The Tale of Genji, Page 84

  He swore great oaths, and despite her continued protests that she would have none of it, this not especially deep young woman could not resist his headlong zeal. “I will do what I can if an opportunity arises,” she said. “There are many women around her curtained bed on the nights when His Grace is away, and the responsible ones are always in attendance nearby. I have no idea when I might find a chance like that.” She returned to her mistress sorely perplexed.

  Day after day he hounded her, until she let him know that she had found the moment. Overjoyed though he was, he arrived in deep disguise.86 In truth, he himself knew all too well how outrageously he was behaving, and it never occurred to him that being near Her Highness might only drive him further out of his senses; he just hoped that he might catch a somewhat closer look at the figure he had never forgotten since that spring evening when he first glimpsed the skirts of her robe, and that once he had opened his heart to her, she might vouchsafe him a line in reply and pity him.

  The tenth of the fourth month had just passed. The Purification was the next day, and the twelve gentlewomen who were to attend the Priestess, as well as the more junior women and page girls, were all busy sewing and making themselves up for their outing. There were few women about, and Her Highness's rooms were quiet. Azechi, who served her intimately, had been called away urgently by a frequent visitor, the Minamoto Captain,87 and in her absence Her Highness had only Kojijū with her. Kojijū saw her chance and quietly seated the Intendant just inside the curtained bed, on the east side. Did she really have to let him in that far?88

  Her Highness had innocently retired to sleep when she detected a man nearby and assumed that it was Genji, but then the man lifted her deferentially down from the bed, and she felt oppressed as though by a bad dream. At last she peered up at him and saw that he was someone else; and he was talking to her, telling her things that made no sense! She called out in shock and fright, but nobody came because there was no one nearby to hear. Shaking and distraught, and with perspiration running from her like water, she seemed to him very sweet and dear.

  “I know that I do not matter,” he said, “but surely this is not what I deserve from you. Years ago I began to entertain an impudent wish that I might have smothered once and for all if I had confined it in my heart, but I gave it voice, and His Eminence heard of it and did not strongly disapprove, which at last gave me hope. Alas, my particular insignificance then frustrated a devotion deeper than any man's, and while I know that it is now too late, that thought must have truly possessed me, for as the months and years go by, I burst with more regret, bitterness, fear, and love than I can possibly contain; which is why I have now presumed to come before you, despite the shame my unkindness brings upon me. I would never dream of further compounding my crime.”

  As he talked, she realized who he must be, and she was too shocked and afraid to answer a word.

  “I quite understand, of course,” he went on, trying every means to persuade her, “but it is not as though this sort of thing has never happened before, and if it is your wish to be so astonishingly cruel, then I shall be very deeply hurt, and blind passion may master me after all. Just tell me you pity me, and I shall obey you and leave.”

  Having imagined her haughty from a distance and forbidding in intimacy, he had resolved merely to hint at his torment and to try nothing more daring, but when he discovered less lofty pride than a sweet, nobly yielding and captivating charm, he took her to be unique among women. Every thought of wise self-restraint vanished, and he longed in confusion only to carry her off into hiding somewhere, anywhere, so as to vanish forever from life in the world.

  Upon dozing off a moment he dreamed that the cat he had made into such a pet came to him, mewing sweetly, and that he brought it to Her Highness as a gift. He awoke wondering why and perplexed about what his dream meant.

  For Her Highness the shock had banished all sense of reality, and she remained stricken and mute. “You must simply accept this as your destiny,” he said, “one you could not evade. I do not feel as though it can be real either.” He told her about that evening when, unknown to her, the cat had lifted a corner of the blind with its cord. She understood with bitter regret that it must really have happened, and she lamented her awful fate. How could she ever appear again before His Grace? She wept like a girl in misery and dread, and while he watched her, both guilty and fond, his already dewy sleeves grew wetter still from wiping away her tears as well.

  Dawn was breaking, but he could not yet summon the will to leave. “What am I to do? Your rejection leaves me wondering how I shall ever be able to address you again. Please give me just a word in your own voice!” He tormented her with his pleading, but she was too repelled and distressed to speak at all.

  “Very well, my only sentiment now is consternation. Surely no one has ever been treated this way before!” He was quivering with resentment. “It is useless, then, is it not? I might as well just die. This was all I had lived for. To think that tonight will have been my last! Just grant me a word of forgiveness, and I shall at least meet my end in peace!” He took her in his arms and carried her out. She was terrified to imagine what he was doing.

  He opened out a screen in the aisle corner,89 opened the double doors, and found that the door on the south side of the bridgeway (the one through which he had stolen the evening before) was still open. He therefore lifted the lattice shutter gently in the hope of catching a faint look at her, for it must still have been only first light. “Your extraordinary cruelty is driving me out of my senses! If you have any wish to calm me, tell me at least that you pity me!” he railed; and she did want to speak, for she was outraged, except that she was trembling like a little girl.

  Daylight grew, and his anxiety with it. “I had a moving dream, and I would tell you about it if you did not hate me so. You may soon know what I mean, though.” He set forth apprehensively into the half-light of dawn, beneath a sky more poignant than any in autumn.

  “I rise and go forth by the first, dim light of dawn, under unknown skies,

  and I find my sleeves are wet with dews from I know not where,”

  he said, holding forth a sleeve to confirm his complaint.

  Now that he was going, she felt sufficiently better to reply,

  “In my misery, O that I might melt away into the dawn sky

  and believe forever more that it was only a dream!”

  He went away feeling as though she were still speaking in that sweet voice of hers, so young and frail, and that his spirit had left his body and stayed behind to listen.

  Instead of returning to the Princess his wife, he went to his father's residence, where he lay down; but his eyelids would not close. He reflected how unlikely it was that his dream should be true, and he dwelled fondly in memory on the image of the cat. I have done a terrible thing! he told himself in fear and shame. I can no longer face the world. In this spirit he ceased going out at all. What his abominable conduct might mean for himself seriously alarmed him, quite apart from the possible consequences for Her Highness, and he simply could not mingle with other people as he might otherwise have wished to do. He would have faced death willingly enough if he had violated an Emperor's woman and the thing had then come to light and cost him such agony as this, and even if his present crime was not quite that grave, dread and shame overcame him at the thought that His Grace might look at him askance.

  There are great ladies with some experience of life, flawless on the surface yet childishly bent underneath on having their way, who yield to one blandishment or another and indulge in intimacy with other men; but there were no such depths to Her Highness. Desperately timid by nature, she felt the same burning shame as if the news were already abroad, and she could not bear to go out into the light of day. She certainly grasped the bitterness of her fate.

  Word that she was not well reached Genji, who came to her wondering what new misfortune might have joined the one that already absorbed him. It was hard to tell what was the matter,
but she was extremely reticent and downcast, and she refused properly to meet his gaze, which he sadly attributed to pique over his long absence.

  He told her how that other lady was. “This may well be the end. I simply cannot neglect her now, you know—it is too difficult for me to leave her, when I have looked after her ever since she was a girl. That is why these past months I have ignored everything else. I hope that once all this is over, you will look at me with other eyes.” Secretly Her Highness could have wept with sorrow and pain when she understood that he knew nothing about what had happened.

  The Intendant felt more and more convinced that he had erred, and he lapsed into a despair that pervaded his whole life, day and night. On the day of the Festival, senior nobles eager to see it came to try to persuade him to join them, but he said that he was not feeling well and lay down in a dark mood. He seldom spent any intimate time with the Princess,90 although he continued to treat her with respect; instead he withdrew to his own room, where he gave himself up to tedium, despondency, and gloom. The sight of heart-to-heart in a page girl's hand inspired this thought:

  “Ah, how bitterly I now rue my wickedness, picking heart-to-heart

  when the gods gave me no leave to sport such an ornament.”91

  Yes, he regretted his folly. The noise of all the carriages outside meant nothing to him, and the endless day dragged on through a monotony of his own creation.

  The Princess was hurt and ashamed when she noted his dreary behavior, and she, too, became downcast. Quiet reigned around her, since her gentlewomen had all gone off to watch the Festival. In an abstracted mood she toyed gently with her sō no koto, displaying as she did so a worthily noble grace, but her husband still lamented that as long as he was to have a Princess, he had been destined to fall short of getting the one he desired.

  “O wreath of twinned green, what possessed me to pick up just the fallen leaf,

  though in name it seemed to be as welcome as the other?”92

  he idly wrote, and a thoroughly discourteous remark it was.

  Genji, who now visited Her Highness so rarely, could hardly leave again straightaway, and he was already anxious when a messenger came to announce that the lady at Nijō had breathed her last. Stunned, he went to her with darkness in his heart. The journey was maddeningly slow, and he found that there was indeed an agitated crowd all around the residence and out to the nearby avenue. The weeping and wailing within were repellent in the extreme. He entered, distraught. “My lady seemed a little better lately,” they told him, “and then, my lord, suddenly, here she is like this!” Every woman attending her was crying out in a frenzy of grief that she would go with her. The altars for the Great Rite had been taken down, and when he saw the priests busily clattering about— although the ones still needed93 remained—he realized with a horror beyond words that this must really be the end.

  Healer

  “But surely there is a spirit at work here,” he said to calm them. “Please make less noise!” To these words he added more and more ardent prayers and then summoned all the most successful healers. “Her life may well have reached its term, but I still ask you to lengthen it a little,” he told them. “There is the vow of Lord Fudō.94 You must keep her in this world at least that long.”

  They prayed with mighty courage until black smoke really did rise above their heads.95 Oh, just look at me one more time! he silently begged. It is too sad, too awful that I was not even with you at the end! One easily imagines the feelings of those watching, for they doubted that he would survive her. Perhaps the Buddha responded to his intense grief, because the spirit, which had refused for months to declare itself, now moved into a little girl in whom it screamed and raged, while his love began at last to breathe again. He was overcome with happiness and dread.

  Once severely confined, the spirit spoke. “Leave, all of you. I wish to speak to His Grace alone,” it said.

  “For months you have cruelly chastised me and caused me such pain that I had thought I might teach you a proper lesson, but even now, when I have assumed this shocking form, the sight of you broken by a grief that may cost you your life has quickened feelings from long ago and brought me to you here. No, I could not ignore your suffering, and that is why I have appeared to you. I never meant you actually to know me.”

  The weeping figure with her hair over her face looked like the spirit he had seen that other time.96 Shuddering with the same fear and amazement, he took the girl's hands and held her down lest she embarrass him. “Is it really you? They say evil foxes and so on, bent on mischief, sometimes blurt out things to bring shame on the dead. Say clearly who you are, or else tell me something to make it obvious, something no one else could know! Then I will believe you, at least a little.”

  The spirit sobbed loudly.

  “Yes, as I am now, my form is one new and strange, but plainly the while

  you are still just the same you, who always refuse to know.

  I hate you, oh, I hate you!” Her air of proud reserve had not changed at all, despite her weeping and wailing, and it filled him with such fear and loathing that he wanted only to silence her.

  “I kept my eye on you from on high, and what you did for Her Majesty made me pleased and grateful, but perhaps I do not care that much about my daughter now that she and I inhabit different realms, because that bitterness of mine, which made you hateful to me, remains. What I find particularly offensive, more so even than your spurning me for others when I was among the living, is that in conversation with one for whom you do care you callously made me out to be a disagreeable woman. I had hoped, as I did then, that you might at least be forgiving toward the dead and come to my defense when others maligned me; and that is why, since I have this shocking appearance, things have come to this at last. I have little enough against this woman, but you are strongly guarded. I feel far away and cannot approach you, and even your voice reaches me only faintly. Very well, do now what must be done to ensure that my sins are lifted. These rites and these noisy scripture readings only surround me with searing flame, and I hear nothing holy in them. That is my torment. Please let Her Majesty know what I have told you. As long as she serves His Majesty, may she never indulge in jealous rivalry with other women. Make sure that she acquires the merit to lighten the sin of the time she spent as Ise Priestess.97 I so wish that she had never done it!” She went on at length, but Genji, who detested conversing with a spirit, shut her away98 and quietly moved his love elsewhere.

  So it was that the news of her death filled all the world, and he was repelled to find people arriving to offer their condolences. One senior noble who had gone to watch the Kamo Priestess's return99 immediately remarked on his way back, upon learning what had happened, “This is a very great loss! No wonder a gentle rain is falling today, when a most happy and fortunate lady has seen the light of day for the last time!”

  “No one as perfect in all ways as she was ever lives long,” another whispered. “There is that old poem after all, ‘Why prefer cherry blossoms?’100 The longer someone like that lives, enjoying all the pleasures that life has to offer, the more other people find existence a burden. Now Her Highness the Third Princess can regain the honor she deserves.”

  Getting through the day before had been too painful, and today the Intendant put his younger brothers, the Left Grand Controller and the Fujiwara Consultant, in the back of his carriage and went to see the Priestess's return. His heart stopped when he heard what they were talking about. “What in this sad world ever lasts long?”101 he hummed to himself, accompanying the others to call on His Grace. Preferring caution, since the news was no more than a rumor, he went only to inquire after the lady's health, but he knew that it was true when he found everyone weeping and wailing, and he mourned her in his turn.

  His Highness of Ceremonial arrived as well and entered, utterly distraught; he could not possibly have conveyed messages from other people. The Commander then emerged, wiping his eyes, and the Intendant begged him to tell him wh
at had happened. “People are talking about a great misfortune, but it is so difficult to believe!” he said. “I really came only to offer sympathy that her ladyship has been ill so long.”

  “Her condition has been serious for months, and this morning at dawn her breathing stopped,” the Commander replied. “A spirit has been at work, you see. I gather that she has at last begun breathing again, and they are all feeling better now, but there is no reason yet to be optimistic. I feel so sorry for her!” He had clearly been weeping copiously, and his eyes were a little swollen. The Intendant noted with surprise, perhaps because of his own heart's strange vagaries, how taken his friend seemed to be with this stepmother to whom he had never even been close.

  Genji heard that the Intendant and the others had arrived. “She was very, very ill,” he said, “and it seemed as though the end had come. The distraught women were carrying on so loudly that I myself was caught up in the confusion and despair. I shall find a suitable occasion later on to thank you all for your kind visit.” The Intendant's heart failed him, for he would never have come if the occasion had not obliged him to do so, and his guilty conscience made him feel acutely ashamed.

  Genji remained sufficiently fearful, even after her breathing resumed, to redouble his commissions for the most solemn rites. To think that someone frightening enough already when she was alive had now assumed so appalling a guise in another world! For the time being he shrank in revulsion from tending Her Majesty and concluded, in short, that all women are a source of dire sin; every dealing with them was hateful. Why, the spirit spoke of things I said in an intimate conversation no one else could hear! He remembered that with horror. Yes, it was she!