him next, and I myself am in despair!” She never answered His Highness at all.

  Detecting no sign of assent from her, and noting that she now seldom answered his letters, His Highness took it that the Commander's well-considered arguments had swayed her and that she had made the somewhat safer choice. He did not blame her for that, but all the same he felt extremely put out; and, he told himself, I know she loved me! Obviously, she must have given in to all those women of hers, preaching at her while I was away! The gloom he felt seemed to him to fill all the vast, empty heavens,51 until he again forgot all caution and set off for Uji.

  The first approach to the reed fence drew, as never before, a chorus of alert voices, shouting, “Who goes there?” His Highness's man retreated and sent in someone who knew the house well. They challenged him, too. Things were different this time. “I have an urgent letter from the City!” he said, hardly knowing what else to do, and he called out the name of Ukon's servant. At last he was admitted. The situation was more difficult than ever.

  “I cannot apologize enough to His Highness,” Ukon said, “but this evening is out of the question.”

  To His Highness, who could not understand their turning against him in such a way, this was not an acceptable answer. “Tokikata, go in there, talk to Jijū, and do whatever needs to be done,” he said, and sent the man off.

  The clever Tokikata talked his way handily past the guards and found Jijū. “For some reason his lordship has issued orders that have made the men on guard duty here very assertive lately,” she explained, “and we are at our wits’ end. My mistress herself seems to be in great distress, and it is very painful to see her so upset over this affront to His Highness. No, no, there is no hope for tonight. Things will only get worse, much worse, if they ever catch sight of His Highness, so please tell him that we, too, are preparing for the night that I believe he has mentioned to my mistress.” She also told him how sharp-eyed her mistress's nurse was.

  Saddle blanket

  It is no joke, you know, his coming all the way here,” Tokikata replied, “and considering the risk he is taking, I would merely look incompetent if I brought him a useless answer like that. All right, come with me. We can explain it to him together!”

  “But I cannot do that!” Jijū protested, and the night wore on while they argued about it.

  His Highness was waiting some distance away, still mounted, when dogs with barbarous voices came barking terrifyingly around him, until everyone with him—and on a mad escapade like this there were very few—was beside himself with worry over what might happen if ruffians of some sort were to rush him.

  “Very well, you are going to come with me now,” Tokikata brusquely announced, and dragged Jijū off. She looked charming, with her hair tucked that way under her arm. He tried to get her on a horse, and when she would have none of it, he picked up her skirts and walked beside her, giving her his own good shoes to wear while he wore
an underling's. It became clear when they reached His Highness, and Tokikata began his report, that conversation would be impossible as long as His Highness remained on horseback. Tokikata therefore spread what they called a saddle blanket beneath a peasant's weedy hedge, so that His Highness might dismount. Even His Highness was shocked by his situation. I doubt that I can count on an assured future if I get hurt on an errand like this, he reflected, and at the thought he could only weep. This made the susceptible Jijū particularly sad. She could not have ignored anyone so beautiful, even if he had been her worst enemy in demon form.

  He dried his tears a moment. “Can I not have one word with her? Why does it have to be this way now? It must be you women who put her up to this!”

  Jijū explained to him exactly what was going on. “Please, Your Highness, you must make absolutely certain not to let anyone know the day you have fixed upon. I am ready to do everything I possibly can for you, at whatever cost to myself, when I see you so generously risk everything for her this way.” His Highness greatly feared discovery, too, and he could not insist on being angry with her.

  It was very late by now, but the watchdogs were still barking, and when His Highness's men chased them off, there came sounds of twanging bowstrings and uncouth men's voices, crying, “Look out for fire!” It was all extremely disconcerting, and His Highness's state as he prepared to return to the City was beyond description.

  “Where I may go now to cast this life of mine away, I know not: white clouds

  hang upon every mountain and my way is dark with tears.52

  Go now, quickly!” He sent Jijū back. His figure was all charm and grace, and no words can convey the richness of his fragrance, drenched as he was in the dews of the night.

  Ukon was just telling her mistress, who lay prostrate and despairing, how she had curtly refused to admit His Highness, when Jijū came in and told her own story. Their mistress did not answer, but she wished that they could not see her like this, with her pillow all but floating away. The next morning she lay long in bed, for shame that they might notice her swollen eyes; then to uphold the barest decency she donned shoulder cords and read the scriptures, praying only to be forgiven the sin of dying before her mother. She took out the picture he had made, and she felt as she gazed at it that he was there before her, enchanting as always, painting it afresh. It was so especially cruel that she had not been able to say a word to him the night before! And how, then, will he feel, when he so often promised me long and peaceful years together? She could well imagine, to her shame, that some might speak ill of her, but better that than that he should have to hear people mock her despicable folly! These thoughts brought a poem to mind:

  “Though in black despair I give up this life of mine, an abhorrent name,

  as alas I know full well, will mark me when I am gone.”

  She missed her mother, too, and even her ill-favored brothers and sisters, of whom she thought so seldom otherwise. Then she remembered Her Highness at Nijō for there were so many whom she longed to see just one more time. Her women were all chatting away, busy with their dyeing, but she paid them no heed. Once it was night again, she lay sleepless, planning a way to get out of the house without being seen. When dawn came, she looked toward the river and felt death even nearer than for the reluctant sheep.53

  His Highness sent a bitterly accusing letter, but even now the fear that someone might be watching kept her from writing the answer she wished. She only wrote,

  “If I left no trace, not even an empty husk, behind in this world,

  where, love, would you seek my grave, to accuse me of my wrongs?”54

  and sent it out to the messenger. She wanted to give his lordship a last word as well, but she could not bear the idea that if she did so, these two fast friends might in time compare what she had sent to each. No, she thought, I shall just leave both wondering what happened to me.

  A letter from her mother arrived from the City: “I had an extremely upsetting dream about you last night, and I asked that scriptures be read for you in several temples. I suppose it is because I never got back to sleep, but today I dozed off and dreamed of you again, in the way that they say announces misfortune.55 That is why I am writing to you, now that I am awake again. Please, please be careful. I greatly fear someone connected with that distinguished lord who calls on you sometimes at that lonely house of yours,56 and it is especially worrying to dream of you this way when you are already in poor health. I want to go to you, but the Lieutenant's wife is still causing us serious concern because she is ill in a way that suggests the work of a spirit, and I have been forbidden to leave the house at all. You must have scriptures read also in the temple near you.” She had included a letter to the temple, as well as a suitable donation. Her daughter was deeply saddened to read the things she had written without ever knowing that, for her, her life was now over.

  She composed her reply while someone went off to the temple. She had a great deal to say, but she confined herself after all to this:

  “I would have you pray that we two may meet again, in the life to come,

  unconfused by any dream of this present, hapless world.”

  The wind brought her the sound of the temple bell, announcing the beginning of the scripture reading, and she lay there listening to it intently.

  “To your dying tones add, O temple bell, my voice, lifted in weeping:

  take it to my mother there, to tell her I am no more.”

  She wrote this on the list of scriptures read,57 only to be told that the messenger would not return to the City that night; so she left it instead tied to the branch of a tree.

  “My heart is racing strangely, and our mistress's mother mentioned frightening dreams,” her nurse remarked to the women. “Go and tell the guards to be watchful tonight!”

  Oh, no! she thought as she lay nearby.

  “I cannot see why you will not eat anything,” Nanny went on. “Some gruel, perhaps?” Ever so busily solicitous, she nonetheless was very old now and quite unsightly.

  What will she do when I am gone? she wondered touchingly. If only I might hint to her that I can no longer remain in this world! But for fear of instant alarm and tears, she said nothing at all.

  Ukon lay down beside her. “They say that the soul of someone with cares like yours may go wandering far away,” she said. “Perhaps that is why your mother had those dreams. I implore you to make up your mind and accept the consequences, whatever they may be.” She sighed.

  Her mistress only lay with her face buried in her soft sleeves.

  52

  KAGERŌ

  The Mayfly

  The kagerō (“mayfly”) hatches in summer and dies only a few hours later. The chapter title comes from the chapter's closing poem, by Kaoru:

  “There it is, just there, yet ever beyond my reach, till I look once more,

  and it is gone, the mayfly, never to be seen again.”

  RELATIONSHIP TO EARLIER CHAPTERS

  The story in “The Mayfly” takes up where it left off in “A Drifting Boat,” in Kaoru's twenty-seventh year.

  PERSONS

  The Commander, age 27 (Kaoru)

  Ukifune's mother, the wife of the Governor of Hitachi (Chūjō no Kimi)

  Ukon, a gentlewoman at Uji, daughter of Ukifune's nurse

  His Highness of War, 28 (Niou)

  Tokikata, Niou's retainer

  Ukifune's nurse

  jijū, Ukifune's gentlewoman, then enters the service of the Empress

  The Treasury Commissioner, Nakanobu, Kaoru's retainer

  Her Highness, a wife of His Highness of War, 27 (Naka no Kimi)

  The Master of Discipline, formerly the Adept (Uji no Ajari)

  Ben, the nun at Uji (Ben no Ama)

  The Governor of Hitachi, Ukifune's stepfather

  Kozaishō, a gentlewoman in the service of the First Princess

  Her Majesty, the Empress, 46 (Akashi no Chūgū)

  Her daughter, the First Princess (Onna Ichi
no Miya)

  Her Highness, the Second Princess, Kaoru's wife, 17 (Onna Ni no Miya)

  Dainagon, a gentlewoman in the service of the First Princess

  Miya no Kimi, daughter of His Late Highness of Ceremonial, in the service of the Empress

  Ben, a gentlewoman in the service of the Empress

  Chūjō, a gentlewoman in the service of the First Princess

  Down there at Uji the women had discovered that their mistress was gone and were looking for her frantically, but in vain. I shall not describe the scene further, since it resembled the morning after a maiden's abduction in a tale.

  The young woman's mother had been worried when her messenger from the City the previous day failed to return, and she dispatched another. “The cocks were still crowing when she sent me off,” the man explained. Neither the nurse nor anyone else knew what answer to give him; they were too desperately upset and confused. But although some could only mill about in distress, those who knew what the trouble was remembered how severely despondent she had been and understood that she might well have drowned herself.

  They wept as they opened her mother's letter: “I worry about you until I can hardly sleep, which I suppose is why last night I did not even dream of you properly. I had only nightmares, which have left me feeling so strange and so frightened that I want you here for whatever time remains, although I know that you are soon to move to the City. Unfortunately, it will probably rain today.”

  Ukon wept bitterly when she opened her mistress's note to her mother, written the evening before. There it is, then! She told her mother that she felt she had no hope! Why did she say nothing to me? She was never displeased with me, not once, since we were children, and I never kept anything from her, but she has gone off on her last journey without a hint to me of what she meant to do! It is too cruel! Ukon stamped her feet and wept like a little child. She had certainly seen her mistress despondent day after day, but nothing about her had ever suggested that she could conceive anything so utterly horrible. What had happened to her, though? Ukon was desperate to know. Meanwhile the shock had left her mistress's nurse unable to do more than mutter, “What are we to do? What are we to do?”