The Tale of Genji, Page 45

  A great train of carriages would have attracted too much attention, and smaller parties would have been tricky to manage. For this reason the lady's escort, who preferred to pass unnoticed, decided that she should go quietly by sea. The ships were launched at the hour of the Dragon.8 While the shore's morning mists that so moved the old poet slowly veiled them from the Novice's eyes,9 he thought in sorrow and longing that his heart would never have peace again.

  After all these years the Nun found her return overwhelming, and she wept.

  “When this nun at heart longed only for the journey to that distant shore,

  now her boat rows back again to all that she had renounced!”10

  And her daughter:

  “Ah, how many times am I to live through autumn, as it comes and goes,

  before upon buoyant wood I make my way home again?”11

  A favorable wind blew, and they arrived on the intended day. They had traveled modestly, for they did not wish to be noticed. The house was pretty, and the view there so nearly resembled her familiar one of the sea that she felt as though she had not moved at all.12 Times long past returned to mind,13 with many touching memories. The galleries built onto the house looked very nice, and the stream in the garden was pleasant to see. The house did not feel lived in yet, but it would do very well once they had settled in. Genji charged his intimate retainers with giving them a proper welcome. As for his calling there himself, days passed while he pondered how to free himself to do so. This did nothing to relieve her melancholy. She felt listless and missed home so much that she turned to playing the kin he had left her, and since she could no longer conceal her sorrow, she went to play a little in a place apart; at which the wind in the pines indiscreetly enough joined in her music. The Nun, who was reclining sadly, sat up.

  “Here at my old home, where I have returned alone and in a changed guise,

  I hear blowing through the pines a familiar-sounding wind,”14

  she said, and the lady:

  “In lonely longing for the friends I used to know at the home I loved,

  I stammer a country tune that no one can understand.”

  So it was that she spent her joyless days. Genji worried more about her now than ever, but he feared that going to her openly would only result in his darling, whom he had not yet really informed, learning the truth from somebody else. He therefore said to her, “I have an errand to look after at Katsura,15 and I am afraid more days have gone by than I would like. Someone near there is expecting me, too, and I feel a little bad about it. I also need to see to adorning the Buddha at the temple on Saga Moor.16 All that should take me two or three days.”

  She knew that he was suddenly building a Katsura villa, and she suspected him of keeping the woman from Akashi there. She did not like that at all. “You will no doubt be gone long enough to need a new handle for your ax,”17 she said with visible annoyance. “I shall have a wait!”

  “How prickly you always are! And I hear everyone is saying that I am quite unlike what I used to be!” The sun rose high while he strove to placate her.

  He went to the new arrival in secret, very cautiously, and with only trusted men among his escort. It was twilight by the time he arrived. Even in a plain hunting cloak he conveyed unearthly beauty, and now, in a carefully chosen dress cloak, he looked so dazzlingly lovely that light shone through the lady's dark forebodings for her child. The moment was profoundly moving—how could he take lightly this first sight of his daughter? How bitterly he regretted all the time they had spent apart! The son given him by His Excellency's daughter looked very sweet, everyone said, but that was because the times inclined them to see him that way. At this age one could tell a child of bright promise at a glance, and his little girl, with all her innocence and her winning smiles, was absolutely enchanting. The nurse had not been at her best when she went down to Akashi, but she was now handsomer than ever. She told Genji everything that had happened since he left, and he sadly marveled that his daughter should have lived so long beside those saltmakers' huts.

  “This place, too, is very cut off, and it is difficult for me to get here. Please move after all to where I would like to have you!”

  “I prefer to accustom myself to life here first,” the lady answered, reasonably enough.

  They spent all night assuring each other in all ways of their love.

  Genji directed the caretaker and some of his new retainers to look after what needed doing. The men from his nearby estates all came calling, since he was to visit his Katsura villa next. He had the garden near the house put right, where the plants had been crushed or broken. “All the standing stones here and there have fallen over or disappeared,” he remarked, “but what a lovely place it would be if it were thoughtfully looked after! It would be a shame to take too much trouble with it, though. You will not be here forever, and leaving would only be painful—it was for me.”18 Amid tears and laughter he talked on intimately of the past, and he was very beautiful as he did so. The Nun stole glances at him and forgot her years; she felt her sorrows melt away and broke into smiles.

  The lady, entranced and delighted, watched him sauntering about gracefully in his gown,19 ordering improvements to the stream that emerged from beneath the eastern bridgeway. Then Genji noticed the holy-water shelf and remembered. “Is my lady the Nun here, too? My costume is disgraceful!” He called for his dress cloak and went to her standing curtain.

  “I take it as an impressive tribute to your practice that you should have brought up your daughter so free of all offense.20 Great devotion was required to leave the home where you had such peace and return to this fickle world, and I can well imagine how the Novice, who remains behind, must be thinking of you.” He spoke very kindly.

  “It is a great consolation to me in my old age that you have divined how greatly this return to the world I once left troubles me, but while I rejoice that the seedling pine21 I cherished on that stony shore should now have her future assured, I cannot help worrying that the soil where she took root is very thin.”22 She was weeping. What Genji gathered of her person was by no means unworthy, and he therefore encouraged her to continue talking about the past and about the Prince's mode of life. The murmur of the mended stream meanwhile reached them like a complaint.23

  Holy-water shelf

  “She whose home this was actually by now forgets many, many things,

  but the clear stream babbles on like the mistress of the house,”

  she said, and Genji admired the elegance with which her voice unaffectedly died away.

  “No such limpid brook could retain a memory of the distant past:

  perhaps it feels after all that the mistress has not changed—

  Ah me!” Standing there so pensively, Genji seemed to her lovelier than anyone in the world.

  He went on to his temple, where he ordered not only the regular litanies to Fugen or the invocations to Amida or Shaka that are done on the fourteenth, fifteenth, and last days of the month but many other services that he wanted performed. He also gave out instructions for adorning the halls and providing furnishings for the buddhas there. He returned under a bright moon.

  That night then came back to her from the past, and she did not fail to mark it, for she offered him his kin. He could not help playing it a little, caught up as he was in warm emotions. The tuning had not changed, and he felt now as he had then.

  “You who faithfully left the tuning of this kin just as it was then,

  did you hear in its music all that you still mean to me?”

  She replied,

  “Resting in my trust that as you had promised me your heart would not change,

  I joined my weeping music to the sounding of the pines.”

  It showed how far she surpassed all one could have expected of her that her side of the exchange was not unworthy. Genji was captivated by her looks and manner, which had matured magnificently, and he could hardly keep his eyes off his daughter. What am I to do? he wondered. It would be
a terrible shame to let her grow up like this in obscurity, and her reputation may easily suffer later on24 unless I bring her to Nijō and provide for her there as I hope to do. He said nothing of all this, though, because he feared her mother's likely feelings too much, and tears came to his eyes. The girl was a little shy with him at first, being so small, but she soon came round, and the more she snuggled up to him, chattering and laughing, the more exquisitely lovely she became. It was well worth seeing him with her in his arms, and the picture clearly conveyed their exceptional fortunes.

  He was to return to the City the next day, and he ought to have gone straight back from there, since he slept a little late, but many people had gathered at his Katsura villa, and a crowd of privy gentlemen appeared at Ōi, too. “What a bore!” he exclaimed as he dressed. “They should not be coming for me here.” The press of business required him to leave, which he was sorry to do, and as he stood by the door with an air of detached innocence, the nurse came out with the child in her arms. He caressed his daughter tenderly. “I know it is selfish of me,” he said, “but it will be very painful not to be with you. What can I do, though? You are so far away!”

  “Not knowing how you may be disposed toward me in the future, my lord,” the nurse replied, “I am more anxious now than I ever was in those years when I knew I could not see you at all!”

  The little girl reached out affectionately to him as he started away, and he knelt on one knee beside her. “It is strange how many sorrows I have. I so hate to be gone at all. Where is your mother? Why has she not come out with you to say good-bye? That is what would make me feel better!” The nurse smiled and passed his words on to her mistress, who was in truth prostrate with sorrow and could barely move. Genji felt she rather overplayed the great lady. It was too much for her women as well, and so very reluctantly she came out after all. Her profile, half hidden behind her curtain, had a wonderfully fine distinction, and the grace of her manner would have put a Princess to shame. Genji turned back to draw her curtain aside and talk to her privately, and despite her efforts to contain herself, this time she did watch him go. He was at the ineffable peak of his beauty. Always tall, he had now filled out somewhat, in harmony with his height, and she thought he had acquired a weightier dignity than before; but perhaps it was only her own predilection that gave him such enchanting grace, right down to the ends of his gathered trousers.

  The Chamberlain once stripped of his post25 had been reinstated. Now an Aide in the Gate Watch, he had this year received his cap of office and was a jolly fellow, quite unlike his former self. He approached to bear Genji's sword.

  “Those days are not forgotten,” he hinted upon glimpsing a certain gentle-woman within, “but I hesitated to take the liberty. I lay awake at dawn, in a wind that reminded me so much of the one there on the shore, but I had no hope of getting any word to you.”

  “When ‘the mountains, fold on fold,’ do as well as ‘gone behind the isle,’ and when I was just thinking, ‘long ago even the pine,’ it is a real pleasure to come across someone who has not forgotten me!” she retorted.26

  He was amazed. Well, I certainly got it! he said to himself. And I was actually quite fond of her, too! “Another time, then,” he answered curtly and went to wait upon Genji.

  Genji's escort cleared the way with loud cries when he set out in grand style. The Secretary Captain and the Intendant of the Watch rode in the rear of his carriage.

  “I dislike the way you have tracked me down when, here, I would have much preferred to pass unnoticed.” Genji was extremely put out.

  “There was such a beautiful moon last night that we regretted not coming with you, and this morning we made our way here through the mists. The colors in the fields were lovely, though it is still too early for brocade on the hills.”27

  “Some of us were busy hawking and fell behind. I wonder what has happened to them.”

  Genji set off toward his Katsura villa, where he was to spend time again today. The sudden need to receive him had thrown the place into a great commotion, and the jargon of the cormorant fishermen, when they were summoned, reminded him of the seafolk. The young gentlemen who had stayed out in the fields now arrived and presented their token gift of small birds attached to a hagi frond.

  The wine went round and round until the riverbank became such a threat that in their drunkenness they all spent the day at the villa instead. Each contributed his share of Chinese verses, and the music began when a brilliant moon rose. It was very lively. The biwa and the wagon were the only stringed instruments, but there were several expert flutists whose music nicely caught the mood of the moment, while the wind sang with them along the river and the moon soared high into a carefree night.

  Wagon

  Rather late, four or five privy gentlemen arrived. They had been on duty in the privy chamber, and when there was music His Majesty had remarked, “It is the sixth today, and the seclusion at the palace is supposed to be over. I was sure that he would be here. What is he doing?” When he learned where Genji was, he had a message taken to him by the Controller Chamberlain:

  “Since that place of yours lies far across the river and boasts a bright moon,

  no doubt the katsura tree feels there perfectly at home.28

  I envy you.” Genji expressed his apology. The company rose to new heights of intoxication, inspired by music that in this setting surpassed in majesty the concert at the palace.

  Having no reward for the messenger, Genji sent to Ōi for something not too ostentatious. He was brought what had come to hand. It arrived in two clothing chests, and he placed a woman's robe across the shoulders of the Chamberlain, who was obliged to go straight back. He also entrusted him with his reply:

  “It is just the name that suggests proximity to that glorious light,

  for in this mountain village mists hang heavy, dawn and dusk.”

  He probably meant that he hoped for an imperial visit.

  He no doubt shed tears of drunken elation as he hummed “grows in the heavens,”29 remembering the island of Awaji and how Mitsune suggested that “it must be the setting.”30

  “So the months have turned, and there, aloft in the sky, close enough to touch,

  shines the moon that I saw then, veiled, above Awaji Isle!”31

  The Secretary Captain added,

  “The moon's brilliant light that misfortune veiled awhile with such dreary clouds

  now at last shines forth again, and the world can be at peace.”32

  The Left Grand Controller, a little older than the rest, had served His Late Eminence intimately:

  “The full midnight moon has forsaken his proud dwelling far above the clouds,

  in what dark, distant valley forever to hide his light?”33

  There were many others, in varied moods, but all that is too much of a bother. One would have liked to spend a thousand years watching Genji and listening to his quiet, informal, and somewhat rambling conversation—one's ax handle might well have rotted away—but Genji had promised himself not to do it again today, and he hurried home. He laid a robe across the shoulders of each in consonance with his rank, and their colors amid the flowers of the garden made a very pretty picture indeed. Some well-known members of the Gate Watch, men adept at dancing and music, felt the need to add a further touch by performing a lively ‘That Horse of Mine,”34 and to reward them the gentlemen slipped off robes that lay on their shoulders like autumn brocade spread by the wind. Such was the uproar of Genji's departure that news of it traveled all the way to Ōi,35 where the lady was silently overcome by sorrow. Genji regretted not being able to send her a word.

  He rested a little on returning home and then told his lady there about Ōi. “I regret having stayed so much longer than I said I would. Those dashing young men of mine came after me and made it impossible for me to leave. I do not feel at all well this morning either.” He went to bed. He could tell she was angry with him as usual, but he paid no attention. “This will not do, you know,” he
admonished her. “In rank there is simply no comparison between the two of you. You are you, after all—remember that.” One easily imagines to whom he was writing at nightfall, turned aside from her that way, just before setting off for the palace. Furtive glances told her that his letter was long. Her gentlewomen did not like the way he whispered when he sent it off.

  He remained in attendance at the palace through the evening, too, but to appease her he withdrew late in the night.

  The answer to his letter came, and he read it without any attempt to hide it. “Destroy this, please,” he said, since there was nothing in it to upset her. “How difficult it all is! This is not the sort of thing I can afford to leave lying about anymore.” As he leaned on his armrest, his inmost heart went out longingly to the sender, and he gazed at the lamp in silence.

  There the letter lay, open, but his lady paid it no heed. “Those poor eyes of yours! They must be burning for a look!” He smiled, and his charm carried all before it. He moved toward her and went on, “Actually, now that I have seen the dear little thing, I understand how strong a tie I have with her, and I only wish there were less need for caution if she is to succeed. Please consider the matter yourself in that light and make up your mind. What are we to do? Do you think you could look after her here? She is just the Leech Child's age by now.36 Her very innocence makes her difficult simply to forget. I would like to put trousers on her, and I hope you will tie them for her, if you do not mind.”37