The Tale of Genji

  Screening fence

  “She stopped almost before she began!” Genji complained. “I had no time even to decide whether or not she was worth listening to! What a bore!” Her Highness's music had been well received.

  “Let me stand nearer to listen, if you don't mind,” he went on, and Taifu saw he was intrigued.

  “I think I would rather not, though,” she replied. “The dismal life she has to lead is so depressing for her, and her whole existence is really so sad, I do not see how I could take it upon myself…”

  He agreed that she was probably right. One could get on perfectly easily with some lesser women right from the start, but her very rank aroused his sympathy, and so he urged Taifu to “convey something of my feelings to her nevertheless.” He then prepared quietly to leave, having no doubt a rendezvous elsewhere.

  “My lord, I often think how amusing it is that His Majesty worries so much about your being too serious. He will never see you in this disguise.”10

  Genji turned back toward her, smiling. “You had better not bring up my failings as though they were none of yours!” he said. “If mine is what you call wanton behavior, then I know a young woman who would be hard pressed to defend herself!” He often teased Taifu for being rather loose in her ways, and she was too abashed to say more.

  He stole off toward the main house, hoping for a sound from the lady within. When he reached a sheltered spot where only the tattered fragments of a screening fence remained, he discovered that another man had been standing there all the time. Who could he be? No doubt some gallant with his eye on the lady, he thought, melting into the shadows; but no, it was the Secretary Captain. Earlier that evening they had both left the palace together, and when, after they parted, Genji made for neither His Excellency's nor Nijō, the Captain so longed to know where he was going that he followed him despite having a rendezvous of his own. Genji had failed to recognize him on the nag he was riding, casually dressed in a hunting cloak. The Captain was intrigued to see Genji enter an establishment quite new to him. He stood there listening to the music and then lay in wait on the assumption that Genji would soon be leaving. Genji, who still did not know who he was and who had no wish to be recognized, was slipping quietly away when the Captain came straight up to him.

  “My lord, I was so put out when you just left me that I decided to keep you company.

  We were together when we turned our steps away from Palace Mountain,

  but I see, this sixteenth night, the moon hides where he will set.”

  Genji was at once amused and annoyed when he grasped who the speaker was. “What a thing to do to me!” he complained bitterly.

  “One certainly may gaze upon a radiance that illumines all,

  but who would wish to hunt out Mount Irusa, where it sets?”11

  “What would you do if someone else were to follow you this way? When you are gadding about like this, you would be much safer with an attendant. You should not leave me behind. There could be an embarrassing incident when you are out at night in disguise.”

  Genji hated to be found out this way, and he gave himself full credit for the Secretary Captain's failure so far to locate his “little pink.”12

  Now in high good humor, the two did not set off again each to his promised assignation. Instead, they rode together in one carriage to His Excellency's, under a moon pleasingly veiled by clouds, blowing away in concert on their flutes.

  They stole in silently, since they had sent no men ahead to clear their path, and they changed to dress cloaks in a deserted gallery. Then they launched into playing their flutes, looking the picture of innocence as though they had just arrived. His Excellency, who could never pass up a concert, brought out his own Koma flute13 and played it beautifully, for he was an expert musician. Then he called for instruments that he had various gentlewomen skilled at music play behind the blinds. Nakatsukasa14 was very good on the biwa, but she who had spurned the Secretary Captain had not refused Genji's kind attentions on his sporadic visits, and she had then inevitably seen her involvement with him become common knowledge, which had in turn earned her the displeasure of Genji's mother-in-law.15 Now she was reclining against a pillar, obviously unhappy and ill at ease. She was miserable at the thought of going away where she would never see him again.

  Biwa

  The young gentlemen remembered the music they had heard on the kin and dwelled with pleasure on how different that sad house had been; and the Captain dreamed of the lady sweet and fair whom he would begin courting there after all her long years alone and with whom he would then fall so recklessly in love that all the world would be talking about it and he himself would teeter on the brink of folly. He recalled with mingled annoyance and apprehension the self-assured way Genji went roaming about—would he let slip a chance like this?

  Both were soon apparently writing to Her Highness. Neither got an answer, which baffled and irritated them. It was really too awful of her! Any lady living in a place like that should sometimes give poignant voice to her feelings by conveying the sorrows she knew so well in terms of the fleeting moods of plants, trees, or the sky. The Captain fretted even more than Genji that it was dull of her, and rude as well, to remain so shut up in herself, however ponderously serious she might be.

  “Have you had any reply from her?” he plaintively inquired of Genji, from whom he could keep nothing. “I sent her a line to see what would happen and got back only a strange silence.”

  Sure enough, Genji thought, he has been courting her; and he replied with a smile, “Perhaps I have had no answer from her because I for one am not really that keen.” The Captain was very annoyed to be put off.

  Faced with such indifference, Genji had lost interest in an adventure that mattered little enough to him anyway, but he supposed that if the Captain was now showering Her Highness with notes, she would yield to the one who sent her the most. The thought of how pleased with herself she would be after casting aside her first suitor was more than he could bear, and he therefore called Taifu into solemn conclave.

  “It is extremely irritating of her to turn me away like this without even hearing me out,” he said. “She must suspect me of wanting only to amuse myself, whereas in reality I am not frivolous at all. Things cannot help going wrong when the other person assumes the worst, and it always ends up being one's own fault. I should have thought someone well disposed, someone living in peace without parents or brothers and sisters to bother her, would be far more attractive.”

  “Oh, no, my lord, I doubt she would suit you. I cannot imagine her being the ‘sweet shelter from the rain’16 that you have in mind. Few people are so desperately shy and withdrawn.” She told him what she knew of the lady.

  “Apparently she is neither witty nor clever. After all, though, it is the childlike, innocent ones who are the most apt to catch one's fancy.” He had not forgotten.

  Spring and summer passed while he suffered from his recurrent fever and remained absorbed in his secret grief.

  That autumn, as quiet, persistent recollection led him to remember with longing even the sound of the fulling blocks and that other noise that had so offended his ears, he wrote often to the residence of the Hitachi Prince; and when he still got no response, he waxed indignant with the lady for her boorish inexperience, vowed to reject defeat, and began pressing Taifu vigorously. “What is going on?” he fumed. “I have never seen anything like it!”

  She sympathized. “Not once have I suggested to her that you do not deserve her. As I see it, her crippling shyness is the reason why she cannot bring herself to answer you.”

  “Exactly! That is just what I mean by inexperience! A girl may well be shy as long as she still knows little of life or is too young to do as she pleases, but I should think that this lady would give all things due consideration. I myself for some reason am feeling listless and low, and I would be quite satisfied to get an answer from her in the same vein. I am not out for hanky-panky; all I want to do is sit for a while on her cr
eaky veranda. I just cannot understand her, and that is why I want you to arrange it for me, if necessary without her leave. I will not lose my head or do anything foolish.”

  Taifu had mentioned Her Highness to him, that night when they were almost alone, only because it had then still been his habit to gather with feigned indifference news of any lady at all, and she did not like having him press her now in such deadly earnest. Her Highness lacked both experience and accomplishment, and in the end she might suffer (so Taifu feared) from Taifu's indiscretion. Still, it might be perverse just to turn a deaf ear to his pleas.

  The old place had been so antiquated even in her father's time that nobody went there, and now visitors struggled even less often through the garden's weeds, so that when, wonder of wonders, Genji's resplendent notes began to arrive, her pathetic gentlewomen broke into eager smiles and urged her, “Oh, my lady, do answer him, do!”

  Alas, their hopelessly timid mistress would not even read them. Well, then, thought the careless, fun-loving Taifu, when the time comes and he talks to her through her blinds, if she doesn't like him, fine, that will be the end of it, but if things go well and he begins calling, there is no one to stop him. She breathed not a word of this even to her father.

  After the twentieth of the eighth month, on a night when the moon would rise so late that the wait for it seemed endless, when the only light was from the stars and the wind moaned in the pines, the lady, weeping, began to talk of the past. Taifu saw that the moment was at hand, and she must then have sent Genji a note, because he soon arrived, as always in great secrecy.

  Cushion

  At last the moon rose, only to illumine gloomily for him the stretch of ragged fence at which he was gazing when, at Taifu's urging, Her Highness began softly to play her kin. No, she was not bad. The giddy Taifu anxiously wished her music might have something more accessibly modern about it. Genji slipped inside without further ado, since there was no one to see him, and he had Taifu called.

  “This is very awkward!” She feigned surprise at the news of his arrival. “I gather he is here to speak to you, my lady. He is always displeased with you, you see, and because I keep reminding him that I can do nothing for him, he has been saying that he means to come and explain himself to you in person. How am I to answer him? He is not as free as other people to do as he likes, and he surely deserves some consideration for that. Do listen to what he has to say, with something between you if you wish!”

  Her Highness was stricken with embarrassment. “But I do not know how to talk to people!” she cried, slipping off in naive terror toward the farthest recesses of the house.

  Taifu smiled. “It pains me to see you behaving so much like a child, my lady. It is quite acceptable for the most exalted lady to retain a girlish innocence as long as she has her parents to look after her, but it simply is not right for you in your present unfortunate situation to remain shut up forever in yourself.”

  “Very well,” said Her Highness, who could never bring herself to say no to anything, “if you mean me only to listen and not answer, we must have the lattice shutters and so on properly locked.”17

  “But it would be rude to leave him on the veranda,” Taifu tactfully reminded her. “As for anything forward or tasteless, why, he would never…” With her own hands she fastened the sliding panel between the chamber and the little aisle room18 securely shut and arranged a cushion in the aisle for Genji to sit on.

  Having not the slightest idea how to talk to anyone like Genji, Her Highness resigned herself despite grave misgivings to faith that Taifu knew best. An old woman, probably her nurse, had by then gone off sleepily to her room to lie down. There remained two or three younger gentlewomen, who in their eagerness for a glimpse of Genji's widely celebrated looks were nervously preparing themselves for the great moment. Once changed into decent clothes and suitably tidied up, the lady herself went to meet her visitor with no flicker of any such anticipation.

  The visitor lent such enthralling grace to the discretion with which he had clothed his own peerless beauty that Taifu longed to show him off to someone able to appreciate him. Poor man, she thought, there is nothing here for him. At least, though, she could feel relieved that Her Highness was behaving with dignity and would probably do nothing eccentric in his presence. She worried that what she had done to evade Genji's constant reproaches might now bring sorrow to the one whose plight so affected her.

  Genji assumed from Her Highness's rank that she would flaunt no modish charms but instead exhibit a supremely distinguished manner; and once she had moved a little closer, at Taifu's insistence, the delicious scent that then reached him, and her quiet composure, convinced him that he was right. With great eloquence he confided to her the yearning she had inspired in him for so long, only to meet more resoundingly than ever with dead silence.

  I give up! he groaned to himself, and he said aloud,

  “Ah, how many times have I found myself undone by such silences,

  and sustained by just one thought: you never say, Do not speak!

  Tell me to go away, if you must. This uncertainty is very painful.”19

  A lively young person named Jijū, a daughter of Her Highness's nurse, was in such an agony of embarrassment by now that she moved beside her mistress and answered,

  “Why, I would never ring the bell20 as though to say, The debate is closed;

  but at a loss to reply?—there I find myself surprised.”

  So young a voice, and one so lacking in gravity (for Jijū had spoken not as an intermediary but as her mistress in person), seemed rather familiar in tone, considering who Her Highness was. “Now it is I who am silenced,” the astonished Genji replied.

  “That you do not speak means far more than any words—that I know full well;

  yet your taciturnity has been a hard trial to bear.”

  He kept up a stream of pleasantries, bantering or serious, but nothing worked. In frustration before this evidence that she must be odd in some way or her feelings engaged elsewhere, he gently slid the panel open and entered.

  How awful of him! And he promised he wouldn't! Taifu felt such pain for Her Highness that she averted her eyes and went off to her room. The young gentlewomen forgave his behavior, so famous were his supreme good looks, and they could not bring themselves to raise any serious outcry, even though it certainly was all very sudden and their mistress was pitifully unprepared. Her Highness herself was numb with shame and wounded modesty, for which Genji did not blame her, since the moment was one in which her state easily touched his tenderest feelings and since she still led so sheltered and so virtuous a life; yet he also found her comportment peculiar and somehow pathetic. What about her could possibly have attracted him? Groaning, he took his leave late in the night. Taifu was lying awake, listening for clues to how things were going, but she did not rouse anyone to see him off because she did not wish to betray her involvement. He stole away very quietly indeed.

  He returned to Nijō and lay down to brood on and on over life's endless frustrations and to lament that anyone of this Princess's not inconsiderable standing should have so little to offer.

  These miseries were still whirling through his head when the Secretary Captain arrived. “You are certainly sleeping late!” he said. “I am sure there must be a reason.”

  Genji arose. “I was overindulging in the luxury of sleeping alone. You have come from the palace?”

  “Yes, I was there just now,” his friend answered breathlessly. “Today is the day when the musicians and dancers are to be chosen for His Majesty's progress to the Suzaku Palace. I heard about it last night, and I am on my way now to inform His Excellency. I shall have to go straight back.”

  “Well, then, I shall go with you.” Genji had them both served a morning meal, after which they got into the same carriage, though the other one followed it.

  “You still look rather sleepy,” the Captain observed reprovingly, and he added with some rancor, “You have a good deal to hide.”


  This was a day when many things were to be decided, and Genji spent the rest of it in attendance at court.

  Remembering with a pang of guilt that he owed her at least a letter,21 he finally sent one that evening. What with the weather having turned wet and his not really being free to leave, he may well have wanted nothing to do with any “sweet shelter from the rain.”

  At Her Highness's, Taifu felt very sorry indeed once the time to expect a letter had passed. She herself remained deeply ashamed, and it never occurred to her to blame Genji even when his morning letter turned up in the evening.

  He had written,

  “I have never seen any sign the evening mist proposes to clear,

  but to make things even worse, tonight it must rain and rain!

  How anxiously time passes while I await a break in the clouds!” The gentlewomen urged their mistress to answer him anyway, despite their bitter disappointment at this evidence that he would not be coming.

  It was at last Jijū who invoked the lateness of the hour to give her the words as before:

  “Kindly give a thought to one who awaits the moon22 in the dark of night,

  though your own melancholy have another cause than hers.”

  With the encouragement of all present, Her Highness wrote this poem out on murasaki paper so old that it had reverted to ash gray, in startlingly definite letters, antique in style and evenly balanced top and bottom.23 It did not deserve a glance, and Genji put it down. He did not like to speculate about what she thought of him. Her Highness meanwhile lamented her misfortune, never knowing that although he did indeed by now regret having won her, he understood his duty and had every intention of upholding it to the end.