The Tale of Genji

  6. Perhaps having to do with the hope that Murasaki might conceive a child of her own.

  7. A rare coincidence of the year's first day and of the first day of the Rat in the first month. On this first day of the Rat, people uprooted seedling pines, a gesture that encouraged longevity, and picked the first spring shoots.

  8. Akashi's.

  9. Warbler and branch are both artificial, the branch would have been attached to the baskets and boxes. In poetry a warbler (uguisu) normally perches on flowering plum, so that its presence on the pine makes a statement: it is the little girl, who has forsaken her natural mother for a new home.

  10. “Please let me hear directly from my daughter. The poem plays on matsu (pine and wait), furu (“pass [speaking of time]” and “old”), hatsune (“first song [of the year]” and “first [day of the] Rat”), and hikarete, which alludes to the New Year custom of pulling up seedling pines. “The village where none sings” is from (Genji monogatari kochūshakusho in' yō waka 177): “Today at least, O let me hear your first song, for what good is the village where no warbler sings?”

  11. He looked as though he would weep. Ill-omened speech and action were taboo in the early days of the New Year.

  12. She dutifully played back the vocabulary and wordplays used by her correspondent.

  13. Hanachirusato's.

  14. Both the incense types mentioned are blends of various substances, especially fragrant woods.

  15. Chinese characters written cursively to represent phonetic sounds.

  16. Kokin rokujō 4385: “Since my house is by the hill where the plum trees are in bloom, I shall not seldom hear the warbler sing.” The warbler among plum blossoms is a frequent motif in spring poetry.

  17. Rinji kyaku, Princes and senior nobles who came to call, generally on the second day of the New Year. They had to be formally entertained.

  18. Courting Tamakazura.

  19. A simple saibara song that begins, “This lord of ours, well deserved are his riches!” The word sakigusa (just below, an unidentified plant) occurs toward the middle of the song and recurs as a sort of refrain thereafter.

  20. Most souls that went to Amida's paradise were born not onto open lotus flowers but into closed lotus buds, and they had to wait a longer or shorter time for their flowers to open. Meanwhile, they could only distantly hear the music before Amida's throne.

  21. Kokinshū 955, by Mononobe no Yoshina: “Should one long for a mountain retreat untouched by worldly sorrows, the beloved is a tie that binds one still.”

  22. Under Genji's gift she should normally have worn three compatible gowns (uchiki) instead of this starched monstrosity.

  23. Her brother, a monk of Daigoji, a great temple southeast of the City.

  24. The one belonging to the main Nijō house.

  25. Hana (“flower”) also means “nose.” Genji likens himself to the warbler who visits the flowering plum in spring.

  26. A holy-water offering shelf (akadana), like a little shrine on stilts, that stood just outside the veranda, with a tub of water, also on a stand, beside it.

  27. Under Genji's main gift to her, the same blue-gray as the curtain, she is also wearing the colored gowns that he gave her.

  28. “I should only have imagined you and not really come.” Gosenshū 1093, by Sosei: “Today I see with my own eyes the celebrated Isle of Pines and, indeed, find dwelling here a most discerning ama.” Ama means both “shore-dweller” and “nun.” Genji alluded to the same poem in “The Green Branch,” the first time he visited Fujitsubo after she had become a nun.

  29. When her stepson forced his attentions on her, after her husband's death, and obliged her to take refuge in religion.

  30. Saneakira shū 50, by the daughter of Prince Atsuyoshi: “I know not what life remains for me, and yet this heart of mine still believes that I never will forget you.”

  31. Tamakazura.

  32. The Kokiden Consort (Genji's nemesis) of the early chapters.

  33. Mizumumaya, literally “water, and stabling for the horses” but actually wine and hot rice gruel. Other places along the route were designated as iimumaya, where the men got a meal.

  34. Kōkoji, especially high caps worn by the dancers (generally two men of the sixth rank, wearing cloth masks).

  35. Kotobuki, raucously delivered blessings to invite good crops, increase, and so on in the coming year.

  36. Traditional gifts that the mummers received especially at the palace; Genji's magnificence is imperial in character.

  37. The Captain is Yūgiri, and the Controller Lieutenant is Tō no Chūjō's son, later known as Kōbai.

  38. Bansuraku, the refrain of a song always sung by the mummers.

  39. Goen, the banquet given by the Emperor to the mummers, normally in the second or third month.

  24: KOCHŌ

  1. The hills are artificial, and the island is the one that belonged in any such garden lake.

  2. Akikonomu's poem to Murasaki, near the end of The Maidens.

  3. Ryūtō gekishu, (two) barges with a “dragon head” and a “roc head.” Dragons were associated with water. The geki (“roc”) was a fabulous bird able to survive great storms at sea and to fly very high.

  4. The waterbird pairs and the mandarin ducks are Chinese textile motifs. The passage also contains echoes from the poetry of Bai Juyi.

  5. These four poems are spoken by the gentlewomen aboard the boat. Cape of Kerria Roses (Yamabuki no Misaki) is a poetic place-name associated with the province of Omi.

  6. Ide, too, a locality between Kyoto and Nara, was known for its yamabuki.

  7. Hōrai, the island-mountain of the immortals, rested on the back of a great tortoise.

  8. The bugaku dancers are performing in a sort of tent (hirabari) between the house and the lake.

  9. The steps down into the garden from the south side of the main house.

  10. One of the six gagaku modes, associated with spring. The professional musicians start off by playing netori (a short, tuning piece) on their wind instruments (in the order shō, hichiriki, flute); and the gentlemen seated above the steps (the professionals are below them) take up the piece on their stringed instruments.

  11. Kaerigoe, the passage from a “major” mode to a “minor” one, or vice versa.

  12. No daughter of Murasaki's own.

  13. Thanks to an allusion to Kokinshū 867, murasaki (the color of wisteria flowers) suggests that Tamakazura is a blood relation (the speaker being Genji's brother). The poem also plays on fuchi / fuji, “wisteria” and “abyss.”

  14. Roughly noon.

  15. Privy gentlemen entrusted with distributing incense to the participating priests.

  16. The “pine cricket” (matsumushi), an autumn insect, is Akikonomu. Murasaki's poem amounts to a declaration of victory in the spring and autumn wars.

  17. A bugaku piece properly entitled “Karyōbinga” (Sanskrit “Kalavinka”) after the bird that sings in paradise.

  18. They receive gifts of clothing, which they pass on to each other down the line.

  19. Koshisashi (“inserted in the belt”), a roll of silk that the recipient stuck in his sash before withdrawing.

  20. At not being able to be present. Kokinshū 498: “On my plum tree's highest branch a warbler sings, and I, too, could cry aloud, so sorrowful is my love.”

  21. Akikonomu's poem plays on the ko (“Come!”) of kochō (“butterfly”).

  22. From Murasaki.

  23. Not in a romantic way.

  24. On the first day of the fourth month, the first day of summer.

  25. Higekuro no Taishō, “Commander Blackbeard.” A brother of the Shōkyōden Consort and an uncle of the Heir Apparent, he is married to an elder half sister of Murasaki.

  26. Confucius's fall seems to have been proverbial, but no locus classicus for it is known.

  27. Genji's question plays on musubu (be knotted, as love letters were) and musubōru (be dejected).

  28. It is from Kashiwagi, act
ually her half brother.

  29. A plum pink hosonaga lined with leaf green (the “pink” layering).

  30. A kouchiki in a deutzia (unobana) layering (white lined with grass green [moegi]). The deutzia flowers in the fourth lunar month, in long clusters of small white blossoms.

  31. A page girl, apparently.

  32. Meshiudo, a term for a gentlewoman taken by her master as a sort of minor mistress.

  33. A tendency to jealousy.

  34. The “saying” appears to be something like “Honor the parent who reared you over the one who bore you” (umi no oya yori sodate no oya).

  35. The poem plays on yo, “passage of time” or “period of years” and “joint [of bamboo]”; and in this context yo also suggests “love relationship.”

  36. He lifts the blinds between the veranda and the aisle, and she slips from the chamber out into the aisle.

  37. From a description of a spring landscape in a poem by Bai Juyi (Hakushi monjū 1280).

  38. Yūgao, Tamakazura's mother.

  39. Yūgiri.

  40. Since it is summer, she is probably wearing above her waist only a single layer of dark, nearly transparent silk gauze.

  41. His outer robe, as he took it off; he had probably made sure that he wore a comfortably unstarched one.

  42. Tamakazura's foster sister (the daughter of her nurse).

  43. Genji monogatari kochūshakusho in yō waka 186: “Such are the pangs of love that I would fain show my colors, like the pine of Ota, and ask her plainly to meet.”

  25: HOTARU

  1. In the last part of the lunar month when there is no moon; the moon is therefore in its first quarter.

  2. Literally “the distance between two pillars” (hitoma), about ten feet.

  3. The central device of this poem is a play on omohi (thoughts of love or longing) and the final hi in the same word, which means “fire.” Because of this double meaning, fireflies figure in many summer love poems.

  4. Shigeyuki shū 264 (also Goshūshū 216), by Minamoto no Shigeyuki: “The firefly who silently burns with inner fires deserves greater pity than the one who cries.”

  5. Kokinshū, by Ki no Tomonori: “While I languish sadly amid the fifth-month rains, late in the night a cuckoo calls—whither can it be bound?”

  6. The day of the Sweet Flag Festival.

  7. White because it came tied to a white sweet flag root.

  8. “Must you spurn me?” For the Sweet Flag Festival people pulled up sweet flag (ayame) roots in search of especially long ones. The poem's sentiments and wordplays (ne [“root” or “cry”] and nakare [“weep” or “flow”]) follow convention.

  9. Hanachirusato.

  10. Yūgiri.

  11. Presumably the mounted archery contest (yabusame) held on the palace riding ground, on the fifth of the fifth month by the Left Palace Guards and on the sixth by those of the Right.

  12. Susogo, cloth dyed so as to be light at the top and dark at the bottom.

  13. About 2:00 P.M.

  14. Literally, he looks like an ōkmi: an imperial child who has not been appointed a Prince or Princess or even given a surname. This is the only mention of him.

  15. Higekuro.

  16. The “sweet flag” (ayame) is herself. “Chosen” translates the verb hiku, which plays on “pull up” (a sweet flag root) and “lead” (a horse). The poem alludes to the distinctly erotic Kokinshū 892: “Old is the grass beneath the trees at Oaraki, no steed grazes there, no one comes to mow it.”

  17. The steed (Genji) wants to be like the grebe (niodori), which pairs for life; he will never abandon the sweet flag (Hanachirusato). The “bluntness” of the exchange (below) has to do with its frankly conjugal sentiments, untempered either by indirection or by a tone of artful courtship.

  18. Presumably, women good at collecting tales, copying them, or painting pictures to illustrate them.

  19. A classic already in the author's time, it survives only in a rewritten version that dates roughly from the thirteenth century.

  20. Nihongi, an official history of Japan written in Chinese and completed in 720. It begins with an account of kamiyo, the divine age that preceded that of humans proper.

  21. China. The original for this whole sentence is confusing and suspect, and it varies especially widely in different manuscripts.

  22. Hōben, a device adopted by an enlightened being in order to lead one unequipped to accept more direct guidance to enlightenment. The term may cover what could be called in conventional terms a lie. The issue is treated at length in the Lotus Sutra.

  23. A paradox of Japanese Mahyaana Buddhism is that “the passions are enlightenment,” the passions due to desire and the senses being precisely that which is furthest from enlightenment as commonly conceived.

  24. The first occurrence of “Murasaki no Ue,” henceforth translated this way wherever it occurs.

  25. Now lost.

  26. He seems to be joking that, unlike the children (presumably a boy and a girl) in the picture, he was a dull, slow boy to whom romantic preoccupations meant nothing.

  27. Above all from her nurses and gentlewomen.

  28. The main house in Murasaki's southeast quarter of Rokujō is divided between the part that she shares with Genji and the part occupied by Genji's daughter.

  29. Into the aisle room, but not as far as the chamber.

  30. Daibandokoro, on the north side of the house, used also by Murasaki's women. He is making sure that Yūgiri cannot gain access to Murasaki through one of her women.

  31. Kumoi no Kari.

  32. An expression particularly suited to an officer of the Palace Guards.

  33. The color of the sixth rank, at which he had started his career. He now holds the fourth rank.

  34. They assume that he is not courting Kumoi no Kari more actively because he thinks she is not good enough for him. (His correspondence with her is a secret.)

  35. Tō no Chūjōs son, Kashiwagi.

  36. As far as one can tell, ten sons and four daughters.

  37. As determined above all by the standing of their mothers.

  38. Kumoi no Kari's involvement with Yūgiri.

  39. Yūgao's daughter.

  40. During the “rainy night” conversation in “The Broom Tree.”

  26: TOKONATSU

  1. The sweetfish (ayu), still a delicacy in Kyoto, are from the Katsura River, and the bullheads (ishibushi, modern Japanese kajika) are from the Kamo.

  2. Himizu (water cooled with ice preserved through the summer in an ice house [himuro]) to make suihan (boiled rice chilled in cold water).

  3. Kashiwagi, the speaker's older brother.

  4. “Noble though he may be himself, no wonder a child of his, born to a lowly mother, is somewhat inferior.”

  5. Yūgiri.

  6. “You might take her yourself. Rather than leave your name soiled by Tō no Chūjō's refusal to let you marry Kumoi no Kari, why not do just as well and marry her sister?”

  7. They are all wearing violet (futaai) dress cloaks, and that color merges easily into the twilight. Yūiri (“that solemn Captain,” below) appears to be with Tō no Chūjō's two younger sons.

  8. The pinks allude to Tamakazura.

  9. Kashiwagi.

  10. To no Chūjō is the son of a Princess, who is also Yūgiri's maternal grandmother. However, Yūgiri's imperial descent on his father's side should lift him above Tō no Chūjō's.

  11. “He would be welcome if he came forward on his own to press his suit.” Tamakazura alludes to (rather than quotes from) a saibara song: “In my house, the curtains are all hung; come, my lord, come: my daughter shall be yours…” She is prompted to do so by Genji's use of ōkimi (“someone of imperial lineage”), which is the “my lord” of the archaic song.

  12. The song goes on, “What will do for the feast? Will abalone, turbo, and sea urchin do?”

  13. Sugagaki, apparently the name of a particular technique.

  14. The wagon was also called azumag
oto (“koto of the East”). The East (typically, the Kanto Plain) was a wild area with uncouth inhabitants.

  15. Genji last sang this saibara song (“Nuki River”) in “Under the Cherry Blossoms,” when Aoi refused to welcome him. It is the complaint of a lover who is barred by his girl's parents from seeing her. This time, Genji is consoling himself for not being able to make love to Tamakazura. He smiles because he is the parent who will not allow the lover (himself) to do so.

  16. “Quaver” is a mere guess for the sugagaki discussed above.

  17. Sōfuren, a “Chinese” gagaku piece. The anecdote in question has not survived.

  18. The sounds of the wind and of strings are often linked in poetry, as in Shūishū 451, by Saigū no Nyōgo: “The sound of the pines on the mountain wind mingles with the music of the kin; and, for this concert, which string was tuned to which?”

  19. “You hear music perfectly, yet you pretend not to hear my pleas.” The “cutting wind” (mi ni shimu kaze), a poetic expression easily associated with such music, evokes the sorrows of autumn and of solitary longing.

  20. An obvious quotation, but the source is unknown.

  21. Marry her off but insist on an uxorilocal marriage, so that she remains at home.

  22. “Never mind how well her husband [sekimori, the “gatekeeper”] guards her.” Kokinshū 632 (also Ise monogatari 6, section 5), by Ariwara no Narihira: “May the barrier guard stationed on the path I take secretly fall asleep night after night!” The guard has been placed there by the father of the young woman Narihira has been visiting.