The Tale of Genji, Page 36

  The sun slowly rose as Genji stepped from the boat into a carriage, and at this first faint glimpse of him the Novice felt age dissolve and the years stretch out before him; he bowed at once to the God of Sumiyoshi, wreathed in smiles. The light of sun and moon seemed to him now to lie in his hand. No wonder he danced attendance on his guest.

  The setting of the house, of course, but also its style, the look of the groves, the standing stones and nearby garden, the lovely inlet—all would have required exceptional genius to do them justice in painting. This was a brighter and more welcoming place by far than the one where Genji had spent the recent months. The furnishings were superb, and the Novice did indeed live among them like the mightiest grandees in the City. In fact, in grace and brilliance his mode of life rather outdid theirs.

  Genji rested and then wrote to the City. The messenger from home was still at Suma, bewailing the miseries he had had to endure on his hard journey. Genji summoned him and sent him back loaded with gifts beyond his station. He probably addressed a detailed account of recent events to favored monks adept at intercession, and to many others as well. It was only to Her Cloistered Eminence that he described his miraculous escape from death.

  The deeply moving letter from Nijō was too much for him to answer, and the way he put down his brush again and again to wipe his eyes betrayed intense feeling. “After surviving so long a catalog of horrors I want now more than ever to put this world behind me, but the face you spoke of seeing in the mirror is always present to me, and fear that this anxiety may be all I ever have of you is driving every other trouble from my mind.

  How my longing flies, over what new distances, now that I have moved

  far along that other shore to a shore I never knew!

  All this makes me feel I am in a dream, and as long as I have not woken up from it, I wonder what nonsense I may talk.” The lengthy, troubled wanderings indeed obvious in his writing were just what made them deserve a stolen glance, and his companions took it as proof of his supreme devotion. No doubt each had his own unhappy message to send home.

  The sky that had rained and rained was now one perfect blue, and the seafolk seemed to be fishing in high spirits. Suma, where there was hardly a fisherman's shelter anywhere against the rocks, had been extremely dreary, and while Genji disliked finding so many people here, the spot offered such beauty that he felt a great deal better.

  To all appearances the Akashi Novice was fiercely devoted to his practice, but he had one serious worry: his only daughter, who entered his talk with distressing regularity whenever he was with Genji. Genji had already noted her existence with interest, and he saw that his unlikely presence here might indicate a bond of destiny between them, but he intended only piety while still in disgrace, and he was so ashamed to imagine his love in the City charging him with broken promises that he betrayed no such thought to his host. Not that on occasion he did not avidly imagine the excellence of her person and her looks.

  The Novice, who was afraid of intruding, seldom visited Genji and confined himself to an outbuilding some distance off. Still, his only wish was to be with Genji from morning to night, and he redoubled his prayers to the buddhas and gods that he might somehow have his desire. Although sixty, he was still a fine-looking man, pleasingly lean from his practice and distinguished in temper, and perhaps for that reason his considerable qualities, as well as his knowledge of the ways of the past, sufficiently outweighed his vagueness and his eccentricities that his conversation helped to relieve Genji's tedium.

  Little by little he treated Genji to tales of bygone days, ones that Genji had never really heard, having been taken up by his own affairs or those of the court; until Genji was sufficiently intrigued to feel at times as though it might have been a shame never to have come and met the man. For all the Novice's ready talk, however, Genji's courtliness daunted him, and despite his earlier tirades he was too abashed to bring up, as he longed to do, what he really had in mind. With many sighs he told his daughter's mother about his worry and disappointment.

  As for the young lady, the sight of Genji in this desert where no one, however ordinary, seemed in the least presentable taught her at last that such a man could exist and made it all too plain where she stood herself; for she thought of him as far, far beyond her. When she learned about her parents' plans for her, they struck her as preposterous, and she felt more forlorn than ever before.

  The fourth month came, and Genji got fine clothes and bed curtains for the new season. These ceaseless attentions oppressed and embarrassed him, but his host was so unfailingly noble and courteous that he let the matter pass.

  A constant stream of letters arrived from the City. One quiet evening, with the moon still in the sky and the whole vast sea before him, he saw, as it were, the lake in his own garden, where he had always been at home, and with the island of Awaji looming in the distance an ineffable yearning seemed to fill all the world. “Alas, how far away…” he murmured.10

  “Ah, how grand a sight! The island of Awaji calls forth every shade

  of beauty and of sorrow tonight under this bright moon.”11

  He took from its bag the kin he had not touched for so long and drew a little music from its strings, while emotion surged through those sadly watching him. His full, masterly rendering of “Kōryō” reached that house below the hill through the murmuring of the pines and the sound of waves, no doubt thrilling the bright young women there. Here and there mumbling old people who could not tell one note from another found themselves wandering the beach in defiance of the wind. The Novice helplessly gave up his prayers and hastened to Genji's side.

  “I think the world I left will claim me after all,” he said, weeping with delight. “I cannot help seeing tonight the land where I pray to be reborn.” Genji found his mind going back to the music on this or that occasion—the koto of one, the flute of another, a voice raised in song; to the praise he had received so often and to the way he had been preferred and feted by one and all, not least His Majesty himself; and to people he remembered and his own fortunes then. The present seemed so dreamlike that the strings as he touched them rang strangely loud.

  The Novice could not stop the tears of age, and after sending to the house below the hill for a biwa and a sō no koto he became a biwa minstrel,12 playing one or two rare and lovely pieces. Genji, when pressed, played the sō no koto a little, leaving his host in awe of his accomplishments. Even a fairly dull instrument may sound splendid in its time, and these notes rang out across the sea while depths of leafy shadow here and there surpassed in loveliness spring blossoms or autumn colors, and a moorhen's tap-tap-tap called up stirring fancies of “the gate favored tonight.”13

  The Novice's sweet music on instruments so superb in tone delighted Genji. “It is on this instrument14 that a charming woman's casual music is most pleasing,” he remarked conversationally, to which his host replied with a curious smile, “Where would one find playing more charming than your own? For myself, I have my skill in the third generation from His Engi Majesty,15 and being so hopeless, you see, and unable ever really to forget the world, I turn to it often when I am deeply troubled—so much so that to my surprise someone else here has picked up what I play. Her style recalls His Highness who taught me, unless my poor ears have simply misheard the wind's sighing among the pines. I wish I could discreetly arrange for you to hear her!” He was trembling and seemed on the verge of tears.

  Biwa minstrel

  “For you, then, to whom my koto can be nothing… 16 I have made a great mistake,” Genji said, pushing the instrument from him. “Somehow the sō no koto seems always to have been a woman's instrument. In Emperor Saga's17 tradition it was his own Fifth Princess who stood out in her time, although no one has really continued her line. People who enjoy some renown nowadays play only desultorily, for their own amusement, and I am delighted that someone hidden away here should have kept it alive. But how could I possibly hear her?”

  “I see no reason why you should
not. You might even call her to play for you. After all, even among merchants someone once heard the old music with pleasure.18 Speaking of the biwa, few in the old days either managed to elicit its true sound, but she plays it very beautifully and makes no mistakes. I wonder how she does it. I am sorry to hear her music through the crash of great waves, but what with all the sorrows one has to bear, it is often a great consolation.” His discernment delighted Genji, who gave him the sō no koto and took back the biwa.

  The Novice did indeed play the biwa exceedingly well. His style was one no longer heard, his fingering was thoroughly exotic,19 and the quaver he gave the strings yielded deep, clear tones. Though the sea off Ise was far away, Genji had a man of his with a good voice sing, “Come now, all to gather shells on the pristine strand!”20 He often picked up the clappers and joined in the song himself, while the Novice took his fingers from the strings to speak his praise. The Novice called for most unusually presented refreshments and pressed wine upon his guests until the night soon became one to banish every care.

  It was late. The sea breeze had cooled, and the sinking moon shone with a pure light. When all was quiet, the Novice poured forth his tale to Genji, little by little describing his plans when he first moved to this shore, his practice for the life to come, and, all unasked, his daughter herself. Although amused, Genji was often touched as well.

  “If I may allow myself to say so, my lord,” his host went on, “I believe that your brief stay in a land so strange to you may be a trial devised by the gods and buddhas in compassionate response to an old monk's years of prayer. I say this because for eighteen years now I have placed my trust in the God of Sumiyoshi. I have entertained certain ambitions for my daughter ever since she was small, and twice a year, in spring and autumn, we go on pilgrimage to his shrine. Quite apart from my own prayers for birth on the lotus,21 in all my devotions through the hours of day and night I beg only to be granted my high aims on her behalf. It must be for my sins in lives past that I have become, as you see, a hopeless mountain rustic, but my father held the office of Minister. Yes, I myself now belong to the country, and I sadly wonder what life awaits those who will come after me if we remain this low; but I have had hope ever since she was born. I want a great lord from the City to have her, and that desire runs so deep that I have incurred the enmity of many and suffered much unpleasantness because of my pretensions. None of that matters to me, however. I tell her, ‘As long as I live, I will do my poor best to look after you. If I go while you are still as you are now, then drown yourself among the waves.’” Between frequent spells of weeping he told Genji this and much else that defies a full account.

  This was a troubled time for Genji, too, and he listened with tears in his eyes. “I had been wondering for what crime I was falsely accused and condemned to wander an alien land, but all that you have said tonight leaves me certain and, I may say, moved that this is indeed a bond of some strength from past lives. Why did you not tell me of what you have seen so clearly? I have been sickened by the treachery of life ever since I put the City behind me, and with only my devotions to occupy my months and days my spirits have sunk very low. Distant rumor had told me of such a lady, but I had sadly assumed that she would recoil from a ne'er-do-well. Now, however, I gather that you wish to take me to her. Her solace will see me through these lonely nights.”

  The Novice was transported with delight.

  “Do you know as well what it is to sleep alone? Think, then, how she feels,

  wakeful through the long, long nights by herself upon this shore!”22

  he said. “And please imagine my own anxiety all these years!” Despite his trembling he did not lack dignity.

  “But surely, someone accustomed to the shore…

  How traveling wears through the long melancholy of the wakeful nights

  that keep a pillow of grass from gathering even dreams!”23

  Genji's casual demeanor gave him intense allure and a beauty beyond all words.

  The Novice talked on and on about all sorts of things, but never mind. Having got wrong everything I have written, I must have made him seem even odder and more foolish than he was. He was enormously relieved to see his hopes on the way to fruition.

  Meanwhile, near noon the next day, Genji sent off a letter to the house below the hill. He was acutely aware that with her reputedly daunting standards the lady might be a startling rarity in these benighted wilds, and he did it very beautifully on tan Korean paper:

  “Gazing in sorrow at skies so wholly unknown that near and far merge,

  through the mists I seek the trees above your whispered refuge.

  My longing heart…”24 That may well have been all. The Novice was of course there already, eagerly waiting, and he plied Genji's envoy with astonishing quantities of wine.

  When his daughter took a very long time to reply, he went in to her to urge her on, but she refused to heed him. Genji's dazzling missive so awed her that she shrank from revealing herself to him, and agonized thoughts of his station and hers made her sufficiently unwell that she had to lie down. Her father, at his wits' end, wrote it himself.

  “Alas, your most gracious letter has proven overwhelming to someone so much of the country. She is too awestruck even to read it. Still, I believe,

  That your gaze like hers rests upon these very skies she has always seen

  surely means that you and she are one also in your hearts.

  But perhaps I am too forward…” He had written it on Michinokuni paper, in a style old-fashioned but not without its airs and graces. Forward? Yes, thought Genji, mildly shocked. His envoy enjoyed the gift of a splendid woman's robe.

  “I know nothing of decrees issued through a secretary,”25 he wrote the next day.

  “Ah, how cruelly I am required to suffer in my secret heart,

  for there is no one at all to ask me, How do you feel?

  The words will not come…“26 He had made his writing very beautiful. If it did not impress her, she must, young as she was, simply have been too shy; and if it did, she no doubt still despaired when she measured herself against him, so much so that the mere thought of his noticing her enough to court her only made her want to cry. She therefore remained unmoved, until at her father's desperate urging she at last wrote on heavily perfumed purple paper, in ink now black, now vanishingly pale,

  “Your heart's true desire: hear me ask you its degree and just how you feel.

  Can you suffer as you say for someone you do not know?”

  The hand, the diction, were worthy of the greatest lady in the land.

  All this reminded him pleasantly of life in the City, but it did not become him to write too often, and every two or three days he would therefore seize the pretext of a languid evening or a lovely dawn (moments likely to appeal to her as well) and soon decided—since she was far from an unworthy correspondent—that he did not wish to miss knowing someone so deeply proud; and yet Yoshikiyo's possessive talk about her offended him, and he did not like to ruin years of hope before the man's very eyes. After some thought he decided to go further only when someone came forward toward him. Alas, she whose pride surpassed the greatest lady's remained so maddeningly reticent that they spent their days in a contest of wills.

  Now that the pass27 stood between him and the distant City, he worried more and more about his love there and wondered what he really should do. Not having her was indeed no joke.28 Should he have her come to him in secret? His resolve wavered now and then, but he told himself that he would not be there forever and that in any case it would not look well if he did.

  That year there were frequent omens and repeated disturbances at the palace. On the thirteenth of the third month, the night when lightning flashed and the wind roared, His Majesty dreamed that His Late Eminence stood below the palace steps, glaring balefully at him while he himself cowered before him in awe. His Eminence had much to say, and no doubt he spoke of Genji. His Majesty described his dream in fear and sorrow to the Empress M
other. “One imagines all sorts of things on a night when it is pouring and the skies are in tumult,” she said. “You must not allow it to disturb you unduly.”

  Something now went wrong with His Majesty's eyes, perhaps because he had met his father's furious gaze, and he suffered unbearably. Penances of all kinds were ordered, both at the palace and at the Empress Mother's home.

  The Chancellor29 passed away, which was natural enough at his age, but to add to this series of crises the Empress Mother herself became vaguely indisposed, and she grew weaker with time. Thus varied sorrows afflicted the court.

  “I do think there will be retribution, though, if Genji really is in disgrace when actually he is blameless,” His Majesty would often remark. “I have a mind to restore him to his offices.”

  “You would gain no respect by doing so,” the Empress Mother would strenuously insist. “What will people say if before even three years are out you pardon a man whose offenses have driven him into banishment?”

  Days and months passed while His Majesty wavered, and meanwhile both his condition and the Empress Mother's grew worse.

  At Akashi there was as always something new in the autumn wind, and Genji found sleeping by himself so horribly lonely that he now and then approached his host. “Do find one reason or another to bring her here,” he would say; for he did not feel that he could go to her, and she herself showed no sign of encouraging him. She had heard that miserable country girls were the ones who foolishly surrendered that way to the flattering talk of a gentleman briefly down from the City. He could not possibly have any respect for me, she said to herself, and I would only burden myself with grief. I suppose that as long as I remain unmarried, my parents, with their impossible ambitions for me, entertain affectionately fanciful visions of my future, but I myself will only suffer for them. No, it is quite enough for me to correspond with him like this while he remains here on this shore. After years of listening to rumors about him she had never expected to catch the least glimpse of anyone like him where she actually lived, but she had nonetheless had a glimpse of him, she had heard on the wind the music of his koto, which was said to be superb, and she knew a good deal about how he spent his time; and the very idea that he should deign to notice her sufficiently to court her was simply too much for one whose life had been wasted among seafolk like these. Such were her thoughts, and the more embarrassed she felt, the less she could even contemplate allowing him nearer.