The Tale of Genji

  His Highness was surprised to see his visitor somewhat undone, and he felt at once pained and troubled, but he maintained his composure. “I am very, very sorry to hear it,” he said. “I heard a rumor to that effect only yesterday, and I wanted to ask you more about it, but I gathered that you did not wish it to be widely known.” The great difficulty of sustaining his air of detachment prevented him from saying more.

  “I had thought that I might offer you the pleasure of knowing her, you see—or perhaps you yourself knew her already, since she had reason to call on Her Highness.” Little by little he was showing his colors. “But I must apologize for troubling you with idle and tedious talk during a time when you yourself are so unwell,” he concluded, and took his leave.

  It really has affected him deeply! he said to himself. How high her destiny was, even though she lived so briefly! He is a Prince, Their Majesties' favorite, and he enjoys looks and every other advantage beyond anyone else of our time. The great ladies whom he honors with his allegiance are both of the very highest distinction, and yet it is she who moved him to folly, she for whom he indulged in such madness that all the world rang with litanies, scripture chanting, purifications, and prayers to the gods! Even I, such as I am, who am privileged to claim His Majesty's daughter as my own, seem to have been as entranced with her as he, and now that she is gone, I, too, am inconsolable! No, I will have no more of this foolishness! Alas, his effort to be reasonable failed in every way, and he lay humming to himself, “Every man is subject to passion, for he is neither stock nor stone.”11

  He wondered with pain and disappointment how His Highness12 might have taken the news of the poor way things had been done afterward—he supposed that it had all been kept very plain because her mother was common and because she had surviving brothers and sisters, as he gathered someone had remarked, and the very idea offended him. There were a great many things that he did not quite understand, and he longed to ask for himself exactly what had happened, but he could not work out how to go about it because he simply could not join the long mourning confinement, and it would hurt too much to go there only to come straight back again.

  The new month began,13 and nightfall on the day when he remembered she was to have moved to the City was very sad indeed. The orange tree in his garden brought back with its scent poignant memories, and a cuckoo called twice as it flew by. “Should you visit her where she has gone,”14 he murmured in anguish; and since His Highness was just then due to go to Nijō, he sent him there, with a spray that he had had picked,

  “You, too, I suppose, softly cry your secret grief, as long as your heart

  goes to where she oversees the fields on the road of death.”15

  His Highness and his wife were just then musing together in sad silence, while her resemblance to the love he had lost sharpened his sorrow. Seeing that the note was fraught with meaning, he wrote,

  “Take heed, O cuckoo, when you think to lift your cry there where such fragrance

  wafts from the orange blossoms, bringing back dear memories!

  It is too much!”

  The lady beside him knew very well what the matter was. Alas! she sadly reflected. How tragically short a while they16 lived, with all their cares! I who have so few have now outlived them both, though for how long? His Highness could no longer bear to keep from her something that had ceased to be a secret, and he gave her a somewhat doctored account of all that had happened. “I hated you for hiding her from me!” he added, amid laughter and tears, because the two had been sisters, which made him feel especially close to her. At that other house, so grand and proper, there was no end to the vexations visited on him when he was indisposed by that lady's importunately solicitous father, the Minister, and by her many brothers; but he knew that here he could always feel comfortably at home.

  He still kept wondering, though, whether he had dreamed it all, because he did not see how it could really have been that sudden. He therefore summoned his usual band of men and sent them off to fetch Ukon. Her late mistress's mother had returned to the City because the roar of the river called to her too urgently to follow her daughter, and she doubted that at Uji she would ever have relief from her sorrow. The place was almost deserted when they arrived, apart from a few priests chanting the Name. The guards who had appeared so suddenly and so ostentatiously never challenged them at all, and they thought bitterly how cruel it was that those same guards had refused to admit His Highness even on that last journey to her. Yes, they, too, had silently condemned him for yielding to such unbecoming folly, but now the memory of those nights when he had gone to her, and of the noble grace with which he had carried her that time into the boat, left the bravest of them unmanned.

  Ukon received Tokikata, naturally enough amid a flood of tears. “That is what His Highness wished me to tell you,” Tokikata explained, “and I have come to fetch you for him.”

  “I am afraid that some here might find it strange if I were to go just now,” she replied, “and besides, even if I did, I doubt that in my present state I would be up to making anything very clear to him. It will look a bit better if I wait till later, after our confinement is over, to give them an excuse for a trip to the City, and I promise that I will, although for myself I hardly wish to live that long. By then I shall be feeling a little more composed. I should like to call upon him then—he need not repeat his invitation—and tell him the whole story, which I quite agree is just like a dream.” For today there was no sign that she was to be moved.

  Tokikata wept. “I myself was never privy to what passed between those two,” he said, “and it is not for such as I to pretend to understand them, but my own eyes witnessed his extraordinary devotion, and I saw no reason to seek your friendship too quickly, since it seemed obvious that in time I would have the pleasure of serving you myself. This dreadful thing that has happened has only confirmed me in my feeling for you.” He concluded his speech by saying, “It would be a great shame to have to bring the carriage back empty, when His Highness has been kind enough to send it for you. Perhaps someone else would agree to go.”

  Ukon called out Jijū. “Please go yourself, then,” she said.

  “But what could I possibly tell him?” Jijū protested. “No, no, I must not, not as long we remain confined. Does His Highness have no fear of defilement?”

  “What with the commotion caused by his illness, there are all sorts of penances being done for him, but he does not look to me as though he himself has the patience to wait that long. In fact, he might well prefer to go into retreat for someone who meant so much to him. There are not many days left anyway. Do come, one of you.”

  His insistence convinced Jijū to comply after all, for she remembered His Highness very fondly indeed, and, as she said to herself, When will I ever again have such a chance to see him? Dressed all in dark gray and handsomely groomed, she really was very pretty. Since she no longer had a mistress, she had neglected to dye herself a train in the same color, and she had a page girl bring a pale gray-violet one instead. It saddened her very much to think that this was the path her mistress would have quietly taken, if she had lived, since her own secret inclination lay that way.

  His Highness felt a pang when they announced her arrival, but he said nothing about it to his wife; that would have been too unkind. He went to the main house and had Jijū alight in the gallery. In response to his pressing questions about her mistress's last days, Jijū described her state of despair and told him how she had wept that night. “She usually had extraordinarily little to say, Your Highness,” she explained. “She was never one to express herself clearly, and it was rare for her to tell anyone else even about things that affected her deeply. I expect that this reticence of hers is the reason why she left no last words either. We never dreamed that she could be planning such a thing.”

  Her circumstantial account troubled His Highness still further. What can have impelled her to drown herself in such a river, he wondered, rather than entrust her days to the destiny prepared for her by karma? He wished desperately, though in vain, that he had found her and stopped her.

  “Oh, why did this never occur to us when she burned and disposed of her letters?” Jijū cried. They talked the night through, and she told him about her mistress's reply to her mother, left written on the list of scriptures.

  His Highness had never paid any particular attention to Jijū before, but the intimacy of their shared grief moved him to say, “Come into service here! It is not as though you were nothing to Her Highness.”

  “I should be honored to do so, Your Highness, but for the time being I think it would make me too sad. Perhaps after the mourning is over.”

  “You must come again, then.” He could not bear to part even with her. She started back at dawn, and he sent a set of comb boxes and one of clothing chests with her, gifts meant originally for her mistress. He had actually had many, many things made for her, but for Jijū he confined himself to these, since he did not wish to overdo his generosity.

  What will they think of me, after my innocent visit to him, when I come back with all this? she wondered. This is a surprising embarrassment! She could hardly refuse them, though, despite her dismay. She and Ukon examined them privately together, having so little else to do, and they wept copiously when they saw how utterly exquisite and stylish they were. The clothes in the chests, too, were perfectly beautiful. “We had better keep these out of sight during mourning,” they said to each other, not really knowing what to do with them.

  His lordship the Commander now arrived, for he could no longer contain his desire to know more. All the way there he pondered the past and wondered what bond from lives gone by had first led him to seek out His Late Highness. And ever since then, he reflected, I have looked after his daughters, even to the strange end of this last and least expected of them, and suffered constantly over them! He was such a saintly man, and our tie was always our hope for the life to come, under the Buddha's guidance, but for me it led only to error and sin—which I suppose must have been the Buddha's way of bringing me to the truth after all.

  He summoned Ukon. “I never heard properly just what happened,” he said, “and what I was told so shocked me that I had meant to come after your mourning confinement was over, since that will be soon; but then I could bear it no longer, and I came anyway. What was your mistress's condition when she died?”

  The nun Ben knows what the matter was, Ukon reflected, and since he is likely to have the story from her in any case, any attempt on my part to conceal it from him will only fail when she tells him something quite different. She had armed herself with lies to cover up the distressing affair, but in the presence of such sincere concern she forgot the tall tales she had meant to tell and, not knowing what else to do, simply told him the truth.

  Her unexpected revelation stunned him, and he found himself at a loss for words. That is beyond belief! he thought. She who had so little to say, even on matters that others discuss easily, and who was always so mild—how could she have made up her mind to do such a terrible thing? What were these women trying to hide? The thought only increased his dismay; and yet His Highness's grief had been perfectly plain. And the scene here at the house in Uji: if they had been merely feigning calm, he would certainly have been able to tell, whereas he could hear that in fact his arrival had plunged them all again, high or low, into loud lamentation.

  “Did anyone else disappear with her? Tell me more about precisely what happened. I doubt that she wanted to leave me because she was disappointed in me. What unspeakable anguish can suddenly made her do such a thing? I simply cannot believe it.”

  So here we are, thought Ukon, at once sorry and troubled. “You probably know the whole story already, my lord,” she said. “Having been brought up in the first place under unfortunate circumstances, my mistress slipped into unbroken melancholy after she came to live here, so far away from anywhere else; but rare as your visits were, she always looked forward to them, and I know, although she never said so, that whenever her mind was off her old troubles, she eagerly anticipated being able to see you often and at your leisure. We who served her were happy to learn that this hope of hers was to be realized, and we set about preparing for the day, as her mother did very gladly when it seemed that what she had wanted for her daughter was to come true and that she was to move to the City. But then there was that mystifying note from you, and your stern reprimand to the guards about some trouble caused by one of her women, which the rough country people here, who understand nothing, took in the worst way they could. After that there was nothing more from you for a long time, and she who had known all too well since childhood what misfortune she was born to became convinced that her mother's efforts to see her respectably settled would in the end yield nothing but ridicule. She knew how cruel a blow that would be to her mother, and it caused her constant agony. Apart from that, I cannot imagine what might have put such a thought into her head. They say that if a demon had made off with her, it would at least have left something of her behind!” She was weeping so much that his suspicions melted away, and he could not stop his tears either.

  “Being who I am, I am not free to do as I please,” he replied, “for my every move may be scrutinized; and that is why, when your mistress's welfare here concerned me most, I at least felt confident of assuring her a future close by and in a style that no one could fault; and if that made her feel I was treating her coldly, then I can only assume that some part of her affections was engaged elsewhere. I had not meant to bring up the subject now, nor would I if anyone else could hear me, but there is the matter of His Highness. I wonder when it began. When it comes to this sort of thing, he is unfortunately a master at turning a young woman's head, and I am therefore inclined to believe that she took her life because she could not have him all the time. You must tell me more about that. Please keep nothing from me.”

  So he does know! she thought in profound dismay. “I gather that you have heard some extremely cruel talk, my lord. And yet I myself was always with her, I assure you.” She paused a moment. “Well, I expect that you have heard what happened. That time when my mistress sought quiet refuge with Her Highness at Nijō, he came straight into her room, to our horror, although we spoke to him so sharply that he went away again. That fright decided her to move to the curious little house you know. She was determined that he should hear no more of her after that, but he still managed somehow to find out where she was, and this past second month she had a letter from him. Many more came after that, but she would never read them. We told her that she should feel honored and that it was actually rude of her not to reply, and so I believe that she did answer him once or twice. That is all I know.”

  What else could he expect her to say? It would be cruel to question her further. Instead he lapsed into thought. Even if she was swept away by His Highness, she did not just for that think less well of me, and being as vague as she was, and as easily swayed, she must have got the idea for what she did simply from having the river nearby. She would never, never have sought out the abyss,17 whatever suffering life brought her, if I had not left her here in the first place. How he detested that river and all the dire grief it meant to him! For many years affection had drawn him here, back and forth over those rough mountain roads, but he hated the place now; he did not want even to hear the sound of its name. He shivered just to remember when Her Highness at Nijō had first mentioned her half sister and he had first talked of a “doll” of the love he had lost. He kept telling himself, It is my fault that she died. He had assumed with disapproval that her mother had arranged the last rites badly and meanly because she herself was of low birth, but he could only sympathize with her now that he knew the whole story. It seemed to him that her daughter was thoroughly deserving, having the father she did, but that she herself, who could not know her daughter's secret, must wonder what could have happened between her daughter and people close to himself. The whole thing was very painful. No defilement was involved, that much he now knew, but to keep up appearances before his men he did not actually enter the house; instead he called for a carriage shaft bench and sat on it before the double doors. However, that did not become a man in his position, and he therefore moved to sit on the moss in the dense grove of trees. From there he looked about him, doubting that he would ever want to see this place again.

  “If now even I leave this old and hateful place to go to ruin,

  who will keep in memory the shade of these ivied trees?”

  The Adept by now was a Master of Discipline. The Commander summoned him and let him know what rites he was to perform. He also added to the number of monks calling the Name. With the gravity of the sin in mind, he gave detailed instructions on the scriptures and images to be dedicated on each seventh day, in order to lighten the burden it imposed. It was quite dark by the time he left, reflecting as he did so that he would certainly not have gone back that evening if she had been alive. He sent the nun a message, but she did not appear. “Alas,” she replied, “I shall continue to lie here, for I am by now a horror even to myself, and I retain too little of my wits to understand anything at all.” He did not insist on approaching her in person. All the way home he nursed bitter regret that he had not called her to the City earlier, when she was so dear to him, and turmoil overwhelmed him as long as he still heard the river. Ah, he thought, sighing helplessly, she met such a terrible end, and they never even found her body! What watery gulf has claimed her now?