The Tale of Genji, Page 42

  Koremitsu entered and roamed about in search of human sounds, but he found no sign that the place was inhabited. Sure enough, he thought, it is all very well to look in that way from the road, but no one seems to be living here. He was on his way back to Genji when by a burst of moonlight he saw two raised lattice shutters with the blinds behind them moving. The idea of having found the inhabitants after all actually gave him a shiver of fear, but he approached and coughed politely, to which an ancient voice replied after a preliminary clearing of the throat “Who is it? Who is there?”

  Koremitsu gave his name. “May I speak with the woman known as Jijū?” he asked.

  “I am afraid she is away, but someone else should be able to answer you just as well.” The voice was weaker and more tremulous now, but he recognized in it an old woman he had heard before.

  The stealthy arrival of a graceful man dressed in a hunting cloak caused such astonishment within that eyes unaccustomed to such sights might have seen in him a fox or some other magic creature. Koremitsu came nearer. “I should be grateful to learn whether Her Highness is still as she was when my lord last knew her. I believe that my lord is still eager to call on her. He was passing by this evening when he stopped here. What answer shall I give him? You need not be afraid.”

  The women broke into smiles. “Would my lady still be living here in this wilderness of weeds if she were different in any way from what she used to be? Use your own head and tell him whatever you please. For us, who are old, the times we have seen here have been a trial cruel and strange beyond anything you could imagine.” They seemed all too willing to talk.

  “Very well.” Koremitsu wished to silence any unwelcome garrulousness. “I shall inform my lord.” He returned to Genji.

  “What took you so long? Well, what did you find? Is it only a wormwood waste, and is nothing left from the past?”

  “My lord, I made my way up to the house as best I could. Jijū's aunt, the old woman they used to call Shōshō, is the one who answered me. Her voice was the same.” Koremitsu described all that he had found.

  Genji was quite upset and wondered what it could have been like for her all this time amid such thickets. He regretted the cruelty of having failed so far to visit her. “What am I to do?” he said. “A secret outing like this is always so tricky. This is the only sort of time when I could actually come. If she is just the same, this is exactly what one would expect of her.” However, he hesitated to go straight in. He badly wanted to send her a dazzling note, but he gave up the idea out of pity for his messenger, who, unless her old slowness of wit had changed, would have waited interminably for an answer. Besides, Koremitsu assured him that he would never get through the dew on all those weeds. “You must not go in until I have brushed it off a little,” he said.

  Genji murmured to himself,

  “Now that I am here, I myself shall seek her out through her trackless waste,

  to see whether all these weeds have left her as she was then”;

  and he alighted after all, whereupon Koremitsu led him in, brushing the dew from before him with his riding whip. “I have an umbrella, my lord,” he said, because the drops from on high recalled cold autumn showers; “the dew beneath these trees really is wetter than rain.”19 The legs of Genji's gathered trousers got soaking wet. Of the middle gate, which had been shaky enough even in those days, there was nothing left at all, and the further he penetrated the grounds, the more self-conscious he felt, though it helped that no one was there to see him.

  Umbrella

  His Late Highness's daughter shrank from his presence, despite her joy at being right that he really would come again one day, and she could hardly bring herself to receive him. She had never even glanced at the robes from the Dazaifu Deputy's wife, whom she disliked, but when her women brought them, evocatively perfumed from being stored in a fragrant chest, she resigned her self to changing after all; and she had that filthy standing curtain of hers placed nearby.

  Genji entered. “My heart, at least, has been constant toward you through all these years of silence,” he began, “yet my disappointment over the absence of any word from you made me wish hitherto to try you a little further. I could not pass a grove so striking, though, whether or not your trees are cedars,20 and so, as you see, I have lost after all.” He drew the curtain a little aside, but she, desperately shy as always, remained mute. Still, the way he had come to her proved that he was serious, and at last she summoned the courage to give him a faint reply.

  “The distress of knowing how long you have spent hidden among these thickets, added to my unchanging devotion, has led me to you, wet with dew. I know nothing of your own wishes in the matter, however, and in this regard I wonder what your feelings are. Perhaps I may hope that you will forgive me, as you would another, my neglect over the years. If after this I fail to please you, I will indeed confess to the sin of having broken my word.” He seems to have made her many such speeches, tender if not entirely heartfelt, to draw her out.

  He might have stayed, but the state of the place, and her own shocking condition, drew many fluent excuses from him, and instead he prepared to go. The pine on her grounds had not been intentionally planted, but it touched him by the height it had reached over the years,21 and his musings on life's dreamlike quality moved him to say,

  “What so caught my eye, when the rich wisteria tempted me to stop,

  was your pine that seemed to speak of someone pining nearby.22

  So many years have passed, when one counts them, and alas, so much in the City has changed. Soon, when there is time, I must tell you all about how I, too, languished far off in the wilds.23 I gather that you have no one but me to hear you complain of the suffering you have borne, season by season, through the years. It is so strange, you know.”

  Fragrant chest

  “Year after long year I have pined, always in vain—are those flowers, then,

  all that made you look this way and at last notice my home?”

  she replied, and a glimpse of her in discreet movement, added to the fragrance of her sleeves, suggested that she had matured since those days.

  The moon, which was setting now, shone in brilliantly, for nothing like a bridgeway remained beyond the double doors to the west, and the projecting eaves were gone as well. He looked about by its light and saw a room appointed just as it had been long ago, and far more elegant than anything suggested by the outside of a house so deep in the “grasses of remembering.”24 Pictures from old tales came to mind, and he wondered sadly at her years here without a breath of change. Her resolutely prim deportment impressed him as admirably worthy of her rank, and he greatly regretted that after compassionately seizing on that very reason not to forget her, he should have lost touch with her for so long, having been absorbed by troubles of his own, until she no doubt thought him extremely unkind. His lady of falling flowers was likewise little given to stylish brilliance, and a mental comparison of the two now excused in his eyes a multitude of sins.

  The season of the Festival and the Purification had come, bringing Genji all sorts of gifts “to assist him with his preparations,” but he gave them all away to his deserving ladies. He was especially attentive toward His Highness of Hitachi's daughter, directing his closest retainers to see to her needs, sending servants to clear the weeds from her grounds, and ordering the unsightly gaps in the garden wall mended with stretches of board fence. He did not visit her, because that would not redound to his credit if the world at large were to learn how he had found her. Instead he wrote to her at length to say (since he was building close to Nijō), “That is where I mean to move you. Please find some nice little girls and so on to look after you.” His solicitude embraced even providing her with servants, and he was so generous otherwise that her wilderness of weeds hardly had room for it all. Her rejoicing women turned toward where he lived with their eyes lifted to the heavens.

  As far as anyone knew, Genji had not even a casual interest in the sort of women in whom the world abounds, but sought only those who appeared to offer something a little unusual, something that caught his fancy; and yet there he was, and one can only wonder why, making much of a lady whose appeal failed in all ways to attain even the mediocre. He must have had a bond with her from the distant past.

  Some former members of her staff, high and low, who had once contemptuously dismissed their poverty-stricken mistress and left her as quickly as they possibly could, now came rushing back to offer their services. Others had become so accustomed to her manner, correct as it was to the point of painful reticence, that they found themselves completely at sea in such households as those of vague provincial Governors, and now all of them at once were inspired to return.

  Genji had only grown more thoughtful as he rose to new heights of glory, and he ordered things so well that he wrought a wondrous change, for her residence was soon amply populated. Where once rank foliage had cast a dismal and pervasive pall there now ran a newly diverted stream, while shrubbery near the house yielded cooling shade, and junior household staff, barely noticed so far but zealous to serve him, so clearly discerned his deep interest that they danced most assiduous attendance upon her.

  She languished two years in her father's house, and then Genji brought her to live in his east pavilion.25 It was rare for him actually to call on her there, but she was so close that he looked in on her whenever he came her way at all, and his treatment of her was not really demeaning.

  I would happily rattle on a bit about how surprised the Dazaifu Deputy's wife was when she came back up to the City and about how Jijū, though very pleased, smarted with shame at her own faintheartedness for having failed to wait a little longer; but for now my head is aching so badly that I am not up to it, and I am afraid I shall have to go on another time, when I remember more.26

  16

  SEKIYA

  At the Pass

  Sekiya means “barrier post” (staffed by a barrier guard) and alludes to the Ōsaka Barrier, between Kyoto and the provinces to the east. The spot is the scene of this short chapter.

  RELATIONSHIP TO EARLIER CHAPTERS

  “At the Pass” takes place toward the end of the period covered by “The Pilgrimage to Sumiyoshi,” from the ninth into the tenth or eleventh month.

  PERSONS

  Genji, the Palace Minister, age 29

  The Deputy Governor of Hitachi, formerly of Iyo (Iyo no Suke)

  His wife, the lady of the cicada shell (Utsusemi)

  The Governor of Kawachi (formerly of Kii), Utsusemi's stepson (Ki no Kami)

  His younger brother, an Aide of the Right Palace Guards

  The Second of the Right Gate Watch, Utsusemi's younger brother (Kogimi)

  The year after His Late Eminence's passing, the Iyo Deputy was appointed to Hitachi,1 and he invited his wife, the lady of the cicada shell, to come with him down to his province. Her own secret thoughts went often enough to Genji, for she had distantly heard that he was going to Suma, but she had no way even to get a letter to him, and since she was wary of the winds over Mount Tsukuba,2 the months and years passed by without a word between them. No term limited his exile, but at last he returned to life in the City, and in the autumn of the following year Hitachi came back up himself.

  Genji went on pilgrimage to Ishiyama to fulfill a vow on the very day when Hitachi was to reach the barrier.3 The former Governor of Kii, as well as Hitachi's other sons, had come out from the City to greet their father, and their warning that the road would be filled because his lordship would take it prompted the party to set off at dawn in a dense, swaying train of women's carriages. The sun rose high. At Uchide Beach,4 Genji's arriving outrunners crowded the road before they could even move aside, announcing that their lord had passed Awata,5 and so higher up, near the barrier, they all alighted, unyoked the oxen, put the carriages here and there under the cedars, and withdrew respectfully beneath the trees to let him by. Some carriages had been allowed to trail behind and others sent on in front, but even so Hitachi's company was obviously large. Sleeves and skirts in tasteful colors spilled from ten of the carriages. Their elegance, not in the least provincial, reminded Genji of the sightseeing carriages on occasions like a High Priestess's departure for Ise. Every man in the vast entourage that accompanied this most rare and imposing excursion noticed them as he passed.

  It was the last day of the ninth month.6 Autumn leaves glowed in many colors, and expanses of frost-withered grasses drew the eye, while a brilliant procession in hunting cloaks embroidered or tie-dyed to splendid advantage strode on past the barrier lodge. Genji lowered his carriage blind and summoned the little brother of long ago; he was now the Second of the Right Gate Watch. “I am sure you will not soon forget how I came to the barrier to meet you,” he said in words meant for the young man's sister. Touching memories of all kinds swept through his mind, but he was obliged to keep his remarks innocuous.

  She, too, had kept old memories in her heart, and now their sadness rose in her again.

  “Coming and going, I found here no barrier to these tears of mine—

  perhaps they may seem to you the slope's ever-welling spring.”7

  He would never understand, she knew, and she was overcome by helpless sorrow.

  The Second of the Watch came out to meet Genji on Genji's way back from Ishiyama. He apologized for having passed on by the other day.8 Years ago, as a boy, he had been so close and so dear to Genji that until he first wore the cap of office, he had enjoyed Genji's unstinting protection; but then, when the world lapsed strangely into turmoil, fear of rumor moved him to go down to Hitachi, and this had put Genji off him a little, though he kept his feelings to himself. Although no longer so warmly disposed, Genji still counted him among his intimate retainers. It was the younger brother of the former Governor of Kii (now of Kawachi), the one who had lost his Palace Guards post and gone down with Genji to Suma, whom Genji singled out for particular favor. The lesson was lost on none of the others, who wondered when they thought over the past why they had ever considered bowing to worldly opinion.

  Genji summoned the Second of the Watch and gave him a letter to deliver. What a long memory he has, the young man thought, for things he should have forgotten long ago!

  “The other day I understood how strong a tie binds us to each other,” Genji had written. “Did you, too?

  I had little doubt that we would meet after all on the Ōmi road,

  yet those waters were too fresh not to betray my fond hope.9

  He was hateful, that wretch of a watchman!”10

  “I feel ill at ease after being out of touch with her for so long,” Genji said, “but I think of her often, you know, and it might all have been just yesterday. I suppose this romantic leaning of mine will only turn her against me more.”

  He gave the letter to the young man, who took it to his sister. “Do answer him,” the young man said. “I have always assumed that he cares less for me than he used to, and it is wonderful that he treats me as kindly as though nothing had changed. I understand that such diversions may not appeal to you, but you cannot just ignore him. A woman may be forgiven for yielding to a gentleman.”

  Although more deeply embarrassed than ever, and less confident in all ways, she must have given in to the surprise, for she replied,

  “O what can it be, the Ōsaka Barrier, that in just this place

  one must make one's mournful way through a forest of sorrows?11

  I think I must be dreaming.”

  Genji had found her unforgettable both for her touching plight and for her maddening ways, but now and again he further shook her resolve by sending her new messages. Meanwhile, Hitachi suffered so much from ill health, no doubt under the burden of advancing age, that his only instructions to his sons concerned his wellborn wife. “Follow her wishes in everything,” he urged them morning and night, “and serve her exactly as I did while I lived.” Seeing her distress over the dismal prospect of losing even her husband, to add to her already sad fate, he longed (for life has its term, and no regret can stay its passing) to be able to leave his spirit with her, and he thought and spoke often of his sorrow and worry, since he did not know his sons' intentions toward her; but his concern availed him nothing, and he died.

  For some time his sons made as though to respect his wishes, but their goodwill was all on the surface, and there were many painful moments. Such is the way of the world, after all, and she spent her life lamenting her solitary misfortune.

  Only the Governor of Kawachi, who had always had an eye for her, showed her any consideration. “My father spoke to us feelingly about you,” he said. “I understand how inadequate I am, but please do not hesitate to let me know if I can do anything for you.” His flattering advances blatantly revealed what he had in mind, and she told herself that any unfortunate like herself who went on living this way would only have to hear more and more of these horrors; and so without a word to anyone she became a nun. This drastic step left her gentlewomen aghast.

  The Governor was very angry. “All right,” he railed at her, “you may have no use for me, but you still have many years before you, and I just wonder how you are going to manage!”

  “What a meddlesome bore!” seems to have been one comment on the subject.

  17

  EAWASE

  The Picture Contest

  The word eawase means a “picture contest,” in which two competing sides submit paintings in pairs for judgment. No such contest is known to have taken place in the period before the tale was written, but the one in this chapter follows the established pattern for poetry contests (utaawase), and in particular for a fully documented example held at the palace in the third lunar month of 960.