The Tale of Genji, Page 99

  Genji watched his graceful figure beneath the red plum blossoms and doubted that anyone else would enjoy them properly. They were only just beginning to open and were as pretty as they could be. There was no music this year, and many other things were different, too.

  The gentlewomen long in her service wore dark gray, and they mourned her too intensely ever to be consoled. Their only comfort was Genji's constant presence, since he never even went to call on the other ladies, and their own familiar attendance upon him. Those who had sometimes caught his eye, although without any great feeling of attachment on his part, he now merely treated like the rest, for he spent his dreary nights alone. When those on duty gathered around him, he had them keep well away from where he lay.

  To pass the time he would often discuss the past with them. Remembering from the depths of his present detachment how affairs he never thought would last, some amusing and others genuinely painful, had sometimes put her in a temper, he wondered why he had been so unkind, and he felt his heart burst with sorrow and regret at ever having upset her. In her wisdom she had seen through him perfectly well, but even so, she had never turned against him, although she worried each time about what might become of her. Sometimes the women who knew how things had been and who were still close to him touched lightly on the subject.

  She had betrayed no hint of her feelings even when Her Cloistered Highness first came, although he gathered sadly at certain moments how much she was hurt. The most vivid was that snowy dawn when he stood waiting, frozen, until the sky became threatening and she sweetly and warmly took him in, meanwhile hiding sleeves wet with tears and tactfully disguising the state she was in. He spent the night wondering, even while he dreamed, in what future life he would ever see her again. He felt as though he were reliving that moment when dawn came and he heard a gentlewoman on her way back to her room say, “Why, look at all the snow!” Her absence from beside him gave him unspeakable pain.

  “When I only long to melt from this sorry world as this snow will soon,

  how strange still to linger on once again to watch it fall!”

  He called for washing water and absorbed himself in his devotions, as he did so often to dispel such thoughts. The women revived the embers and offered him the brazier. Chūnagon and Chūjō3 stayed with him to talk.

  “Last night was lonelier than ever!” he said. “I should have seen through it all by now, but no, this life still holds me captive.” He stared absently into space, then glanced at them and imagined sadly how much more forlorn they would be if he abandoned them, too. His voice at his devotions, quietly chanting a sutra, could move anyone to weep, and those who were with him day and night and whose sleeves could not stay the flood of their tears4 of course felt boundless sorrow.

  “Very little in this life has really satisfied me, and despite my high birth I always think how much less fortunate my destiny has been than other people's. The Buddha must have wanted me to know that the world slips away from us and plays us false. I who long set myself to ignore this truth have suffered in the twilight of my life so awful and so final a blow that I have at last seen the extent of my failings, but while no attachment binds me any longer, it will be a fresh sorrow to leave you both behind, when I now know you so much better than before. Ties like ours are fragile. Oh, I know that I should not feel this way!” He wiped his eyes to hide his tears, but he failed, and they quickly spilled over; and of course the women watching him were still less able to keep themselves from weeping. Each wanted to tell him how much she hoped that he would never leave them, but speech failed them, and they could only sob.

  So it was that in the silence of dawn, after a night spent wakeful and sighing, or the quiet of dusk after a vacant day, he would often spend time in intimate conversation with these women, who seemed to him to be more than usually worthwhile. The one called Chūjō had been so close to him since girlhood that he cannot have failed secretly to enjoy her, and that is probably why she had kept warily away from him; but after Lady Murasaki died, he remembered how particularly she had liked her and so became fond of her himself, although not like that, but only because she reminded him of her. Chūjō's looks and disposition recalled a young pine,5 and under the circumstances he thought her cleverer than he might have otherwise.

  He met no one to whom he was not already close. Senior nobles he knew well, or the Princes his brothers, came calling often, but he seldom received them; for he said to himself, I may do my best to maintain some composure while I am with other people, but I have been confused for months, and I must be eccentric in some ways. They would make too much of it later on, and I do not want that. I suppose that it comes to the same thing if people are saying I am too distraught to see anyone, but it would still be much worse to show off my peculiarities than to have them merely gossiped about and imagined. He spoke even to the Commander only through blinds. Nevertheless, he contained himself; he would not hurry even now, when people might well be telling each other that he was no longer the man he had been. He could not yet turn his back on the sorrows of this world. A brief, rare visit to one of his ladies would call forth a rain of tears too copious for him to bear, and he let days go by without sending either6 a word.

  Her Majesty returned to the palace, leaving the Third Prince to give Genji what consolation he could. The little boy looked very carefully after the red plum that stood before the wing.7 “Grandma told me to,” he said. Genji thought it extremely touching. In the second month, when mist prettily veiled the trees in flower and others yet to bloom, a warbler appeared in that favorite red plum tree, singing splendidly, and Genji went to watch it.

  “How the warbler sings, just as though nothing had changed, there among the flowers,

  in the tree she planted then, even when she is no more,”

  he repeated as he went.

  The further the season advanced into spring, the more her garden looked just as it had then,8 but this gave him no pleasure; on the contrary, it was troubling, and so many things tugged painfully at his heart that he longed only for mountains as remote as another world, where no bird would ever sing.9 The kerria roses blooming in merry profusion only called to his eyes a sudden rush of dew.

  Elsewhere the single-petaled cherry blossoms fell, the doubles faded, mountain cherries bloomed, and the wisteria colored, but she had known precisely which flowers blossom early and which late, and she had planted them accordingly for their many colors, so that in her garden they all yielded their richest beauty in their time.

  “There are flowers on my cherry tree! I will not let them fall, ever! We must put up a curtain all round them—that way the wind will not get at them!” the little Prince announced very proudly.

  The sweet look on his face made Genji smile. “That is a much better idea than trying to find someone with sleeves wide enough to cover the sky,”10 he said. His Highness was really his only pleasure.

  “I do not have much longer with you,” he said, and, as so often, tears came to his eyes. “Life may go on for me a little after that, but I shall not be able to see you anymore.”

  His Highness did not like this at all. “Grandma said things like that. It is bad luck to talk that way.” He looked down and toyed with his sleeves to hide his tears.

  Genji leaned against the railing outside the corner room11 and gazed sadly now out into the garden, now back through the blinds. Some of the women still wore a gray that acknowledged their loss, while others had on common colors, although their damasks had nothing bright about them. Genji himself wore a dress cloak ordinary in color but intentionally plain and discreet. The room was furnished very simply indeed, and it felt sadly quiet and empty.

  “Now the time has come, must I consign to ruin what she who is gone

  specially loved with all her heart, her hedge bright with spring flowers?”

  His own decision filled him with sorrow.

  To pass the time he went to call on Her Cloistered Highness. A nurse carried the Third Prince there with him, and
he ran about with Her Highness's little boy just like the child he was; his fear for the blossoms had not run very deep. Her Highness was chanting a scripture before the altar. There was nothing profound about her spiritual aspiration, but bitterness toward the world never troubled her, and she pursued her devotions in undistracted peace. Genji envied her her steadfast detachment and deplored his own failure to match the piety of so shallow a woman.

  The flowers on the holy-water shelf handsomely caught the light of the setting sun. “Flowers hardly move me anymore, now that she who so loved spring is no longer here, but they look pleasant when offered to the Buddha,” he remarked. And he went on, “Still, I have never seen anything like the kerria roses before her wing— the flower clusters are so big! They obviously do not pretend to good manners, but their richness and exuberance are simply delightful! It is sad, though, how they seem not to know that this spring the lady who planted them is no more—they are only flowering more magnificently than ever.”

  “‘A valley far removed from spring,’”12 she replied, meaning nothing in particular by it.

  Genji was annoyed. She could have thought of something else! Nothing she ever said or did made me wish it otherwise, even in little things like this! He thought back over what she had been like since childhood: no, he could think of nothing, nothing at all. Instead he found himself dwelling on countless moments that confirmed her wit, wisdom, and charm, and on all sorts of things that she had said and done, until his weakness for tears overcame him, and he suddenly wept.

  The twilight was so pretty, through the mists that veiled the distances, that he went straight to visit the lady from Akashi. She was not expecting him, since he had hardly looked in on her for ages, and his arrival was therefore a surprise, but when she received him with perfect composure and grace, he saw how remarkable she still was. No, he thought (the comparison made itself for him), she was different, she had another range of gifts and accomplishments; and longing for her made him so sad that he hardly knew how to seek consolation.

  He lingered there quietly to talk over the past. “I grasped long ago that it is not at all a good idea to set one's heart too fondly on anyone,” he said, “and on the whole I have done what I could to avoid attachment to anything in this world; in fact, thinking things over during those years when people assumed that I was destined for oblivion made me realize that nothing really prevented me from giving my life to wander the farthest mountains and plains. In the end, though, even now when my own time is coming, I am still caught up in ties that I should properly shun. It is maddening to be so fainthearted!”

  He did not complain that all his sorrow had a single cause, but she understood with a pang how he felt, and she sympathized. “I have the impression that even someone whom one easily imagines regretting nothing is still restrained at heart by many, many ties,” she said, “and I certainly do not see how you of all people could renounce the world that quickly. A step taken that way, on impulse, will only provoke blame for being ill considered and turn out to be a mistake after all, so that your slowness to make up your mind seems to me to promise deeper peace in the end. Past example suggests that it is not a good idea to act on disenchantment due merely to disappointment or shock. You will be happier and feel easier in your mind if you continue as you are now until you have seen Their Highnesses grow up and reach a position beyond any challenge.”13 She looked very handsome as she offered her sage advice.

  “But such an abyss of circumspection would be even less commendable than shallow haste,” he replied, and he went on to talk of things that had long been on his mind. “That spring when Her Cloistered Eminence passed away, I really did wish the blossoms would be kind.14 She was so admirable, you know, as everyone acknowledged, and having known her since I was a boy, I felt her loss more keenly than most; not that I mourned her for anything more than quite general reasons. If she, too, still means more to me than I can forget after so many years, it is not just that I miss what she was to me later on. I brought her up from childhood, after all, and we aged together, and now that she has left me, I can hardly bear the sorrow of remembering it all and of endlessly recalling what she and I were to each other. Everything about her that moved me, or impressed me, or gave me pleasure, comes back in an overwhelming flood of memories.” After talking over things old and new with her late into the night, he felt as though he should stay on until morning, but he went back anyway to the southeast quarter, which must have moved and saddened her. Even he was astonished to find himself so disposed.

  He returned to his devotions, and it was only in the middle of the night that he lay down to rest a little in his day sitting room. Early the next morning he sent her a letter, and with it,

  “Crying as geese cry, I made my way home again in a fleeting world

  where no creature ever finds a last haven beyond time.”15

  He had hurt her the evening before, but she felt sorry for him, too, for she had never seen him looking so lost. She therefore set her own feelings aside, and tears came to her eyes.

  “The geese once haunted waters around seedling rice that now are all gone,

  and ever since, the flower reflected there comes no more.”16

  The unfailing excellence of her writing made him think of the way the two had come in the end, despite her initial objections, to respect each another and to acknowledge a mutual trust—not that that meant they had ever been close, since she always treated the lady from Akashi with a fine formality hardly noticed by anyone else. Sometimes, when he was feeling particularly lonely, he would look in on her this way just to talk. Nothing of what he had once been to her remained.

  From the lady of summer there came clothes for the new season, with a poem:

  “Summer clothes today: and with the new season's change there will come, I know,

  a tide of old memories to sweep all else from your thoughts.”

  He answered,

  “Today, with the change to clothing gossamer thin and feathery light,

  I lament this life the more, this flimsy cicada shell.”

  “I expect that everyone is looking forward to enjoying the sights today,” he remarked on the day of the Festival,17 imagining the shrine. “You women must hate the thought of missing it all. Go home quietly, then, and see what there is to see.”

  Chūjō had fallen asleep a moment on the east side of the house, and Genji went to look at her. She got straight up, very dainty and pretty and the way her slightly disordered hair fell over her bright, flushed face was quite enchanting. She had on trousers of a scarlet veering toward yellow and a leaf gold shift under dark, dark gray and black,18 of which lay untidily one layer over another; and she had slipped off a train and Chinese jacket that she now attempted to put back on again. Beside her she had laid a sprig of heart-to-heart.

  Woman's train

  Genji picked it up. “What is this called?” he asked. “Why, I have forgotten its name!”19

  “So it may well be that waterweeds choke a bank once nobly favored,

  but the leaf I sport today—you forget even its name!”20

  she answered bashfully.

  He took her point and was sorry.

  “In most things by now I have given up the world and its temptations,

  but I shall perhaps today wickedly pick heart-to-heart!”21

  He seemed not to have rejected her, at least.

  The long rains of the fifth month left him with less and less to do all day, save for vacant dreaming, but the Commander came to wait upon him a few days past the tenth, when the moon at last shone brilliantly from among the clouds. Entranced by the scent of an orange tree that stood out sharply in the moonlight, Genji was just waiting for the cuckoo to sing his song of a thousand years22 when startling clouds appeared, accompanied by a violent shower and howling wind that blew the lanterns about. The sky seemed to go black. Genji hummed “The pattering of rain on the window” and other well-worn lines23 in a voice that his visitor would gladly have had ring out “at
my darling's hedge.”24

  “There is nothing all that strange about living by yourself, except that you get so lonely,” Genji remarked. “If you mean to live far off in the mountains, I am sure you really can find peace there if you accustom yourself to it as I am doing.”

  “Here, you women, bring us some refreshments!” he called. “I suppose it would be making too much of a fuss to send for the men.”25

  The Commander could see perfectly well that at heart his father was only gazing aloft to the heavens,26 and he felt extremely sorry for him. How can his devotions possibly bring him peace if he can think of nothing else? he wondered. I can hardly blame him, though—even I can never forget that glimpse of her. “It feels as though it was only yesterday, but I suppose the mourning will be over soon,” he said. “May I ask what you have decided to do?”

  “Nothing unusual—what good would it do? There is the Paradise Mandala27 she had made, and it is time now to dedicate it. There are lots of scriptures, too; she told His Reverence all about what they are for.28 As for anything else that may need to be added, I plan to do as His Reverence suggests.”

  “I am very glad for her sake that she always took such an interest in these things, but she seems to me to have been destined for only a brief passage through this life, and it is a great pity that she did not even have any children.”

  “But others who have lived longer are still, in that respect, almost the same. For that I blame myself. I trust that you are the one who will bring increase to our line.” Genji was too wary of his own feeble susceptibility to touch very much on the past. Just then the cuckoo he had been expecting gave a single, distant cry, at which he murmured with deep feeling,” ‘How did you know?’29