The Tale of Genji, Page 33

  Blinds

  The sweet promise of her presence was what it had always been, and he felt a wish to chide her for her cruelty, but she would only have disliked him for it. He calmed the renewed clamor in his heart and said only, “There is one thing that comes to mind, now that a punishment so unforeseen has come upon me—one thing for which I still fear the heavens above. I would gladly give my life to assure the Heir Apparent's smooth accession.” One could hardly blame him. Her Eminence, who fully shared his feelings, was too moved to reply. He wept as he thought back over the past, making as he did so a vision of infinite beauty.

  “I am going to His Eminence's tomb,” he said.

  “Have you any message for him?” But she could not immediately speak, and she seemed to be struggling to master her emotions.

  “The man I once knew is gone now, and he who lives bears many sorrows:

  all in vain I left this world to live out my life in tears,”

  she said. Their hearts were too troubled to allow their teeming thoughts to find voice.

  “When he went away, I discovered just how far grief and pain may go,

  yet the sorrows of this life only rise and rise anew,”

  Genji replied.

  He left once the moon had risen, with a mere half dozen companions and only the closest servants. He rode.17 Needless to say, everything was so different from his excursions in happier days that those beside him were very downcast.

  One of them, a Chamberlain Aide of the Right Palace Guards, had been assigned to his escort that Purification Day; he had been denied due promotion, barred from the privy chamber, and stripped of his functions, and that was why he was with Genji now. The sight of the Lower Kamo Shrine in the distance brought that moment back to him. He dismounted, took the bridle of his lord's mount, and said,

  “I recall the days when we all in procession sported heart-to-heart,

  and the Kamo palisade calls forth a great bitterness.”18

  Genji could imagine the young man's feelings, and he grieved for him, since he had once shone brighter than the rest. He, too, dismounted and turned to salute the shrine. Then he said in valediction,

  “Now I bid farewell to the world and its sorrows, may that most wise god

  of Tadasu judge the truth in the name I leave behind.”19

  Watching him, these young men so enamored of beauty were filled with the wonder of his stirring grace.

  He reached the tomb, and there came into his mind the image of his father as he had once been. Only ineffable sorrow remained now that even he, who had been beyond rank, was gone. Genji reported in tears what had befallen him, but his father's judgment remained inaccessible. Alas, what had become of all his parting injunctions?

  Wayside grasses grew thickly by the tomb, which Genji had approached through gathering dews, and meanwhile clouds had covered the moon and the darkness of the forest weighed upon him. He felt as though he might never find his way back again. While he prayed, he shivered to behold a vision of his father as he had seen him in life.

  “What is it his shade beholds when he looks on me—I, before whose eyes

  the moon on high, his dear face, hides from sight behind the clouds?”

  Once full day had come, he left again for home, and there he also wrote to the Heir Apparent. The letter was to go to Ōmyōbu in her room, since he had charged her with representing him. “I leave the City today, and the greatest of all my regrets is that I am now unable to call upon His Highness.20 Please understand my feelings and convey them to him.

  When will I again set my eyes on the City blossoming in spring,

  now that I am of the hills, a peasant whose time is past?”

  He tied the letter to a cherry branch bare of flowers.

  His Highness grew boyishly serious when it was shown to him. “What reply do you wish me to give him?” Ōmyōbu asked.

  “Tell him how very quickly I begin to miss him, and how with him far away I really wonder…” Ōmyōbu was touched by his sad little answer. Looking back on the past, when Genji had suffered so much for his impossible desires, and on all his encounters with her mistress, she grieved to think that he had brought these torments on them both, when they should have lived free of care, and she felt that the blame rested on her alone.

  She wrote in reply, “My lord, there is nothing I can say. I have spoken to His Highness. It is a shame to see him so unhappy.” The scattered character of her remarks must have reflected her troubled state of mind.

  “It is very sad that the flowers quickly fall; yet, O passing spring,

  come again to smile upon the City your blossoms grace!

  Man in hunting costume

  There will surely come a time…” In this somber mood His Highness's household talked on through their tears. No one who had laid eyes on Genji could see his affliction without grieving for him, and of course those in his personal daily service, even maids and latrine cleaners21 he would never know but who had been touched by his kindness, particularly lamented every moment of his absence.

  Who could have remained indifferent to him, even in the world at large? He had waited day and night on His Majesty since he was seven, he had told him no wish that remained unfulfilled, and all had therefore come under his protection and enjoyed his generosity. Many great senior nobles or court officials were among them, and lesser examples were beyond counting. Although they did not fail to acknowledge their debt, they did not call on him, for they were cowed by the evil temper of the times. People everywhere lamented his fate and privately deplored the court's ways, but apparently they saw no point in risking their own careers to express their sympathy, for many of them disappointed or angered him, and all things reminded him how cruel the world can be.

  On the day, he talked quietly with his darling until dark and then set out late at night, as people do. He had kept his traveling costume—hunting cloak and so on—very plain. “The moon is up,” he said. “Do come out a little farther and see me off. There will be so much I will wish I could tell you! Somehow, you know, I have no peace when I am away from you only a day or two.” He rolled up the blinds and beckoned her out to the edge of the aisle. Dissolved in tears, she paused before she slipped out to sit like a lovely vision in the moonlight. What would become of her once he was gone from the dreary world around them? The matter desperately worried him, but in her present state he only feared to upset her more.

  “Even while alive, people may yet be parted: that I never knew,

  even as I swore to you to stay by you till the end.

  So much for promises…” he said, striving to take it lightly.

  “I would soon give up this unhappy life of mine if that might just stay

  a little while the farewell now suddenly upon us.”

  He did not doubt that she had spoken truly, and he could hardly bear to leave her, but he did not wish dawn to find him there, and he hastened away.

  Her image was with him throughout the journey, and he boarded his ship with a stricken heart.22 The days were long then, and with a following wind he reached his destination at the hour of the Monkey.23

  Having never traveled this way before, even for pleasure, he experienced mingled desolation and delight. The place called Ōe Hall was sadly ravaged, for only its pine trees showed where the building had stood.24

  “Is it then my lot even more than his, who left his name in Cathay,

  to roam on and never know anywhere to call my home?”25

  Seeing the waves washing the shore and slipping back to the sea, he murmured, “‘With what envy…’”;26 and on his lips the old poem sounded so fresh and true that sorrow overwhelmed his companions. Looking back, he saw the mountains behind them melting into the mists and truly felt “three thousand leagues from home.”27 He could not bear the drops from the boatman's oar.

  “Mist over the hills may conceal my home from me, yet perhaps that sky

  my eyes turn to in longing is hers, too, beyond the clouds.”

 
All things weighed upon him.

  He was to live near where Counselor Yukihira had lived before him, with the “salt, sea-tangle drops falling as he grieved.”28 The place stood a little back from the sea, among lonely hills. Everything about it, even the surrounding fence, aroused his wonder. The miscanthus-thatched pavilions and what seemed to be galleries thatched with rushes were nicely done. At any other time a dwelling so novel and so in keeping with the setting would have delighted him, and his thoughts returned to pleasures past.

  He summoned officials from his nearby estates, and it was sad to see Lord Yoshikiyo, now his closest retainer, issuing orders for all there was to be done.29 In no time the work was handsomely finished. The streambed had been deepened, trees had been planted, and Genji felt to his surprise that he could actually live there. The Governor of the province30 was another of Genji's familiar retainers, and he quietly did all he could to help. The place was lively with visitors even though Genji had just arrived, but he still felt lost in a strange land, for he had no one with whom to discuss things properly, and he wondered how he would get through the years ahead.

  The rainy season came as life began at last to take on a normal rhythm, and Genji's thoughts turned to the City: to the many there whom he loved, to his dear lady in her sorrow, to the Heir Apparent, and to his little son at innocent play. He sent off messengers. It was beyond him to complete the letters to his Nijō residence and to Her Cloistered Eminence, for tears blinded him. To Her Cloistered Eminence he wrote,

  “How, then, fares the nun in her seafolk's hut of rushes at Matsushima,

  these days when brine is dripping from the man of Suma Shore?31

  Amid my prevailing sorrows, the past and the future lie in darkness, and alas, the floodwaters are rising…”32

  To the Mistress of Staff he wrote, as always, as though addressing himself privately to Chūnagon, but he enclosed, “Now that I have such leisure to dwell on the past, I wonder,

  While, all unchastened, I on Suma Shore still miss sea-tangle pleasures,

  what of you, O seafolk maid, whose salt fire never burns low?”33

  One easily imagines his passionate eloquence.

  To His Excellency's and to Nurse Saishō as well he sent instructions for his son's upbringing.

  In the City his letters aroused strong feelings in most of those who read them. The mistress of Nijō lay down at once, grieving and yearning, and she would not rise again, until the women in her service were at their wits' end to console her. An accessory he had favored in daily use, a koto he had played, the scent of a robe he had worn: these only recalled him to her now, as though he had passed beyond her world, with consequences so ominous that Shōnagon asked His Reverence to pray for her. His Reverence did a protective rite for her and Genji, and he begged, “Oh, let her cease to mourn as she is doing and enjoy a life free from care!”

  She made him nightclothes to wear while he was away. A dress cloak and gathered trousers of plain, stiff silk were so different and strange that the face of which he had spoken, the one “forever near in your mirror” (and indeed it was) was no comfort at all. It broke her heart to see a doorway he had come through, a pillar he had leaned on. She would still have been unhappy even if she had been old enough to have thought things over better and known more of life, and no wonder she missed him keenly, considering how close she was to him and how he had been both father and mother to her while she grew up. If he really had no longer been among the living, that would have been that, and she might have begun to forget, but although she knew that Suma was not far away, she could not know how long they would be parted, so that she had no relief from her sorrow.

  Needless to say, Her Cloistered Eminence grieved, too, because of the Heir Apparent.34 How could it leave her indifferent to ponder her karma from past lives? Fear of rumor had kept her wary all these years, for if she had shown Genji affection, the result might have been censure, and she had often ignored his own to remain impassively formal; but despite the world's cruel love of gossip he had so managed things in the end that nothing was said, he had resisted his unreasoning passion and kept the affair decorously concealed. Could she then fail to remember him with love? Her answer was unusually warm. “More and more, lately,

  Her every labor goes to firing dripping brine: at Matsushima,

  while her years go by, the nun heaps up the sad fuel of sighs.”

  The Mistress of Staff replied,

  “She whose love this is, the saltmaker with her fire, dares not have it seen,

  and for all her smoldering the smoke has nowhere to go.

  I shall not repeat things that need not be said…” Her short note was enclosed in the one from Chūnagon, who vividly conveyed her mistress's sorrow. Some passages were so affecting that Genji wept.

  The letter from his darling, her reply to a long and passionate one from him, was often very moving. She had written,

  “Hold up to your sleeves ever wet from dipping brine, O man of the shore,

  the clothes I wear every night that watery road parts us.”

  The things she had sent were lovely in both color and finish. She was so skilled at every task that he could not have wished for more, and he bitterly regretted not having her with him now that other absorbing affairs no longer claimed him and he should have been living in peace. Her image was before him day and night, and her memory haunted him unbearably until he quietly considered bringing her down after all, only to dismiss the idea again as hopeless and to aspire instead to erase his sins at least in this blighted lifetime. He went straight into continual practice of purifying fasting.

  From His Excellency he had news of his little son, too, and although he missed him very much, he did not worry unduly, because he knew that he would see him again and that he was in good hands. Perhaps he was not completely absorbed in a father's grief.

  Oh, yes, in all the confusion I left something out. Genji had also sent a messenger to the Ise Shrine, and he had had one from there as well. She35 had written with great warmth. Her turn of phrase and the movement of her brush showed exceptional mastery and grace. “News of the conditions under which you are living, and which I can scarcely believe, leaves me, so to speak, caught in the night without a dawn;36 yet I take it that you will not be away long, whereas I, deep in sin,37 will speak to you again only in the far future.38

  Give thought when you can to the Ise saltmaker gathering sorrows,

  you who are of Suma Shore, where I hear the brine drips down.39

  Oh, where will it lead, this life that is so painful in every way?” It was a long letter.

  “Though I scour the strand at low tide on Ise Bay, there is not a shell

  nor anything such as I can do in my affliction.”40

  She had joined four or five sheets of white Chinese paper into a scroll, on which she had written fitfully, as her sorrows moved her, and there was a lovely quality to the strokes of her brush.

  The thought that he had turned against her in an unkind moment, when she meant so much to him, that he had hurt her and driven her away, made her timely letter especially moving. He felt so grateful and so sympathetic that her very messenger was welcome, and he detained him for several days to learn all about her life. The messenger was a young and most accomplished member of his mistress's household. In his present reduced circumstances Genji did not keep even a man like him too far away, and the dazzled messenger wept at his glimpses of Genji's beauty.

  Genji framed a reply. His words are easily imagined: “If I had known that I was to leave the City in any case, I would have done better to follow you after all,” and so on. Bored and lonely, he wrote,

  “If only I, too, had boarded the little boat she of Ise rows

  lightly out over the waves, and gathered in no sorrows!41

  How long, languishing here at Suma on the shore, must I dream and mourn

  while the briny drops rain down on the seafolk's fuel of care?

  I cannot get over not knowing when I shall speak
to you again.”

  Collapsed earthen wall

  In this way he kept consolingly in touch with all his ladies.

  He was at once pleased and disconcerted to see how the ladies of the village of falling flowers had conveyed each her own mood in an artless message of grief;42 but although both messages were comforting, they also deepened his sorrow.

  “On and on I gaze at the ferns fringing the eaves of my dreary home

  while the dew in ceaseless drops moistens my forsaken sleeves,”43

  she had written, and Genji understood that in truth they had no protection but their garden weeds. Upon learning that their earthen wall had collapsed in several places during the long rains, he had his retainers in the City bring men from his nearby provincial estates to repair the damage.

  The Mistress of Staff was extremely unhappy to be laughed at, and His Excellency her father, who was very fond of her, made such strenuous representations to the Empress Mother and His Majesty that His Majesty reconsidered; after all, she was neither a Consort nor a Haven but merely a palace official, and besides, that lapse of hers had already caused her trouble enough. She gained His Majesty's pardon and could once more go to court, though even now her sole desire was the one who had claimed her heart.