The Tale of Genji

  “You must tell me!” the nun pressed her angrily. “You have been very cruel to treat me this way!” She had worked herself into a frenzy, ignorant as she was of the circumstances, when a voice announced, “Someone is here from the Mountain with a letter from His Reverence.”

  This was a new surprise, but she assumed that this letter must be the real one and asked to have the messenger approach. A very nice-looking, well-mannered boy then came forward, beautifully dressed. A cushion was put out for him, and he knelt before the blinds. “His Reverence told me that I would not be received quite this way,” he said, and the nun therefore spoke to him in person. She took the letter and read, “To the young lady nun, from the Mountain.” His Reverence had signed it with his name.

  The young woman could not claim that it was not for her. She shrank back farther into the room, acutely embarrassed, and would not meet anyone's eyes. “You certainly are always very quiet, but this is just too much.” The nun read His Reverence's letter.

  “His lordship the Commander came here this morning to inquire about you, and I told him everything I know. You have turned your back on his deep devotion to renounce the world among uncouth mountain rustics, and judging from what I am now startled to learn, this could to the contrary earn you the Buddha's condemation. There is no help for it. I wish you to know that you must not further compromise your tie with him and that you must dispel instead the sin of his attachment to you, trusting meanwhile that a day of renunciation does indeed confer immeasurable merit. I shall discuss the matter with you further in person. The young boy who brings you this will no doubt tell you more.” He had made himself perfectly clear, and yet no one but she could have fully understood what he had written.

  “Who is this boy?” the nun demanded to know. “Is there no end to your cruelty? You are keeping everything from me even now!”

  The young woman turned a little and looked outside. It was the brother she had missed so much on that evening she had thought was her last. He had been an arrogant little mischief when they all lived together, but their mother was very fond of him, and now and then she had even brought him to Uji. He and she had come to like each other as he grew older, and the memory of his childish ways now seemed to her like a dream. What she wanted above all was to ask him how their mother was, because although she had heard some news of the others, not a word about her mother had ever reached her. The sight of her brother therefore overwhelmed her with sorrow, and she burst into tears.

  He was a very attractive boy, and the nun thought that she noted a slight resemblance. “He is your brother, is he not? I am sure that he has a great deal to tell you. I shall have him come in.”

  Oh, no! I would be too ashamed to have him see me suddenly so horribly changed, when now he does not even believe I am alive! She stopped crying for a moment. “You see, the reason I told you nothing is that I hated to imagine you then knowing how much I had kept from you. The distressing spectacle I undoubtedly made must have offended you, but I could not remember anything of my past then, I suppose because I was not in my right mind and because my soul, if that is the word, was no longer what it had been. But then I heard the gentleman they told me was the Governor of Kii talking to you about people whom I felt that I had once known, and it seemed to me that I was beginning to remember things. I went on thinking about it all after that, but I still could not grasp anything clearly. There was one lady, though, who longed only for me to be happy, and I kept wondering whether she might still be alive. In the midst of my sorrows the thought of her never left me. The face of the boy here now gives me the feeling that I knew him when I was little, but the memory is too painful, and I do not want anyone like him to know that I am still alive. The lady I mentioned is the only one I want to see, if she is still living. I do not want that gentleman whom His Reverence mentioned to know anything about me. Please, please tell him that there has been a mistake and continue to hide me.”

  “That is not possible,” the nun answered in great agitation. “His Reverence is unusually open even for a holy man, and I am sure he told that gentleman everything. He will soon know all about you, and so great a lord is not someone to trifle with.”

  “Who ever heard of anyone so brazenly stubborn?” the women said to each other. They stood a curtain at the edge of the chamber and invited the boy in.4

  The boy had been told that his sister was there, but being so young, he was too shy to address her on his own. “I have another letter I am supposed to give her,” he said, his eyes to the floor. “His Reverence was quite sure that she is here, but I am afraid I just cannot tell!”

  “Why, the dear thing!” the nun exclaimed. “Yes, I believe the lady the letter is for is here. We others do not quite understand what the matter is, so you must talk to her yourself. You are very young, but I am sure that his lordship is right to have confidence in you.”

  “What can I possibly say to her, when she will not even acknowledge that she knows me? If she wants nothing to do with me, then I have nothing to say to her. He told me to give her this letter in person, though, so I must do that.”

  “Of course he does,” the nun pressed the young woman. “Please do not be so obstinate. Your attitude is really quite frightening.” She made her move up to the standing curtain, where she sat as though not actually present at all—a quality that gave the boy the feeling that he did indeed recognize her. He placed the letter beside the curtain.

  “I should like to ask for a quick reply so that I can then be on my way.” After this cruelly cold reception he was eager to go.

  The nun opened the letter and gave it to her. His handwriting was as it had always been, and the fragrance suffused into the paper had an almost eerie intensity. The women, always far too quick with their praise, were no doubt transported with delight when they glimpsed it.

  He had written, “For the sake of His Reverence I forgive your heart your unspeakably many and weighty sins; and my own, which now yearns at least to talk over those terrible days, days that seem a dream, leaves me despite myself prey to great anxiety. What, then, will people think of me?” He had not managed to put his feelings into words.

  “Following the path I trusted would take me to a teacher of the Law,

  I lost my way and wandered a mountain I never sought.5

  Have you forgotten this boy? I keep him beside me in memory of someone who vanished without a trace.”

  The letter was deeply felt and sufficiently precise to discourage any thought of pretending that it was not for her, but even so, the shame of letting him see her in her present, distressingly changed guise threw her into such confusion that she sank into deeper gloom and found nothing to say; instead she lay there weeping. The women could not imagine what to do with her and thought her extremely odd.

  “How shall I answer him?” the nun insisted.

  “I am not well, I think, not well at all. I will answer later on, when I feel better. I am trying to remember, but nothing will come back, and I cannot make out what it was that I dreamed. Perhaps I will recognize this letter when I have regained a little calm. For today, please, just take it back to him. It would be awful if it were for someone else.” She slid the open letter toward the nun.

  “Your attitude is unspeakable! If you must be so excessively rude, you will implicate us, too, who are looking after you!” The young woman, who did not wish to listen to these sharp reproaches, lay with her face buried in her clothes.

  The nun had a word with the boy. “There may be a spirit afflicting her,” she said. “She never seems to be in a normal frame of mind and is constantly unwell, and ever since she assumed this unusual guise, I have worried that there might be serious trouble if anyone did come for her. I was right, too, because now, when his lordship has made it touchingly plain how much she means to him, I can only make abject apologies. She has been quite ill lately, and I suppose all this may just have confused her more, because at the moment she seems even less lucid than usual.”

  She provided
him with a very pleasant meal of delicacies from the mountains nearby, but he was very young, and he remained thoroughly ill at ease. “What can I possibly tell him now, after all the trouble he has gone to?” he asked. “If only she would just give me a word!”

  “Of course,” the nun replied, and she repeated what he had said to the young woman, but to no avail. The young woman said nothing.

  “I suppose that you can only describe to his lordship the reduced state she is in. Not that vast an expanse of cloud separates us from the City, and whatever mountain winds may blow, I hope very much that you will come again.”

  For him to stay on until evening would only have been a foolish imposition, and he prepared to leave. Bitterly disappointed not even to have seen her, when secretly he had longed to meet her again, he returned to the Commander with a heavy heart.

  The Commander, who had awaited him eagerly, was confounded by this inconclusive outcome. He reflected that he would have done better to refrain and went on to ponder, among other things, the thought that someone else might be hiding her there, just as he himself had once, after full deliberation, consigned her to invisibility.

  That appears to be what is in the book.6

  Places Mentioned in the Tale

  The City

  The Inner Palace

  NOTES

  1: KIRITSUBO

  1. The beauty Yokihi (Chinese Yang Guifei) so infatuated the Chinese Emperor Xuanzong (685–762) that his neglect of the state provoked a rebellion, and his army forced him to have her executed. Bai Juyi (772–846) told the story in a long poem, “The Song of Unending Sorrow” (Chinese “Changhenge,” Japanese “Chogonka,” Hakushi monjū 0596), which was extremely popular in Heian Japan.

  2. She had no influential male relative on her mother's side and was often pushed aside when an event took place.

  3. Such a birth took place not in the palace but at the mother's home.

  4. Her standing was too high to allow her to wait on the Emperor routinely, like a servant. She should have come to him only when summoned and for a limited time.

  5. Because the Emperor himself seems to treat her like a servant.

  6. The Kōrōden (den means approximately “hall”) was very near the Emperor's residence. He gives it to her not to replace the Kiritsubo but as a nearby apartment (uetsubone) to stay in when he requires her company often.

  7. Genji's mother. Her unofficial title (Haven, Miyasudokoro) seems to have designated a woman, especially one of Intimate or Consort rank, who had borne an Emperor or an Heir Apparent a child.

  8. She was too ill to stay in the palace, lest it be polluted by death, and imperial etiquette forbade the Emperor to see her off.

  9. After the year 905, children not yet in their seventh year no longer went into mourning for a parent, and the present of the story therefore seems to be earlier.

  10. The death of a parent.

  11. Appropriate to a Consort.

  12. These gentlewomen, who rank below the ladies just referred to, would have known the deceased personally because they waited on the Emperor routinely.

  13. Genji monogatari kochūshakusho in'yō waka 1: “When she was alive her presence was a trial, but now she is gone I miss her so!”

  14. A rite was performed every seven days for the first forty-nine days after the death, in order to guide the spirit of the deceased toward peace. The Emperor probably sent a representative to each and provided for it generously.

  15. The mother of the Emperor's first son, the future Heir Apparent. Kokiden (a Chinese-style name that means “Hall of Great Light”) is the name of her residence within the palace compound. Many historical Consorts and Empresses lived there.

  16. A woman who had nursed the Emperor in place of his natural mother. The relationship with a nurse was normally intimate and lasting.

  17. A typhoon (nowaki) wind is blowing, and the season is early autumn by the lunar calendar.

  18. A gentlewoman of middle rank (Myōbu) with a male relative in the Gate Watch (Yugei).

  19. Yūzukuyo, the “evening moon” that lingers in the twilight sky up to the tenth day of the lunar month.

  20. An ironic reference to Kokinshū 647: “Her reality in the dark of night is not worth more than a clear, bright dream.”

  21. Out of respect for the Emperor, who has sent Myōbu. The south side is the front.

  22. A conventionally modest statement. Myōbu ranks too low to claim finer feelings as a matter of course.

  23. She speaks in the Emperor's own words, although she uses honorifics when the Emperor refers to himself.

  24. “As the sad winds of change sweep through the palace, they bring tears to my eyes, and my heart goes out to my little boy.” Hagi, an autumn-flowering plant, has long, graceful fronds that are easily tossed and tangled by the wind. Miyagino, east of present Sendai, is often associated with hagi in poetry, and here, the miya of Miyagino also suggests the palace (miya). The poem refers to Kokinshū 694.

  25. Kokin rokujō 3057, in which the poet laments feeling even older than the pine of Takasago, a common poetic exemplar of longevity: “No, I shall let no one know that I live on: I am ashamed to imagine what the Takasago pine must think of me.”

  26. Momoshiki, a poetic term for the palace, particularly used by women.

  27. Gosenshū 1102 (also Kokin rokujō 1412) by Murasaki Shikibu's ancestor Fujiwara no Kanesuke: “A parent's heart, although not in darkness, may yet wander, lost, for love of a child.” The sentiment became almost proverbial, and the tale alludes to the poem so frequently that further occurrences will not be noted.

  28. “Blaming you, instead of all that has happened, for my tears.” These poems are carried by an intermediary, for the lady is still in the house. “You who live above the clouds” (kumo no uebito) is Myōbu, the Emperor's emissary, whose visit has started fresh tears.

  29. The paintings were probably on screens, with poems set in cartouches as comments on each scene. Ise was a distinguished poet and gentlewoman in the entourage of Emperor Uda (reigned 887–97), while Ki no Tsurayuki (died 946) was the most influential poet at the early-tenth-century court.

  30. Her poem neglects the Emperor's protection of the boy in favor of that provided by the boy's mother; it could even be taken to suggest that the Emperor cannot protect him.

  31. In “The Song of Unending Sorrow,” the Emperor sends a wizard to find his beloved in the afterworld (the fabulous island of Hōrai [Chinese Penglai]), and the wizard brings back an ornamental hairpin from her.

  32. These similes of the Taieki (Chinese Taiye) Lake and the Miō (Chinese Weiyang) Palace are from “The Song of Unending Sorrow.”

  33. In the “Song” the Emperor promises Yang Guifei that if reborn as birds they will share a wing as they fly and if reborn on earth they will share their branches as trees.

  34. “When even I am weeping, how could a bereaved mother not weep, too?” “Above the clouds” (kumo no ue) refers to the palace, and the asaji grasses are those already mentioned by the lady in an earlier poem. The Emperor's poem also hints at the meaning “How can I go on living?”

  35. Another touch from “The Song of Unending Sorrow.”

  36. Roughly 2:00 to 4:00 A.M.

  37. The Emperor had once slept through dawn in his love's arms. The expression is from Ise shū 55, by Ise, written to go on a screen illustrating “The Song of Unending Sorrow.” The poem is based on two lines of Bai Juyi's original.

  38. The catastrophe caused by Xuanzong's infatuation with Yang Guifei.

  39. People believed that supernatural powers coveted unusually beautiful people and stole them. The tale often alludes to this fear.

  40. He had no influential male relative on his mother's side to support him.

  41. Her own son has now been formally appointed Heir Apparent.

  42. Chinese studies, mainly in political philosophy, law, history, poetry, and court usage.

  43. The ancient Korean kingdom of Koguryŏ.

  44. Wh
en Uda abdicated, he wrote down articles of advice for his successor, Daigo (reigned 897–930), and one of these advised against admitting any outsider to the palace. Judging from this passage, the Emperor in the tale corresponds to Daigo. The Kōrokan was the building where foreign ambassadors and other visitors were received, near the crossing of Suzaku Avenue and Shichijō (“Seventh Avenue”).

  45. An imperial son was not a Prince until appointed by his father. The appointment was to one of four ranks, and the appointee received a corresponding stipend. One not so appointed but still retained in the imperial family was “unranked” (muhon).

  46. Members of the imperial family had no surname, but after the early ninth century some excess imperial sons were made commoners (tadabito) with the surname Minamoto. “Genji” means simply “a Minamoto.”

  47. Since the present Emperor's reign is her third, she must have been appointed by his grandfather. The word sendai (“previous Emperor”) means an Emperor who did not abdicate but died in office, and Kōkō (reigned 884–87), who preceded Uda (Daigo's predecessor), did just this.

  48. That he would provide for her himself and not count on her mother's family.

  49. The principal men in her mother's family.

  50. He sits on a chair in the aisle room (hisashi)—his day room (hiru no omashi) on the east side of his residence, the Seiryoden; Genji and the Minister of the Left are a beam width below him in the second aisle (magobisashi), an open, floored space not found in ordinary dwellings.

  51. Mizura, hair bunches that divided the hair evenly on either side of the head. Boys wore mizura until they came of age.

  52. The Emperor's hair was normally cut by a Chamberlain.