THE OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY defines “apocrypha” as works “of unknown authorship; not authentic, spurious; uncanonical; false.” One or more of these descriptions would fit each of the texts in this chapter, but none of them is “apocryphal” in quite the same way as any of the others. “Sakurahito” and “Sumori” are the surviving fragments of chapters that were considered authentic by late-Heian editors of Genji; they may even have been written by Murasaki Shikibu, but were later rejected as noncanonical. “Yamaji no tsuyu” is a spurious “last chapter” of unknown authorship, but is not without an air of authenticity. The six “Kumogakure rokujō” are blatantly false. And “Tamakura” is an academic exercise in neoclassical composition by an eighteenth-century author who made no attempt to conceal either the nature of his project or his own identity. In short, these “apocrypha” constitute a diverse body of texts, written over a span of about seven centuries. What they share with one another, however, apart from their apocryphal character, is a direct relationship to the early textual evolution of Genji, the end product of which was the fifty-four-chapter Genji that we know today. To better understand the Genji apocrypha, therefore, we must first consider how the canonical Genji came into being.
The Genji that we read today is not the Genji that its earliest readers read. At the outset, there would have been only a few independent tales about a young nobleman, the Shining Genji, probably commissioned individually by wealthy courtiers for the amusement of their daughters (not to mention themselves). The price of paper was such that even the shortest chapter could not have been written without a substantial subsidy to cover the cost of materials.1 As the number of these stories grew, so did the reputation of their author. As a result, she was taken into the service of Empress Shōshi and commissioned to compile a volume of these stories for presentation to the Ichijō Emperor in 1008. But this first Tale of Genji, a luxurious edition the compilation of which Murasaki Shikibu describes in her diary, would probably have been no more than half the length of the present Genji. Thereafter, the text continued to grow, by both accretion and emendation, for about two hundred years before consensus coalesced and the fifty-four-chapter Genji became the canonical Genji.
In the meantime, even as the text was expanding, readers who had access to it were copying it. Genji’s famous discussion of the merits and demerits of fictions in the “Hotaru” chapter is set in the midst of a scene describing this activity in considerable detail. Elsewhere in the capital, in the palace of Princess Senshi, the High Priestess of Kamo, the copying of literary texts was an ongoing activity of such magnitude that the ladies of this court were organized, pseudo-officially, into two “bureaus,” one led by a director and a deputy director of poetry (Uta no Kami and Suke) and the other by a director and a deputy director of romances (Monogatari no Kami and Suke). Small wonder that a legend of later years claimed that the High Priestess, through her friend Empress Shōshi, had commissioned Murasaki to write Genji.
One by-product of all this copying was that the text soon found its way out of the palaces, to circulate among the lesser ranks of the aristocracy. In the palace of the High Priestess, for example, “When Her Highness commanded that fresh copies of the romances be made and the old texts were distributed among the members of the bureau, the Director of Romances sent some to Minbu’s place.” From her reply, we know that Minbu was a gentlewoman, probably of a middle-ranking aristocratic family, who had served the High Priestess, perhaps as a member of the Bureau of Romances. Other recipients of worn copies may well have passed some of them on to their relatives living at home. Even more explicit is the Sarashina diarist’s description of her experience after returning from the provinces in 1020. When her mother wrote to relatives to tell them of their arrival in the capital, one of them, Emon no Myōbu, a gentlewoman in service at the palace of the Sanjō Princess,2 “sent us some lovely booklets that the Princess had given her, all packed in the lid of a writing box.” A little later, an aunt “gave me the fifty-odd volumes of Genji, all in their own box, and Zai Chūjō, Tōgimi, Serikawa, Shirara, and Asauzu as well.”3
Needless to say, the travels of these hand-me-down texts did not end in their new homes. Some of them would simply have been passed on, but many were lent to friends and relatives to be recopied, in a process that was repeated endlessly—copies producing copies producing copies—until the advent of commercial printing centuries later. But copied how? In the first place, errors crept in. But scribal errors were by no means the principal cause of textual variation. Many of the discrepancies probably were intentional. Every copyist had his or her own idea of what made good grammar, a good sentence, or even a good story. If one felt that the poem Utsusemi traces in the corner of Genji’s letter is too abrupt an ending to the chapter, then one could add, “She wrote and let it go at that” (tote yaminikeri, 1:106.10). Or if he considered it excessive to have the Kiritsubo Emperor recall his lost love as “adorable and lovely, more pliant than a maiden flower bending in the wind, her looks and the very aura about her more lovely and adorable than a pink moistened with dew,” then one might, as one editor did, pare that down to “he recalled how adorable and lovely she was” (1:17.7–9).4
Nor was copying the only process through which a text might evolve into something quite different from its original form. The Genji scholar Inaga Keiji (1928–2001) describes how illustrated fictions of the sort depicted in the Genji monogatari emaki (mid-twelfth century) were particularly susceptible to textual metamorphosis. Because these “special editions” were meant to be read aloud while the listeners looked at the pictures illustrating the text, individual “copies” of them probably were made up of three separate components: the text of the tale itself, a set of pictures illustrating the text, and a companion volume of what might be called captions, which the reader would use to explain the details of the pictures and how they relate to the text. Repeated use, however, would eventually render these captions unnecessary to both readers and listeners. The volume containing the captions might then be dismantled and the captions combined with the text of the tale to form a new volume that would be used for reading without the pictures—quite literally a cut-and-paste editing process.5
In an age when concepts of authorial integrity were, to say the least, highly amorphous, practices of this sort could be carried to considerable extremes. We know, for example, of at least two romances, Torikaebaya and Sumiyoshi monogatari, that were so drastically rewritten that they came to be called by separate titles to distinguish the originals from the revisions. And Inaga is convinced that The Tale of the Hollow Tree (Utsuho monogatari) as we now have it is an amalgam of the textual components of a once-illustrated version and that many other Heian tales may have similar origins. Nor was The Tale of Genji immune to such interventions. References abound to “the sixty chapters of Genji,”6 and, indeed, the number of chapter titles listed in various catalogs totals nearly seventy. None of the texts of these chapters survives, and some titles may refer to chapters better known by other titles. Still, a sixty-chapter Genji was by no means an impossibility. Some of Murasaki’s readers probably made not only minor amendments to their copies; they thought of themselves as her co-authors, and in that capacity they developed the story in new ways and filled in what they perceived as lacunae. In some cases, they went so far as to write whole new chapters. Thus in the second century of its life, The Tale of Genji circulated in several variant versions, some much longer than others and some markedly different from others.
During this same span of two hundred years, currents of history in the larger world of Genji readers brought changes that checked these expansive tendencies in the textual development of Genji. As warriors married into aristocratic families and usurped the court titles, functions, and emoluments that were formerly the birthright of court aristocrats, these losses affected not only the social standing but also the economic well-being of the aristocrats. In compensation, their expertise in one or another of the leisure pursuits with which they amused themselves came to be regarded as a source not simply of personal pride but of economic sustenance in the form of patronage. The ability to compose poetry, once considered merely an instrument of dalliance,7 would become the focus of such intense practice that it came to be regarded as a “Way,” and the study of the canon of classics on which all poetry must be based became virtually a profession. Eventually (though not at first), that canon came to include The Tale of Genji.
As we have seen in chapter 3, the defining moment in this process is generally thought to be Fujiwara no Shunzei’s pronouncement in 1190 that “to compose poetry without reading Genji is simply inexcusable.”8 Such an attitude made it a matter of high priority to establish a definitive text. By this time, many aristocratic houses possessed at least one Genji text, and every one of these texts differed from every other, some of them considerably so, not only in lexical detail, but also in the number and ordering of chapters. There never was, and never will be, a single text that could be designated “the” Genji; there were only multiple Genjis. Some of these texts, however, had descended in lineages thought to trace back more closely than others to Murasaki’s original. One, attributed to the renowned calligrapher Fujiwara no Yukinari (972–1027), a contemporary of Murasaki Shikibu, understandably carried particular authority, as did those of Yukinari’s grandson (the Nijō no Sotsu Korefusa text), Michinaga’s grandson (the Horikawa Sadaijin Toshifusa text), and the great-great-grandson of Murasaki Shikibu’s husband (the Reizei Chūnagon Asataka text), to name but a few.9 But none of these manuscripts, however authoritative, could stand alone as the definitive Genji. Murasaki herself had put at least two versions of the text into circulation, her draft and her revised fair copy. In addition, all texts were subject to the myriad pitfalls of the reproduction process. Thus we encounter mentions of texts riddled with errors; scholarly-minded editors reading variant manuscripts together in order to correct errors in punctuation, voicing, and kanji glosses; repeated collations of texts, comparing eight or even twenty-one different manuscripts; and interlinear and marginal notes from borrowed manuscripts being gathered in booklets.
Unfortunately, too little documentary evidence survives to sketch even the broad outlines of all this activity, much less identify its participants and date their work. The tumultuous times that had set in motion so many of these acts of canonization were not kind to their fragile paper products. The culmination of the process, however, was the production of two carefully collated texts, the descendants of which form the basis of all standard modern editions of Genji. The Aobyōshi-bon (Text in Blue Covers), completed in 1225, was the work of Fujiwara no Shunzei and his son Teika, two court nobles of the Mikohidari house known for their learning, their expertise as poets, and their judgment of literary excellence. The Kawachi-bon is so called because both of its principal compilers had once held the title of governor of Kawachi. It was completed in 1255 by Minamoto no Mitsuyuki and his son Chikayuki, members of a warrior house that had had a dangerous habit of choosing the wrong side in power struggles,10 thus ensuring themselves, as long as they managed to stay alive, ample time for literary pursuits. The two families cooperated closely over a span of more than fifty years, sharing manuscripts with each other, consulting on philological problems, and making fair copies of texts for each other. Thereafter, their descendants carried on the work, expanding the notebooks their forebears had filled with marginal notes gleaned from the manuscripts they had collated into the massive commentaries of subsequent centuries.11
Such, then, is the context in which the Genji apocrypha must be situated. The apocryphal texts collected in this chapter are presented not in the order of their composition, since the dates of their creation are impossible to ascertain, but in the order in which they would appear if they were canonical chapters of The Tale of Genji.
T. HARPER
(Tamakura)
“Pillowed upon His Arm” is the most recent of the Genji apocrypha, written by Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801) after his return from medical studies in Kyoto, probably in the latter 1750s while he was giving his first series of lectures on Genji in Matsusaka.12 As Norinaga himself describes the work, it “fills in the omission of the beginning of the story of the Rokujō lady in The Tale of Genji, the language and all else being fashioned in imitation of that work.” Ozaki Masayoshi (1755–1827), in his bibliographical compendium published in 1801, was more specific:
Tamakura 1 volume Motoori Norinaga
Describes the beginnings of Genji’s affair with the Rokujō lady in a style modeled on that of the tale; written to fill the gap between the “Utsusemi” and “Yūgao” chapters.13
Over the centuries, many readers have felt that certain “gaps” in Genji needed “filling in,” but before Norinaga no one had suggested that the Rokujō episode was one of them. Medieval commentators had noticed the omission, but far from perceiving it as a flaw, they took it as an instance of the author’s consummate “narrative strategies” (hippō).14 Norinaga, too, modestly disclaimed any necessity for the work:
Genji’s affair with the Rokujō lady is abruptly introduced in “Yūgao” with the words “about the time he was secretly visiting Rokujō….” Nothing whatever is said of how the affair began. So consummately crafted is the work that one infers all of this from one thing and another as one reads along. This clumsy bit of writing, however, in which everything is made explicit, is not merely puerile, but positively presumptuous and painful to contemplate.15
Why, then, did Norinaga write “Tamakura”? In seeking an answer to this question, it is helpful to recall how different Norinaga’s world was from that of his medieval predecessors and how different his involvement with Genji was from theirs.
Many of the so-called Old Commentaries were compiled in an age of incessant warfare, by noblemen of the imperial court who were living in much reduced circumstances, some of them even in exile. For these people, Genji, however much an object of classical learning they had made it, still retained some of its immediacy as a document of their class, a window on a world of magnificence that in better times they themselves might have inhabited. Norinaga’s Genji monogatari Tama no ogushi (1796), the pinnacle of the “New Commentaries,” was the work of a provincial doctor of plebeian origins living in the second century of the Pax Tokugawa. For Norinaga, Genji could only have been purely classic, almost as far removed from the realities of his own life, times, and class as the Chinese classics. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that in his approach to Genji, he preferred the rigorous textualism (kobunjigaku), current among certain schools of classical studies, to the wistful and sometimes snobbish opining (as he saw it) of dispossessed noblemen.
For scholars of this time, the practice of textualism meant not merely strict adherence to the ancient text and the rejection of intervening commentary. To grasp the full, true meaning of what the ancients wrote, they also had to learn to write as the ancients wrote. For adherents of Ogyū Sorai’s school of Confucian studies, this meant writing Chinese poetry in the style of the Tang Anthology (J. Tōshisen). For the pioneering scholars of the National Learning school (kokugaku), Kamo no Mabuchi and Kada no Azumamaro, it meant writing waka (Japanese poetry) in the style of the Man’yōshū or the Kokinshū. For Norinaga, it meant something even more difficult, composition in the style of The Tale of Genji. As he himself says in an early work, Kogen shinan: “If you mean to write, then you must carefully study Ise, Genji, Makura no sōshi [The Pillow Book], and other early tales and acquire such mastery of their language that you comprehend it completely. If you do not master this language, you shall never be able to write.”16 As this remark suggests, to Norinaga and his contemporaries the literary merit of “Tamakura” lay not in its beauties as a piece of storytelling, but in the virtuosity and authenticity of its archaism.
Superfluous though it may be, “Tamakura” is a remarkable demonstration of Norinaga’s mastery of the language of Genji. Hardly a single phrase in “Tamakura” is at variance with the language of Genji and other Heian texts,17 an impressive achievement in a day when variorum editions and exhaustive indexes did not exist and all this language had to be drawn from memory. Moreover, Norinaga’s usage of Heian vocabulary and grammar is finely nuanced and precise. He was alert, for example, to the fact that -te as an adversative (rather than a consecutive) particle occurs more frequently in Genji than in any other Heian text, and he was careful to use the adjective wakawakashi not simply to mean “young” or “youthful,” as it was used in his own time, but “childish” as in Heian usage.18
Yet however technically accomplished, Norinaga’s neoclassical style (gikobun) could never be mistaken for genuine Heian prose. One clue to the difference is that it is so easily understood. If you do not understand something, you simply look it up in the dictionary and there you will find the precise meaning; you need never grope for shades of meaning that lie somewhere in between or adjacent to the dictionary definitions. And when Norinaga employs Heian-style ellipses, it usually is obvious what he is omitting and where. His is the prose of study, analysis, and emulation rather than something rising from gut feeling and everyday speech.
Qualities of this sort make it easy to dismiss such an exercise as unoriginal, derivative, a mere pastiche. As Fujita Tokutarō (1901–1945) put it, “Norinaga’s command of the classical language is masterful and graceful, but what he has to say is utterly commonplace.”19 The modern critic Maruya Sai’ichi is far less patient, finding Norinaga’s neoclassical prose so repellent that he was unable to read “Tamakura” through to the end.20
In Norinaga’s own day, his skill as a writer of Heian prose greatly enhanced his reputation as an interpreter of Heian prose, and justly so.21 Many of the qualities that make his Genji monogatari Tama no ogushi such a superb commentary clearly derive from the same fund of knowledge that makes “Tamakura” so flawless an imitation of Heian prose. But unfortunately, little of the learning that informs Norinaga’s imitation of Genji survives the process of translation. The reader thus must be at pains to compensate mentally for both the lack, in English, of the archaism that would have delighted Norinaga’s eighteenth-century readers and the narrative banality that they would have overlooked.
T. HARPER
The Former Crown Prince, as he was then known, was a brother of the reigning Emperor. He had been invested as heir apparent at the very outset of the reign and had enjoyed, indeed deserved, wide esteem. With his brother he was on the very closest terms, while the rest of the court looked up to him as a promising successor. Yet for all the grandeur of his position and all the promise that it held, he had, for whatever reasons, grown weary of his lot.22 It became his constant wish that he might somehow escape the painful restrictions of his position and spend the years that yet remained to him in some more fulfilling way: to lead a more leisurely, tranquil life, free from all the cares that now beset him. And in the end, he resolved he would do just that. He renounced his claim to the throne and took up residence at Rokujō-Kyōgoku.
His palace there was of a most delightful design, and the gardens possessed a particular charm. Lush groves abounded; there was a broad pond and, flowing into it, a sparkling brook. All in all, it was an exquisite palace, in the most refined taste and modern fashion.
While still Crown Prince,23 he had been married to the favorite daughter of a Minister of State of that day, a match that had gratified the hopes of all concerned. Their affection for each other left naught to be desired, and before long, as if in token of their great devotion, a lovely little Princess was born. The child was a source of endless delight to both parents, and they spent their every waking moment in caring for her. Then, in the autumn of the Princess’s fourth year, her father, the Prince, was taken ill. At first it seemed but a minor ailment, but then quite unexpectedly, he passed away. His sudden death while still in his prime came as an enormous shock to the Emperor; nor, indeed, was there anyone at court who did not lament his loss. Small wonder, then, that his consort was so utterly devastated and disconsolate that she hardly knew one day from the next. So extraordinary had been their reliance over the years on the bonds of their mutual affection that she could scarcely contemplate being left behind in this world, even if only for an instant. But such is life, short though it be, that it does not always comply with one’s wishes; alas, there was no following him. The sight of the little girl, however, frolicking about in all innocence, at once compounded her grief and aroused fond memories.24
As the days and months passed and the child grew, there was hardly a moment when her mother’s eyes were dry and no sigh of longing issued from her lips. Then, in addition to all else, her father, the Minister, died.25 Now she was utterly helpless and forlorn. Had there been only herself, she would, with no regrets, have taken vows, then and there, and hidden herself away in some mountain retreat, far from capital and court. But there was the future of the young Princess to consider. Everyone she had depended on was gone, nor was there anyone of substance to look after the child’s interests. If even her mother abandoned her, what hope would she have of holding her own in the world as she grew up? These were painful ties, and she could not bring herself to sever them. With no one to look after the child, it was too great a worry to leave her alone in the world, and so the months mounted into years as she wavered between one impossible choice and another. Her gentlewomen and servants were so touched by her rare solicitude that they all stood by her, hardly a one of them leaving to go elsewhere.26 Outwardly, nothing was changed from of yore, but all too often one thing or another would leave her feeling helpless and lonely. Even the sight of the blossoms and the autumn leaves only brought back a stream of memories of times past when they had delighted together in “their fragrance and their hues.”27 The little Princess, who was becoming as beautiful a creature as ever they could have wished, was a constant comfort to her through these bitter days. She was determined that the child should be raised with the very best instruction she could give her, be it in writing, playing the koto, or whatever; and her women, for their part, were as conscientious as she was. Throughout her palace, refinement reigned.
In the palace of the Emperor, the late Prince was not forgotten. His Majesty remembered his brother fondly and never failed to send condolences on the appropriate days. And to Genji he had said, “The consort of the former Crown Prince is in low spirits; do pay her a visit now and again.” As it happened, Genji had himself wished that he might meet this lady, for he had heard reports of her elegance and beauty. And so one day, toward evening, as if just stopping by on his way home from the palace, he set out for Rokujō.28 The distance was great,29 and the sun had long since set by the time he arrived. He had his carriage brought to a halt before the gate and sent a guardsman in to announce his arrival. While he waited, he leaned out just a bit, the better to peer inside. He could see a dark expanse of ancient trees, and he could not help but be struck by the air of quiet elegance about the place. Then, mingled with the moan of the wind in the pines, came the faint, almost inaudible, sound of music. It was no common touch, he quickly discerned, that could produce strains of such haunting loveliness. His pulse quickened. It was well known that the consort was a consummate mistress of all the arts; this could only be her koto. He listened, enrapt.
Within the mansion, his sudden and unexpected visit had set the household buzzing and bustling in a flurry of confusion, and the lady put her koto aside. What a great pity, Genji thought, wishing that he might hear more. But his guardsman had emerged, and Genji alighted from his carriage. The sheer perfection of bearing and the dignity of movement with which he walked through the gate were so incomparably beautiful, and the refinement he seemed to radiate so exquisite, that they all were quite bedazzled and overawed. There was an awkward moment when no one came out to receive him, and he was left standing at the foot of the stairway, looking aimlessly about. Finally, after a long interval, a gentlewoman, Chūjō, emerged. “I am afraid the unexpected visit with which you honor us has found us regrettably ill prepared to receive you properly. I do apologize,” she said, offering him a cushion with an air of practiced ease. “Not at all, madam,” he replied, “I have meant for some time now to inquire after Her Ladyship, but with one thing and another, I have refrained from doing so and thus have not yet been able to acquaint her with the degree of my concern. His Majesty, too, never ceases to remember the late Prince. He speaks often of Her Ladyship’s plight and of what a lovely little girl the Princess must have grown to be.” He spoke of the Emperor’s uncommon concern and was most punctilious and feeling in offering the usual condolences. “Now that I have presumed this once to call on you, I trust we shall have the chance to meet again at greater leisure,” he said, and for that evening he brought his brief visit to an end and departed.
Could she possibly have ignored the attentions he had paid her in going out of his way to visit her thus? Thereafter, he never failed to send his regards when the occasion called for it, nor, for that matter, to call on her in person—in the course of which, he found himself growing rather more interested than he might have expected. The air of utter refinement and serene nobility about her struck him forcefully, and he could not help but regret that he had allowed so many years to pass without giving her a thought, much less paying her a visit.
Now and again, however, he resorted to more amusing sorts of banter, and his letters, too, came to be dotted with suggestive repartee. The lady could not help but be pleased by the depth of his devotion, yet as he grew more persistent, it came to seem rather distasteful and disagreeable to her, and she hardly ever responded to him. In his impatience, Genji wrote more frequently than ever and dispatched Koremitsu and others in his entourage to see to the lady’s more practical needs as well. After some two years, in spite of all. Her Ladyship gradually came to regard him as not so disagreeable at all; and when the season or the occasion seemed to call for it, she at least would not omit to exchange a friendly note with him.
The careless charm of these missives was unutterably elegant, as was the hand of their author genteel and dignified, dashed off with an accomplished ease that immediately caught the eye. Whenever he saw it, seldom though this was, he found himself thinking that this was someone too rare simply to dismiss. He never let pass any occasion by which he thought she might be touched—be it but the blooming of a frail flower or the coloring of a tree—to let her know how deep his feelings for her were. Yet Her Ladyship, friendly though her regard for him was, found this only more inappropriate; she remained firm in her resolve that it was only proper that she should answer him through intermediaries.
The New Year came, but the lady’s heart, far from thawing in the spring breeze,30 grew only more obdurate. Yet when he considered her standing, his every thought left him bewildered. For so exalted was she, and so much to be pitied, that he would never dare press her in any more forceful terms. All the while, at his wife’s great mansion, his evening absences were becoming the cause of ever-increasing consternation. In the tedium of spring’s tranquillity at the palace, when the days are long and it rains from morning to night, he could not help but lament the wretched state he was in, that he, too, was “a very thing of spring.”31
oki hito ni misebaya sode no namidakawa / kyō no nagame ni masaru fukasa o
Oh to show my cruel one: this river of tears upon my sleeve,
like my love, deeper than the waters of today’s long rain.
That evening, too, they awaited him at the mansion, but again he passed them by and made his way to another destination. He went in the strictest secrecy, with no outrunners whatever, and in the plainest garb and equipage.
As usual, it was Chūjō who came out to meet him, this time bearing a message from her mistress. “The kindness of your visits, so much more frequent than I deserve, and the extent of your rare goodwill over the years move me quite to wonderment. Yet I shan’t myself be able to greet you this evening, as I am feeling so painfully out of sorts that I am unable to move near the veranda. Sometime, if I’m feeling a bit better, I shall take the time to offer you my apologies for these last years.” Clearly, the lady was not much inclined to receive him.
“What a pity,” Genji said. “It’s been painful, you know, always to be kept outside these blinds. Of little consequence though I am, my feelings have been far from shallow, quite literally for some years now. Surely, in spite of everything, she must realize this? Were she to take into account all that I have endured in this time, could she yet keep me at such a distance? Were she only to say to me, and without an intermediary, ‘poor thing,’ what a comfort that would be in the depths of my affliction. It’s most upsetting. I’m quite unused to this sort of awkwardness. Yet having learned what a painful illness she is suffering, I must at least offer her my condolences without an intermediary.” And so saying, he pulled the blind aside, leaned under it, and entered. Her women, thinking it hard indeed that he should be left on the veranda, took pity on him and led him within.
It was a moment when her ladyship had come quite near the veranda and had not yet lowered her shutters. She sat gazing out at an enchantingly misted sky, where through a gap in the rain clouds the moon now shone. Genji, having thus contrived to gain entrance, stealthily approached her screens. “On such a perfectly lovely evening as this,” he thought, “were I just to declare my feelings, surely even she could not fail to be moved.” He had no intention of turning back now.
koyoi dani aware wa kakeyo asu wa yomo / nagaraubeku mo aranu tama no o
“Tonight at least, pray take pity upon me,
lest this flicker of life not last until the morrow.
Should I die of love, who then would be the one for long thought obdurate?”32 So close was he when he spoke that it was as if his words were intended only for himself. This came as a shock to Her Ladyship. But, then, she had been in correspondence with him, albeit only indirectly, for some years now; it was not as if a total stranger had burst in upon her, which perhaps is why she was neither repulsed nor frightened.
ware ni shimo ayana na kake so taenubeki / midare ya yoso no ada no tama no o
“Pray blame nothing so unjust upon me; the tribulations
of this flicker of life about to expire are none of my doing.
Isn’t this all a bit contrived?” she said, so softly she seemed hardly to speak at all. She seemed on the point of withdrawing discreetly, as if embarrassed to think what she had just said, when Genji softly pushed open the panel and, sliding forward, grasped the hem of her robe and held her back.
“I do beg your pardon for this intrusion,” he said, “but when you’ve been accustomed to hearing from me for months, nay, years on end, how can you still treat me with such indifference? Surely what you will have heard of me should assure you that I have absolutely no amorous intentions of that capricious, shallow sort so common in this world. Without your gracious permission, never, never would I presume to any greater liberties than I have taken thus far. It is just that as things were, I had to convey to you some small hint of the anguish that is wasting me away.”
Calmly and with seemly restraint, he told her of the many cares and feelings he had found so difficult to endure. So ineffably appealing, so elegant and attractive, was his manner that even for this lady there were not a few moments when she found herself moved. In this inconvenient state of things, she was no longer able to treat him with such severity.
A chill wind arose as the night grew late. With the shutters still open, they were starkly visible as the light of the moon grew brighter. Genji took a low screen that stood nearby and placing it between them lay down, as though but for a moment, beside her. All her people, assuming that it had at last “come to this,” withdrew to a distance and went to bed.
Her ladyship was overwhelmed with gloom and resentment at the enormity of what seemed her ineluctable fate. That having come this far, her gentlewomen would now think her up to something so childish and unseemly—the shame was vexing enough to make her die. And in a world where not a word that anyone speaks ever remains a secret, she was surely doomed to a name for waywardness and frivolity. In such a state of agitation, the most she could manage was to drown her cares in tears, for there was no casting them off. This pitiable sight must surely have moved Genji to a great many deeply felt promises and reassurances.
The spring night, so short at the best of times, passed as in an instant, and as dawn drew near, the setting moon cast a forlorn and misty light upon them.
kawasu ma mo hakanaki yume no tamakura ni / nagori kasumeru haru no yo no tsuki
“Fleeting as a dream, this time of ours together, pillowed upon my arm
while the misted moon yet lingers in the sky this spring night.33
And how do you see it?” he asked.
oboroge no mi no usa naraba haru no yo no / kasumeru tsuki mo tomo ni mimashi o
“Were this anguish of mine of some common sort, then gladly would I view
together with you this misted moon of a spring night.”
She clutched her robes to her face and refused even to look at [the moon]. Genji was tender and solicitous in comforting her. Hoping to gain one more glimpse of her before leaving, he said, “If you could just look at the sky while it is still so beautiful, in the same spirit as do I, it might bring some small solace to you in your woe. Really, you mustn’t carry on so.” His attempts to entice her to the veranda were fervent and persistent, and overwhelmed by shame though she was, she did inch forward just a bit. The poise with which she managed somehow to disguise her feelings in the light of the dawning sky, at once so eerily beautiful and dreadfully revealing, was, in its sheer perfection, utterly elegant and captivating. He fairly exclaimed at the sight of her in profile, so breathtaking with wisps of her hair illuminated in the soft light of the dawn moon. More riveted than ever, he hung back and could not bring himself to leave, but his retainers were raising their voices now. “Well, it’s morning,” one of them said, coughing impatiently to urge him on. Upsetting and irritating though this was, the excruciating shame that the lady was suffering was truly pitiable, and it would not be to his own advantage to remain longer. In the gray light while all was still indistinct, under cover of the dawn mist, he stealthily departed—so it is said.
TRANSLATED BY T. HARPER
Scattered throughout the commentaries, catalogs, colophons, and documents from which scholars attempt to glean some sense of the early textual development of The Tale of Genji are a dozen or so titles of chapters that no longer survive. Some of them may be alternative titles for chapters (or portions thereof) that we now know by different names (“Tsubo senzai” instead of “Kiritsubo”); some probably existed in name only (“Kumogakure”); and some seem actually to be the titles of chapters that had found a place in late Heian- and early Kamakura-period texts of The Tale of Genji.
Most of these “missing” chapters we know only by name. Two of them, however, “Sakurahito” and “Sumori,” have left behind tantalizing fragmentary evidence that they not only once existed, but were considered by knowledgeable readers to be the work of Murasaki Shikibu. It is clear, though, that during the winnowing process that eventually produced the fifty-four-chapter version that is today the definitive Tale of Genji—a process in which some chapters still considered spurious (“Niou Miya,” “Kōbai,” “Takekawa”) found their way into the canonical text—these two no less “authentic” chapters were excluded.
The first of these rejected chapters, in terms of its position in the Genji narrative, is “Sakurahito,” whose title probably alludes to an old song (saibara) by that name. We know of this chapter only because Sesonji (Fujiwara) no Koreyuki, sometime before his death in 1175, decided that it was worthy of annotation, and thus his brief notes on “Sakurahito” are included in his Genji shaku.34 In this collection of marginalia, between the commentary on chapter 31, “Makibashira,” and that on chapter 32, “Umegae,” Koreyuki quotes thirteen phrases from “Sakurahito,” following each of which he cites a poem to which he thinks that phrase alludes. This is all that survives of “Sakurahito,” but it at least provides a foothold for some interesting speculation on the content of the chapter and the role it may have played in the textual evolution of Genji.
Judging from the volume of Koreyuki’s commentary (thirteen lemmas), “Sakurahito” probably would have been a chapter of medium length, comparable, for example, to “Yūgao.” And the fact that “Sakurahito” is not annotated in the earliest collection of Koreyuki’s commentary suggests that his later decision to include it reflects a considered judgment of its authenticity and importance.35
When we venture beyond these broad generalizations, however, problems arise. First, we have no idea what to make of the title. The song from which it seems to derive is about a man who sets off to inspect his rice fields on another island, telling his wife that he’ll be back the next day. Not likely, says she, for surely you’ve got another woman over there; you’ll not be back tomorrow.36 Was there a scene in which this song was chanted? Does one of the characters allude to it in a poem? Does it refer to a particular character, perhaps a man not on the best of terms with his wife, such as Higekuro? We have no idea and thus cannot translate even the title of the chapter.
Then there is the tentative caveat that follows the title: “There are some texts that include this chapter. It is not indispensable. It should follow ‘Hotaru.’” Did Koreyuki himself write this? And regardless of who wrote it, what are we to make of it? Ii Haruki suggests that this may be Koreyuki’s defense of his decision to include “Sakurahito” in his text while conceding that there would be no harm in omitting it.37 For although Koreyuki accepts the authenticity of the chapter, he also points to the major problem of its placement in relation to the other ten chapters of Tamakazura’s story. In the text that he is annotating, Koreyuki leaves “Sakurahito” where he finds it, following “Makibashira,” but he himself feels it belongs elsewhere, following “Hotaru.”
Of Koreyuki’s successors, only the author of the list of Genji chapter titles in Hakuzōshi expresses an opinion on these matters. He dismisses “Saku[ra]hito,” “Samushiro,” and “Sumori” as “the work of later authors appended” to the canonical fifty-four chapters.38 Everyone else whom we might expect to have read “Sakurahito” and been concerned to establish a definitive text of Genji is silent on the subject. Not until the middle of the twentieth century did scholars begin to take an analytical interest in why “Sakurahito” might have found its way into Koreyuki’s text in the first place. By this time, they had only the thirteen fragments preserved by Koreyuki to work with.
Horibe Seiji (1913–1944) was one of the first scholars to attempt to explain Koreyuki’s dissatisfaction with the placement of “Sakurahito.” The chapter, he noted, appears to deal principally with Hotaru Hyōbukyō no Miya’s amorous interest in Tamakazura. But by “Makibashira,” the last of the Tamakazura chapters, Tamakazura already is married to Higekuro. To then revert to a tale about one of her previous suitors would make sense only as a retrospective lament. Yet to place “Sakurahito” immediately following “Hotaru,” as Koreyuki’s Genji shaku suggests, is to create calendrical contradictions. “Sakurahito” appears to be set in late spring “after all the cherry blossoms have fallen,” whereas “Hotaru” is set in early summer during the long rains. To follow the summer chapter with a spring chapter would be to upset the strict seasonal progression that is maintained throughout the ten Tamakazura chapters. Horibe’s analysis demonstrates clearly why Koreyuki should be troubled by the placement of “Sakurahito” in his manuscript, as well as by the problems that his recommended relocation of the chapter would entail. Beyond this, however, Horibe could only conclude that a scholar as careful as Koreyuki must have had good reasons for his misgivings that we can never know, now that the text of “Sakurahito” has been lost.39
Textual studies of Genji began to thrive as never before in the immediate postwar years, in the course of which Kazamaki Keijirō (1902–1960) made a chance discovery that led him to a tentative but highly plausible solution to the “Sakurahito” problems posed by Horibe. In attempting to resolve some chronological anomalies in the Genji text, Kazamaki found that between chapters 21 and 32, only one year passes in the life of Lady Murasaki: in “Otome” (chapter 21) she is twenty-seven, and in “Umegae” (chapter 32) she is twenty-nine. In the intervening ten chapters, however, four years pass in Genji’s life. How can so great a discrepancy be explained? In the first place, Kazamaki notes, the ten intervening chapters are precisely those that tell the story of the discovery of Yūgao’s long-lost daughter Tamakazura, the amorous interest that she arouses in her guardian Genji and his brother Hotaru Hyōbukyō no Miya, and ultimately her marriage to Higekuro. Both Yūgao and a certain prince (miya) are mentioned specifically in the “Sakurahito” fragments and most of the poems cited by Koreyuki are love poems, so it seems reasonable to speculate that “Sakurahito” may have described some of the same matters as do chapters 22 to 31, the “ten Tamakazura chapters.” This further leads Kazamaki to suggest that “Sakurahito” was once the only chapter between “Otome” and “Umegae”; that the events it depicts take place in the space of a single year, Murasaki’s twenty-eighth; and that later the story it tells in a single chapter was expanded to fill ten new chapters that span four years—a discrepancy that passed unnoticed until detected by Kazamaki.40 This new hypothesis was so persuasive and so thoroughly in accord with the work of other textual scholars of the time41 that it gained immediate acceptance. As Ii Haruki pointed out, reaffirming its validity half a century later, it no longer makes sense to consider the “ten Tamakazura chapters” as the “original” and “Sakurahito” as a forgery by some later author.42
Who, then, was the author of “Sakurahito”? Ii Haruki implies (but does not state) that it was Murasaki Shikibu; Hasegawa Kazuko maintains that it must have been written by “the same person who wrote the rest of Genji”;43 and Inaga Keiji, pointedly and repeatedly, states that it was the work of Murasaki Shikibu. But as we have seen, even Murasaki could not have undertaken such a project without the support of a wealthy patron. Again, the patron was probably Fujiwara no Michinaga, for as Saitō Masaaki argues, the “ten Tamakazura chapters” may well have been written for Michinaga’s younger daughter Kenshi (994–1027) on her marriage to the crown prince who later became the Sanjō Emperor (976–1017; r. 1011–1016). It would have been the perfect gift, for these ten chapters directly follow the three “Hahakigi” chapters, which Michinaga himself had purloined from Murasaki’s room and passed on to Kenshi.44 “Sakurahito,” then, is “apocryphal” only in the sense that Koreyuki and later editors of the Genji text failed to recognize that it had been rewritten and then discarded by its author as superfluous.
Myriad questions remain; we have only thirteen fragments with which to address them; and as Ii Haruki wistfully notes, the golden age of postwar Genji textual scholarship, which carried us this far beyond the oversights of the previous eight centuries, has by now “drawn its last breath.”45 The explication of the following translated fragments, therefore, attempts only to summarize the work of those few scholars who have ventured to speculate on the relationship between “Sakurahito” and the “ten Tamakazura chapters.”46
T. HARPER
Sakurahito
kono maki wa aru hon mo ari.
nakutemo arinubeshi. hotaru ga tsugi ni arubeshi.
There are some texts that include this chapter.
It is not indispensable. It should follow “Hotaru.”
1. koke no tamoto wa kesa wa sobotsuru to yomite nao tachikaeru to aru wa
Where it says, “‘The sleeves of this mossy robe are this morning soaked with tears,’ he/she recited, thinking back again…”:
inishie ni nao tachikaeru kokoro kana / koishiki koto ni monowasure sede
How I long to return once again to the past;
for once one has loved one never forgets. [Kokinshū 734]
This first fragment poses a daunting problem. “Mossy sleeves” are those of a robe worn by a nun or a monk, but there is no nun or monk in the Tamakazura chapters who might long to “return once again to the past.” Who, then, might be the speaker of this lower hemistich of the poem that Koreyuki quotes? Inaga Keiji (8–9) proposes a daring solution to this problem. Perhaps, he suggests, Ukon’s discovery of Tamakazura was far less elaborately plotted in “Sakurahito” than in “Tamakazura.” Perhaps Yūgao’s nursemaid, rather than taking the child with her to Kyushu, simply remains in the western purlieus of the capital and, after her husband dies, becomes a nun. When Ukon discovers her there, it would be entirely natural for the nurse/nun to express her longing for her dead mistress in terms of tear-soaked mossy sleeves. For the writer, however, this more economical plot line could have proved to be a problem when she set out to expand the single chapter into ten. Readers of the elaborated version might begin to wonder why, in the intervening twenty years, the nurse never contacted the child’s father and how so beautiful and obviously aristocratic a girl could escape attention that long. To forestall such objections, Inaga suggests, Murasaki Shikibu may have decided that she must remove both nurse and child from any possible contact with denizens of the capital, to which end she brought the nurse’s husband back to life and had him appointed to a post in Kyushu, to which his wife and her charge accompany him. As a result, the “mossy sleeves” of “Sakurahito” are not found in “Tamakazura.”
Ii Haruki (140–41) proposes another way around this problem. He takes the “mossy sleeves” to be a metonym for garments of mourning and suggests that because the verb is yomite rather than yomitamaite, the speaker may be Tamakazura, who is described at the beginning of “Fujibakama” as mourning her grandmother, Princess Ōmiya. This interpretation, too, presupposes a beginning to “Sakurahito” somewhat more somber than that of the present Tamakazura story. Yet if the “ten Tamakazura chapters” were indeed written for presentation to a future emperor, it would have been entirely appropriate to give them a new and more auspicious beginning.
2. koi o shi koiba to aru wa
Where it says, “If one but loves…”:
tane shi areba iwa ni mo matsu wa oinikeri / koi wo shi koiba awazarame ya wa
Be there but a seed, a pine grows, even if from a crack in a rock;
if one but loves, can it be that one never meets one’s love? [Kokinshū 512]
This is the first of a number of fragments that seem to look forward to episodes—many of them love scenes—depicted in the “ten Tamakazura chapters.” Although the speaker of this particular phrase is not identified, both Hasegawa Kazuko (120) and Inaga (9) speculates that it may be Genji hinting at his own fondness for Tamakazura by quoting from the Kokinshū poem cited by Koreyuki. Inaga also notes that some medieval commentators identify this poem as one source of Genji’s bitter rebuke of the Third Princess in “Kashiwagi,”47 suggesting that the story of the affair of Kashiwagi and the Third Princess had already formed in the author’s mind when she wrote “Sakurahito.” For further evidence of this, see fragment 13.
3. ware ya kawaranu to aru wa
Where it says, “Shall I not change?”:
e zo shiranu yoshi kokoromiyo inochi araba / ware ya wasururu hito ya towanu to
Never can we know, yet let’s give it a try; for as long as we have life,
shall I ever forget you, shall you not care for me?48 [Kokinshū 377]
Textual problems, as Hasegawa (120–21) points out, make this fragment particularly difficult to deal with. The verb kawaranu does not agree with the source that Koreyuki cites, which instead reads wasururu. Moreover, because the verb is cast in the negative, kawaranu is not an appropriate substitute for wasururu. Scribal errors may, of course, account for these discrepancies. Inaga (9–10), though, seems not to be troubled by them; even so, he suggests no more than that the three-word quotation, which seems to occur early in the chapter, may form part of a dialogue between Genji and Tamakazura.
4. itodo mo keburu to aru wa
Where it says, “ever more smoke rose…”:
[A blank space follows.]
The blank space following this fragment probably indicates that although Koreyuki had not yet found a source poem for these words, he hoped that he might later turn up something to insert here. As Inaga (10) notes, however, even a thorough search of Shinpen kokka taikan does not yield a promising candidate. The space is likely to remain forever blank. Still, the ruling metaphor is clear: the smoke must rise from those “fires of love” (omohi) so often encountered in love poetry. In arguing that “Sakurahito” was originally placed between “Otome” and “Umegae,” Kazamaki Keijirō (72) points to this fragment as a possible reference to Yūgiri’s love for Kumoinokari, in which case it may have served to link those two chapters (see also Inaga, 14n.3). Inaga, however, thinks it more likely to relate to Genji’s attempt to seduce Tamakazura in “Kagaribi”:
kagaribi ni tachisou koi no keburi koso / yo ni wa tae senu hono’o narikere
Smoke from the fires of my love that rises with that of the watch fires:
these are flames that never, as long as I live, will burn out.
(“Kagaribi,” 14:249)
5. wakare semashi ya to oshimikikoyu to aru wa
Where it says, “‘Should there then be these partings?’ he lamented”:
akatsuki no nakaramashikaba shiratsuyu no / okite wabishiki wakare semashi ya
Were there to be no dawn, would there then be no awakening in tears,
or ever these wretched partings as the clear dewdrops form?49
[Gosenshū 862; Shūishū 715]
The context of this fragment is clear: the dawn parting of two lovers. But we have no way of knowing who those lovers might be. Inaga (10) prefers Genji and Tamakazura to Hotaru and Tamakazura.
6. harezu ya kiri no to iu wa
Where it says, “Will it never clear, this mist?”:
shirakumo no kakaru okabe no sumika ni wa / harezu ya kiri no tachiwatarubeki
Here in this dwelling, set on a hill, enveloped in white clouds,
will it never clear, this mist that rises to cover all? [source not identified]
Mist that covers all and fails to clear is a frequent metaphor for the anguish of unrequited love. There is no clue, however, as to who the lovers might be. Inaga (10) ventures no more than that this lover’s lament may be in some way connected with the previous two fragments.
7. michi o sae seku koso to iu wa
Where it says, “Cuts me off even from the Way…”:
kakarademo kumoi no hodo wa nagekishi ni / michi o sae seku yamaji naruran
Quite apart from all else, I lament my distance from that dwelling in clouds,
for this mountain road cuts me off even from the Way. [Saigū no Nyōgo shū 77?]
The source poem that Koreyuki cites no longer survives precisely as he quotes it, but Horibe Seiji has found a poem in Saigū no Nyōgo shū in which the upper hemistich is identical to Koreyuki’s citation. In 981, when Prince Yukihira was about to enter holy orders, the High Priestess of Ise wrote to him:
kakarademo kumoi no hodo wa nagekishi ni / mienu yamaji o omoiyaru kana
Quite apart from all else, I lament my distance from that dwelling in clouds,
for my heart yearns for the mountain road I cannot see.
In other words, she regrets her isolation in Ise for many reasons, but particularly because it prevents her from performing her Buddhist devotions. But what can an allusion to such a poem signify in the context of what is essentially a tale of romance? Inaga notes that in secular terms, such an allusion could be taken as a lament that something or someone is beyond one’s reach. Here, therefore, it might be Hotaru Hyōbukyō no Miya’s lament that when Tamakazura becomes Chief Palace Attendant, she will be beyond his reach.
8. hana mo mina chirihatete wazuka ni fuji zo nokoreru katabuku kage ya nagametamawan [-nu?] to aru wa
Where it says, “All the blossoms had fallen and only the purple wisteria remained; in the waning light he gazed at it pensively” [or “…won’t you gaze at it?”]:50
haru kaerite tomeenu chūchō su / shitō no kaka yōyaku kōkon
With the passing of spring, I lament that I cannot stop it
while in the shadow of the purple wisteria, dusk gradually gathers.
[Hakushi monjū 631; Wakan rōei shū 52]
Inaga points out that the diction of the Chinese poem cited by Koreyuki forms the basis of not only the fragment quoted from “Sakurahito” but also the depiction of Tō no Chūjō’s reconciliation with Yūgiri in “Fuji no uraba,” which echoes both Hakushi monjū and Wakan rōei shū. On the twentieth day of the Third Month, when “all the blossoms had fallen in profusion” (“Fuji no uraba,” 14:424–25), Tō no Chūjō hints to Yūgiri of his change of heart. A few days later, at the beginning of the Fourth Month, “when the wisteria was blooming in glorious profusion” and “its color grew ever richer in the gathering dusk,” he sends one of his sons to Yūgiri with an invitation to come view the flowers. His message contains the poem
waga yado no fuji no iro koki tasogare ni / tazune ya wa konu haru no nagori wo
My wisteria, its color richer still in the deepening dusk:
will you not come view it, this last memento of springtime? (14:426)
On the basis of the striking resemblance of the language of this scene to the quotation from “Sakurahito” and the poem that Koreyuki cites as its source, Inaga (3–4) concludes that the successful resolution of Yūgiri’s suit must originally have been depicted in “Sakurahito.” Accordingly, “Sakurahito” may once have been the final chapter of what we now call part 1 of Genji. Indeed, it may even have depicted the imperial progress to Genji’s Rokujō mansion, and the crown prince’s coming of age, now depicted in “Umegae,” even though no evidence survives to support this latter hypothesis.
9. Yūgao no mite no, ito aware nareba, ato wa chitose mo to aru wa
Where it says, “The hand of Yūgao was touchingly beautiful, its traces [a memento for] a thousand years”:
hakanaku mo fumitodomekeru hamachidori / ato wa chitose no katami narikeri
These traces, as delicate as the plover’s faint print on the sand,
shall remain as a memento for a thousand years. [source not identified]
Horibe (164) derides the use of the honorific mi- with reference to the hand of someone as insignificant as Yūgao. Moreover, he argues, in doing so the author reveals her own ignorance, thus proving that she could not be Murasaki Shikibu. Indeed, as Hasegawa (125–26) points out, honorifics are never attached to her name in the “Yūgao” chapter. Genji finds her living in a hovel, and she dies before he can learn her ancestry. In “Tamakazura,” however, Ukon reveals that Yūgao was in fact the daughter of a nobleman of the third rank and thus a lady entirely deserving of such respect. Hasegawa feels, too, that the description of Yūgao’s hand as aware implies that Genji, who was once her lover, must be the subject of this fragment. In contrast, Ii (138–39) suggests that it would be entirely natural for Tamakazura to speak deferentially about her own mother’s writing and raises no objection to her thinking of it as aware.
Inaga (138–39) notes three possible forms in which Genji (whom he, too, assumes to be the subject) might be viewing Yūgao’s handwriting: (1) the fan, which he has kept for years as a keepsake; (2) Yūgao’s letters in the possession of her nursemaid, which come into Genji’s possession when he takes the women in at the Rokujō mansion; and (3) the letters that come to Genji via Saishō no Kimi (a daughter of Yūgao’s uncle), who is introduced in “Hotaru.”
Ii suggests yet another possible scenario, in which Genji may have shown Tamakazura the fan he has kept as a keepsake, perhaps somewhere in the vicinity of “Miyuki” when he tells her father, Tō no Chūjō, the truth about her.
10. ware sae kokoro sora nari ya to uchiwaraitamaite, ayashi, tsuma matsu yoi nari ya to aru wa
Where it says, “I, too, find myself quite distracted,” he said smiling. “And of all times, on this evening when even his love awaits him”:
ōzora o hitori nagamete hikoboshi no / tsuma matsu yo sae hitori kamo nemu51
Alone, gazing longingly at the heavens; even on this night
when the herder star’s love awaits him, must I sleep alone?
[Shinkokinshū 313]
Because the ware of this fragment is not identified, we have no way of knowing who speaks and smiles. But Tsurayuki’s poem, which Koreyuki cites, helps clarify what he means. According to the headnote in the Shinkokinshū, the poem was composed to accompany a folding screen depicting, month by month, the yearly round of festivals. Tsurayuki’s poem would thus have been inscribed on a picture depicting the Tanabata Festival in the Seventh Month, which probably shows a man gazing at the Milky Way, lamenting that even on this one night of the year when the Ox Herder can lie with his love, the Weaver Maiden, he must sleep alone. As Inaga’s (5) commentary makes clear, the ambiguities of language and culture make possible several interpretations of tsuma matsu yo (tsuma can be either male or female, and who awaits whom?), of which the translator can choose only one. The most plausible guess at the identity of the speaker is that of Ii (140), who takes him to be Genji venting his own chagrin at losing Tamakazura to Higekuro. Hasegawa (126) strongly supports this hypothesis.
11. miya wa au o kagiri ni nagekasetamau to aru wa
Where it says, “‘That finally we shall meet,’ the Prince sighed”:
waga koi wa yukue mo shirazu hate mo nashi / au o kagiri to omou bakari zo
Ah, this love of mine! I know not where it shall lead or how it shall end;
my one and only hope is that finally we shall meet. [Kokinshū 611]
Ii (140) regards this as another instance in which a scene in “Sakurahito” seems to coincide with a scene in the Tamakazura chapters. “The Prince” here would be Hotaru Hyōbukyō no Miya, who, when he finally expresses his desire to marry Tamakazura, finds that she is already married to Higekuro. In the present Tamakazura chapters, this scene may have been the basis of the events depicted in “Makibashira.”
12. nado seshi waza zo to aru wa
Where it says, “Why have I done such a thing?”:
ukishima ya uki tabi goto ni nazo shima ya / nazo seshi waza zo kokorozukushi ni
Ukishima! With every dismal moment I ask, Why this island?
Why have I done such a thing? I wonder with all my heart. [source not identified]
Neither of the commentators (Hasegawa [127]; Inaga [6]) who discuss this fragment offers to paraphrase the strange poem that Koreyuki cites as its source, but both agree that its most likely function in “Sakurahito” is as an expression of Genji’s annoyance with himself for having allowed Tamakazura to fall into Higekuro’s hands.
13. mizu ni yadoreru to kakitaru wa
Where it is written, “that lies in water…”:
te ni musubu mizu ni yadoreru tsukikage no / aru ka naki ka no yo ni koso arikere
Like the moonlight that lies in water scooped up in the palm of the hand:
does it exist or does it not? And just so is this world. [Shūishū 1322]
The quotation in this fragment is from a poem by Tsurayuki composed on his deathbed. It is highly unlikely that anyone’s death is described in “Sakurahito,” but as Inaga (6–7) suggests, this allusion may well be an expression of the grief of someone who feels that he might die of lovesickness: Hotaru Hyōbukyō no Miya, who has lost Tamakazura to Higekuro. Inaga also notes that the same poem is identified by some medieval commentators as underlying the description in “Yokobue” of the death of Kashiwagi. Could this fragment from a discarded chapter thus be, Inaga asks tentatively, the seed of a much later episode in which a young man actually does die of lovesickness?
TRANSLATED AND COMMENTARY BY T. HARPER
(Kumogakure rokujō)
The six “Hidden in Cloud” chapters are the product of a mystery and have remained shrouded in mystery since their inception. But their origin and development could not be described more succinctly and accurately than in the words of Yamagishi Tokuhei: “Originally, the ‘Kumogakure’ chapters existed in neither name nor fact. Later they came to exist in name but not in fact, and ultimately in both name and fact.”52
Perhaps the most easily explicable aspect of them is their number. To our great misfortune, the earliest readers of Genji never mentioned how many chapters their copies contained. To the Sarashina diarist in the 1020s, Genji was already a work of “fifty-some” chapters. And in the two centuries following her reading of the tale, the text continued to grow and evolve in ways of which we now have only the dimmest sense. By the latter years of the Heian period, if any number at all was associated with the chapters of Genji, it was most likely to be sixty. Thus we find Genji ipponkyō (ca.1166) speaking of a Genji “made up of sixty chapters,” the narrator of Ima kagami (1170) marveling that Murasaki “wrote not just one or two scrolls but sixty chapters,” and even the narrator of A Nameless Notebook (ca. 1200) assuring her friends that now they “can imagine how [moving] the remaining sixty chapters must be.”53 Although the titles of many more than sixty chapters survive, sixty was the number of volumes in the “Three Great Treatises” (sandaibu) of the Tendai school of Buddhism. Thus to readers at all piously inclined, it seemed natural that Murasaki Shikibu should wish her tale to have the same auspicious number of chapters.
Yet it was during the same decades, when “the sixty-chapter Genji” was becoming a term in common parlance and the connection with Tendai doctrine was coming to seem an item of common knowledge, that the first attempts to compile a truly definitive text of Genji were begun; and the results of those efforts, both the Aobyōshi-bon and the Kawachi-bon, consisted of only fifty-four chapters. The question was bound to arise: What became of the other six? Were they hidden or destroyed or lost? So little remains of the earliest attempts to explore this mystery that it is “now beyond the reach of scholarly inquiry.”54 The Genji text was still extremely unstable and in constant flux. Readers could compile their own lists of six additional chapters, picking and choosing from the titles (and, in some cases, texts) of Genji chapters written in the Heian period and still in circulation. But the quality of these peripheral chapters was so markedly inferior that no single list emerged that could command general acceptance. Clearly, a solution of a different sort was required.
That new way forward was found in a fortunate conflation of the search for the six unspecified “missing” chapters with the search for another “missing” chapter, “Kumogakure” (Hidden in Cloud), which was presumed to tell the story of Genji’s death. This combination then came to be known as the “Six Kumogakure Chapters” (Kumogakure rokujō). Once they had a name, and thus a locus within Genji, the attempt to solve this two-pronged mystery gave birth to what was probably the most productive myth in the history of the reception of The Tale of Genji. At some point in the process, it also produced the only concrete textual product of the entire effort, the most obviously faked and ineptly executed of the Genji apocrypha, the “Six Kumogakure Chapters” translated here.
How did it happen, then, and when did it happen that this set of six imaginary “chapters” came to be called the “Six Kumogakure Chapters”? At the stage in the process when the six chapters “missing” from the sixty-chapter Genji came to have a name, it was natural that their collective title should be “Hidden in Cloud.” For in the Genji text itself, at the end of “Maboroshi,” Genji murmurs:55
monoomou to suguru tsukihi mo shiranu ma ni / toshi mo waga yo mo kyō ya tsukinuru
While I, beset by cares, notice not the passing of the months and days,
shall my life, as well as this year, have run its course today? (15:536)
Immediately following which: “He commanded, so they say, that this year the New Year’s season should be grander than ever and that the gifts he prepared for the Princes and Ministers of State, as well as his rewards to one and all according to their rank, should be without parallel” (15:536).
At long last, Genji is about to take the step he has so often claimed to wish he might take and turn his back on the secular world. Yet the momentous event itself is never once mentioned, much less described. The first line of the next chapter, “Niou Miya,” “begins in the past perfect” (kako ni nashite) tense:56 “After his radiance had been hidden, there were none among his progeny who could succeed to his brilliance.” References to Kaoru’s age reveal that eight years have passed between the end of “Maboroshi” and the beginning of “Niou Miya” (16:11), and there are tantalizing mentions of Genji’s move to the “temple in Saga where he spent his last two or three years in seclusion from the world” (“Yadorigi,” 16:385). But sometime during those eight years, Genji passed from the scene, probably died, and certainly was “hidden in cloud.”
Nomura Hachirō suggests that the word describing Genji’s demise (and the idea of a chapter so named) may have been lifted from one of Murasaki Shikibu’s best-known poems, where it is used in its more literal sense:57
meguriaite mishi ya sore to mo wakanu ma ni / kumogakure ni shi yowa no tsukikage
We chance to meet, yet before I can be sure that you’re the one I’ve known,
the light of the moon, so late this night, is hidden in cloud.58
Whatever its source, the notion that there should have been a chapter (or set of chapters) called “Kumogakure” that filled the perceived gap between “Maboroshi” and “Niou Miya” must have taken shape at least by the middle of the twelfth century, for the name appears under the heading of “Set Twenty-Six” in the oldest extant list of Genji chapter titles, thought to date from 1176 and contained in Hakuzōshi.59
Opinion seems to have been divided, however, whether the text of such a chapter ever existed, or only a title. Those who held that only a title had ever been put to paper appealed to Tendai doctrine to support their claim. Murasaki, they maintained, had in mind those doctrinal treatises that were known only by name because their texts had never been transmitted from India to China and Japan. In like manner, she had alluded to Genji’s death with the title “Kumogakure,” but never actually described the event.60 For having depicted the deaths of Yūgao, Lady Aoi, and Lady Murasaki in such heartbreaking detail, she may have thought it best to stop when Genji senses that he is near death, insert the title “Kumogakure,” and move past his death to “Niou Miya.”61 Or, alternatively, the missing chapters of Genji could be seen as analogous to the six missing poems of the Chinese Book of Songs, once extant but now, tragically, lost.62 The assumption that these chapters had once existed led further to the thesis that the story they told had inspired their readers to take the tonsure and seek enlightenment. Thus—citing the precedent of an early Chinese emperor who had buried alive all the Confucian scholars and burned their texts—it was commanded that every copy of “Kumogakure” in the land be burned. “An amusing story,” Gyōa commented, “but hardly worthy of belief.”63
Others, however, seemed very reluctant to give up all hope that someday they might actually read “Kumogakure.” Even Sesonji (Fujiwara) no Koreyuki left an opening in his Genji shaku into which the missing chapter(s) might be inserted. He divides the chapters of Genji into thirty-seven sets (narabi) and lists “Minori” and “Maboroshi” as the twenty-fifth set and “Niou Miya,” “Kōbai,” and “Takekawa” as the twenty-seventh. He does not mention a twenty-sixth set, but leaves a place open should a text of “Kumogakure” ever turn up.64 Minamoto no Chikayuki’s younger brother, Sojaku (fl. mid-thirteenth century), insisted in his commentary Shimeishō that “the ‘Kumogakure’ chapter must survive somewhere. If we ourselves had a wizard (such as both the Kiritsubo Emperor and Genji yearned for), how should he fail to find it? The idea that it never existed seems to me deeply suspect.”65
It is important to emphasize at this point that these strained attempts to explain why Genji no longer had sixty chapters—or even just fifty-five—were not simply the playthings of naive, credulous, or superstitious readers of Genji. The very scholars who produced the definitive fifty-four-chapter texts of Genji were equally eager to solve this mystery. Minamoto no Chikayuki was sufficiently intrigued to “inquire of several learned scholars.” None of them, apparently, was able to offer him a convincing explanation, but he reported the results of his inquiries, including some of the fables recounted previously, in his Genchū saihishō, a version of which we know Fujiwara no Teika to have read. Nor did the descendants of these scholars, the compilers of the massive medieval commentaries on Genji, seem to lose interest in whether “Kumogakure” had ever existed or to cease trying to explain why it could not be found.66 None of these scholars, however, would be likely to resort to forgery. How, then, did the “Six Kumogakure Chapters,” once they had come to exist in name, come to exist in fact?
Of the many flights of fancy that this fruitless search produced, one in particular seems to have been almost an invitation to compose a set of “Six Kumogakure Chapters.” Genji hiun wahishō, a little-known work, claims that “Kumogakure” once consisted of six chapters,67 but because it contained “untoward material that was a disgrace to the tale,” the GoShirakawa Cloistered Emperor (1127–1192; r. 1155–1158) had ordered all copies to be burned. Before doing so, however, he had allowed their content to be revealed, as a secret oral transmission (kuketsu) to a select and trusted few. What this “untoward material” was we are not told, but it may well have referred to the powerful effect that “Kumogakure” was said to have had on its readers, inspiring them, “one and all,” to forsake the secular world to seek enlightenment68—a trend that, if allowed to continue, could seriously destabilize aristocratic society.
Whether inspired by this report or not we shall never know, but at some time in the Muromachi period, someone seems to have decided to adopt the persona of one of those trusted few to whom the contents of the six chapters had been confided and to write down all that he “knew.” He would make the “Six Kumogakure Chapters” exist in both name and fact, and restore the canonical fifty-four-chapter Genji to its intended sixty-chapter perfection.
Since forgers and fakers do not usually reveal their intentions, sources, and methods of deceit, it is no surprise that we know nothing about when and by whom the “Six Kumogakure Chapters” were composed. The bare bones of his method, however, are obvious. He took “Kumogakure” as the title not of a single chapter but of a set of chapters (narabi). There is ample precedent for this usage; it could even have been the intention of the author of the Hakuzōshi list to use it in this sense. The forger then chose five more titles of chapters that had been in circulation during the Heian period but, having been rejected as noncanonical, probably were no longer extant at the time of the forgery. Two of these, “Sakurahito” and “Sumori,” we have already encountered as fragments of lost texts. For each of these authentic chapter titles, the forger then wrote an entirely new text that had no connection whatever with the original content of the chapter, but making sure to include a poem on which the chapter title could be based. In short, he “found” the missing “Kumogakure” chapter, resurrected the other five chapters of that set, explained in a colophon (of which more later) why they had been hidden for so long, and completed the sixty-chapter Tale of Genji.
How this “discovery” was received, we have no idea. The work is not mentioned in any of the commentaries of the Muromachi period, nor do any manuscript copies survive that predate the Edo period. In her commentary Gyokuei shū (1602), Kaoku Gyokuei (1526–after 1602) tells of six (unnamed) chapters that were secreted in the Uji treasure house (of the Byōdō-in) but had been destroyed in one of the many fires that ravaged that temple.69 Another report tells of a set of six chapters (likewise unnamed) being burned in the fire that destroyed Fujiwara no Shōshi’s personal temple, the Tōbokuin.70 Genji higishō (fourteenth century?) lists “six Sumori chapters” that it attributes to Akazome Emon.71 And Ichjō Kanera’s (1402–1481) son Jinson (1430–1508) records almost the same list72 in his diary Daijōin jisha no zōjiki (entry for 1478.7.28), but describes them as “additional chapters written by Sei Shōnagon.”73 The closest we come to any recognition of the existence of the forged “Six Kumogakure Chapters” is a list of titles in a work called Genji hakoiri nikki that corresponds precisely to the names of the extant six chapters, but it is prefaced, “Stored in the Ishiyama treasure house and not allowed out; this because they are secret.”74 Readers obviously remained fascinated by the mystery of the “Six Kumogakure Chapters,” but no mention survives of anyone actually having seen them. On the face of it, it would appear that the newly recovered “Six Kumogakure Chapters” were themselves headed for oblivion. But such was not to be, thanks largely to the interest taken in them by the learned monk and prolific writer of popular books, Asai Ryōi (1612?–1691).
Entering the world of scholarship on the history of the “Six Kumogakure Chapters” leaves us with a strange sense of déjà vu. Things that we now see as patently false are discussed as though they might be true. A few skeptics voiced reservations, but, for the most part, they were ignored. And we end up with yet another forgery.
To begin with, there are two lines of manuscript texts of “Kumogakure rokujō.” The only dated manuscript is identified as a 1739 copy of a manuscript dated 1618. Expert opinion considers all other copies to date from the early, middle, or late Edo period.75 Both lines of texts are assumed to have had pre-Edo antecedents that no longer survive. The two lines of texts are obviously related, but they differ considerably in their details. Their chapter titles are the same; they are arranged in the same order; and there are many passages that, if not identical, at least closely resemble one another. Conversely, the chapters differ greatly in length; the poems differ greatly in number; and the wording often differs so much that one scholar claims it would be impossible to produce a variorum edition of the two texts.76 Finally, the two lines bear totally different colophons identifying their origins. The fuller of the two texts is usually described as the “standard text” (rufubon, futsūhon) and the other as the “variant text” (ihon, beppon).77 Concerning their origins, Yamagishi Tokuhei and Imai Gen’e say:
It is impossible to determine whether or not the variant text derives directly from the standard text. It probably makes more sense to assume instead that they have a common ancestor. For then we may manage to infer something of the original form of those “Six Kumogakure Chapters” that had been the subject of legend since the latter years of the Heian period or, at least, gain some hint of it.78
It was not by means of these manuscript editions, however, that “Kumogakure” circulated most widely in the Edo period. Sometime before 1670, in Kyoto, Asai Ryōi published not only an illustrated edition of the text but also an extremely learned and detailed commentary on all six chapters.79 This publication was such a success that it was reprinted in 1677, 1678 or 1679,80 1696, and 1709. In the meantime, sales of “Kumogakure rokujō” in Kyoto encouraged the Edo publisher Urokogataya to bring out yet another edition, illustrated by none other than Hishikawa Moronobu (d. 1694). These Edo editions date from 1676, 1681, and 1682. After centuries of obscurity, the “Six Kumogakure Chapters” had become both a best seller and a long seller.
But if we look a little more closely, as Yoshida Kōichi has done, we notice certain anomalies that invite suspicion.81 As noted, the two lines of manuscript texts bear totally different colophons. The longest of the three versions of the variant colophon reads as follows:
Of the sixty chapters of The Tale of Genji, fifty-four circulate widely in the world. These six chapters, however, describe the death of Genji and, moreover, contain esoterica of the Buddhist law, for which reasons they have been secreted within the precincts of the palace and not revealed to the world at large. Now as it happens, there was a certain lady, a Chief Palace Attendant [Naishi no Kan (= Kami) no Kimi], who was the most accomplished poet of her age. And because the Emperor harbored a fondness for her, he bequeathed to her all the secrets of the Way of Poetry, including even these volumes. But there was a scandal,82 and in the early years of the Tenbun era [1532–1555] she was banished to the Takaki District83 in the province of Hizen. When she departed from the capital, she secretly took along these six volumes. After making the most earnest entreaty of her, I [was allowed to] copy them. Ye who may read them hereafter, regard them with due gravity! Keep them secret! Keep them secret!
The other two extant versions are slightly shorter, differ a bit in phraseology, and are more effusive in their praise of this lady’s talents, declaring her “superior even to Komachi of old.”84 And one of them bears a notation that it had been copied in Genna 4 (1618) from “the text of Arima Etchū Nyūdō Tokuen.” All agree, however, that the Chief Palace Attendant was banished to Kyushu in the early to middle years of the sixteenth century and took the “Kumogakure rokujō” with her.
We must not take this colophon at face value, but it probably would have seemed more plausible to a seventeenth-century reader than would the colophons of the standard text (both of which are translated in this chapter). Scandals involving even the emperor’s women were not uncommon in those years of endemic warfare, when no one knew what horror the morrow might bring. Placing the emergence of the “lost” chapters in this context and in this age thus has a certain ring of authenticity.85 Moreover, the copyist’s note, which probably can be trusted, identifies this line of texts as unquestionably predating the published edition.
By contrast, the two colophons of the standard text line ask us to believe that Murasaki Shikibu herself bequeathed these texts to Ishiyamadera Temple, where, according to another myth, she had begun writing Genji; that they were first viewed by the superior of that temple in 1058; and that they then were miraculously transferred to the possession of an obsessed courtier in 1319 by the bodhisattva Kannon. Moreover, every colophon in this line of texts agrees verbatim with every other; no historical record exists of either the superior or the courtier named; and none of the texts in this line can be shown to predate the printed edition.
On the basis of this and other evidence, Yoshida Kōichi argues, most persuasively, that whereas the variant text may faithfully represent a version of the forged “Six Kumogakure Chapters” that survived from Sengoku into the Edo period, the standard text is in fact a major revision of the variant text, executed by Asai Ryōi himself in order to produce a work that would fare better in the book market of his day and create a vehicle for the display of his own vast knowledge. The manuscripts in the so-called standard text line are as uniform as they are because they were copied not from earlier manuscripts, but from Ryoi’s printed edition. The standard text is indeed the standard edition of “Kumogakure rokujō,” but the variant text would more accurately be termed the “earlier/older text” (kohon).
Ryōi probably was right to do what he did. It was a good business decision. It wasn’t even immoral. His commentary is often extremely helpful and occasionally amusing—as in his discussion of authorship, when he compliments himself by saying that “there are some passages that might well be the work of Murasaki Shikibu.” Yet despite the charm of the author, the reader must remain ever aware that the “Six Kumogakure Chapters” translated here are not simply a forgery, but a forgery of a forgery.
T. HARPER
1. Hidden in Cloud (Kumogakure)
It had seemed more than ample cause for new hope when Genji set forth his orders for the New Year’s festivities so much more meticulously than usual.86 But then, on the morning of the first day of the New Year, in the first quarter of the Hour of the Tiger,87 he had departed from the mansion in a wicker carriage, the inner curtains drawn and so worn from use as to evoke memories of times past.88 He had to speak with someone in the neighborhood of Tadasu,89 he said. His only attendants were Koremitsu’s son Korehide,90 who waited on him more attentively than his own shadow, and a single guardsman, one Okabe.91 They had thought it strange92 that on this of all days, when one ought to shun any hint of the inauspicious,93 he would set forth so suddenly in the dead of night. For he had been distracted and not at all his old self of late, his men could not but note to their distress. What might he be up to now? And what, they could not but worry, would be said when it was found that he had left with so meager an entourage? It was not their place to raise objections, however,94 and they simply asked whither they might escort their lord.
“There is a matter I must discuss with His Majesty of the mountain temple,”95 he [Genji] replied. “So it has come to this,” Korehide thought to himself as they made their way thither. And, indeed, when they had come within sight of their destination, he [Genji] told them, “I have decided it is time I forsook this world. I shall go deep into the mountains and live a life of austerity as a hewer of wood and bearer of water,96 as they say the Buddha himself once did. What further need have I for anyone to wait upon me? You must go back now.”
“Yet of your many retainers, Your Lordship was pleased to choose us to escort you thus far. In your service we would follow you to the ends of the earth, to the plains where tigers lurk,97 to far shores infested with crocodiles.”98 Both of his men were now in tears. “Even the Buddha himself, we are told, was attended by five of his retainers when first he forsook the world and secluded himself in the mountains,”99 they protested.
“So indeed he was,” he [Genji] replied. “Well then, dispose of the carriage somewhere. As the first of our austerities, so I understand, we must proceed on foot.” They unhitched the ox and he stepped down.
It was still dark when they arrived. The Retired Emperor was astonished. “What brings you here at this early hour?”100 he asked, delighted nonetheless to see him [Genji] after so long a separation. His austerities had left him gaunt, as slender, he [Genji] thought, as when he was a much younger man.101 For a time they could only regard each other in a state of deep emotion.
“So you’re making a clean break of it!” His Majesty then said, to which he [Genji] replied:
maboroshi no mi o shiru kara no kokoromote / yume chō yo oba sugushihateme ya
“Once one knows this body we inhabit is naught but a phantasm,
can one still go on living in this world, so like a dream?
Once I had made up my mind, the months and days passed as slowly as they do for a child.”102 Whereupon [the Emperor]:
yume no yo to omoisomuru ya murasaki no / ne sae kareno wa kaze mo tamarazu
So now you see this world is but a dream? The Murasaki withers
to the root, leaving naught to block the desolate plain winds.103
What could have moved him [Genji] to such a drastic resolve? His Majesty’s mind raced with thoughts, for even a rude mountain ascetic could not but be struck by the pity, the charm, the waste of this one man to whom the world had always looked for protection.
His Lordship was determined never so much as to mention Her Ladyship [Murasaki]; yet even now, as he [Genji] thought with regret of the undeserved taint his act would cast upon her name,104 his eyes filled with tears. Such was the true depth of his devotion to her.
It need hardly be mentioned that his people at the Rokujō mansion searched frantically for him once his absence was discovered. That the man who had been a virtual father to the whole land should simply disappear, and on the first day of the New Year—this would suffice to turn heaven and earth on end. But their search was to no avail.
Had he simply fallen ill and died, they might have accepted his loss as normal; the flowers of forgetfulness105 would soon grow. Or even if he had forsaken only public life, he would at least have announced his intention to go into retreat, a practice for which there was ample precedent both past and present—though they still might have wondered if it were not all “but a dream.”106 But this could only be a source of unforgettable grief that the Commandant [Yūgiri] and the [Akashi] Empress would never cease to lament.
The Reizei Retired Emperor’s regard, not to mention his unspoken affection [for Genji], had always been profound, and for his part, His Lordship had always discharged his duties with particular diligence when the imperial command issued from this quarter. His Majesty had, after all, learned what had happened while in mourning for his late mother the Empress.107 He had even hoped that he might somehow persuade His Lordship to succeed to the throne. He had failed, however, and now, it seemed, he was gone. His Majesty was anxious that he himself might follow in his father’s footsteps without a moment’s delay:
tarachine no oyama no mine ni iritsuki no/kage no nokoranu asaborake kana
Gone now is my parent, quite as the moon sets behind the mountain peak;
dark will be the dawn, in which no trace of his light remains.
What to do? If only he [the Emperor] might learn which mountain peak it was that concealed him. Whole days he passed in ceaseless anxiety. Unable to sleep, he lay listening to the constant chirping of the birds, which normally he found such a joy, when, while dozing, there appeared to him the image of a mournful figure at his devotions, in a place that appeared to be the temple of His Majesty of the mountain. Beside him knelt a woman of indescribable beauty and grace. It was she! She whom His Lordship never had been able to banish from his thoughts—Her Ladyship of the West Wing, her hair as luxuriant and lovely as ever. What an extraordinary woman she was indeed! Yet even as the thought crossed his mind, he awoke. “Had I but known it were a dream…,”108 he thought, despondently:
omoiki ya kono yo nagara ni wakaretsutsu / yume ni kokoro o kudakubeshi to wa
Would I ever have thought it: that having once been parted in this life
my heart should again be broken seeing him in a dream?109
Off in the mountains, the two brothers were inseparable. In the capital, there may have been those to whom it seemed that the dew settled even more heavily on the flowers of care.110 But for the Retired Emperor, Genji’s constant companionship in his devotions was a source of great delight.
Twice a year, Genji would look in at the Saga temple111 and the Rokujō estate, but never did anyone detect him.112 The Nijō mansion, which Lady Murasaki had cherished as her very own,113 he visited every month on the day of her death at the Hour of the Ox,114 there to reminisce upon the shade of she who had once lived there.
In the three years that he [Genji] had resided there, the Retired Emperor’s health declined pitiably. “This is hardly cause for wonder,” the Emperor said, “but surely it must be depressing for you to be left behind, even for the briefest while:
kusa no ue ni shibashi todomaru shiratsuyu yo / moto no shizuku o aware to mo miyo
Oh clear dewdrops, you who must yet linger on the leaves of this flower,
look with pity upon we droplets that fall from the stem.”115
His Lordship the Holy Layman116 replied:
kono hodo mo nani to ka wa mishi sue no tsuyu / kiete shizuku no mizu no aware o
“In all these years, what have you learned of the evanescence of this world?
The dewdrop, too, will soon vanish, a mere droplet of water.
What is it that has occupied your thoughts through all these years and months since you turned your back on the world? Once one has left the world behind, what reason can there be to retain any sort of attachment to it? You speak in such terribly disturbing terms. It is but the natural course of things that the Five Elements disintegrate117 and the spirit returns to dwell in the Void, where all is at one with the Dharma Realm. Only awaken to this truth, and there will linger in your mind not the least trace of attachment:
hito no yo wa nenu ni katsu miru yume no yume / matsu fuku kaze ni haraisamashitsu
This world of man, this dream of a dream that we dream without sleeping:
the wind in the pine sweeps it away and awakens us.”118
A most saintly figure he was when two or three days later he died.
Now, with naught to distract him, His Lordship gave himself up totally to his devotions. Even the news that Prince Hotaru, the Minister Higekuro, and the Akashi lady had one and all passed away, rumors of which had somehow reached him, only impressed him anew how like the flow of a river is the evanescence of life in this world and made him even more anxious to take the final step.
The New Year came, months passed, and the seventh anniversary of the death of Her Ladyship of the Western Wing came around. He [Genji] now took the tonsure:
yo no hoka no yo ni sumu kai ya ariake no / tsuki yori akuru shinonome no sora
What profits it one to live in some world other than this mundane world?
With the dawn moon comes a light as of the sky at daybreak.
Most saintly he was as he intoned this prayer. Afterward, he never left the hermitage for any reason, except, once a month, to make a pilgrimage to the peak of Mount Hie.
This year was the thirteenth anniversary of her death. Having decided he would now enter final meditation119 at a place called Shibafugatani120 in Saga, he went to pay his respects at the grave of Her Ladyship of the Western Wing. He murmured softly to himself:
toshi goto ni oisou kusa no tsuyukeki o / haraeba itodo okimasaritsutsu
Though I brush the dew from these grasses that grow every year more profuse,
the droplets only gather in yet greater abundance.
Never, it seemed, even in his present state, could he forget her. Now, when one takes vows and leaves this mundane world, what use is it to mortify oneself and dye one’s robes black if one remains ignorant of the one great truth for the sake of which the Buddha made himself manifest to this world? Indeed, it might be most unseemly to do so, as if in this guise one were trying to conceal the sins one has committed. Yet conversely, for one who is so thoroughly enlightened, what does it serve to turn one’s back on the world?
kuma no naki kokoro no tsuki no tokotowa ni / kumogakure to mo omooenu kana
Eternal and unchangingly bright the moon of an unobscured mind,
unthinkable that it might ever be hidden in clouds.121
Many were the ladies he had once cared for, including even Her Ladyship of the Western Wing, who were now but names, mementos of a vanished world.
Korehide, determined that he should not be left behind, went to his lord and humbly placed himself at his service.
“This world of man,” His Lordship said, “amounts to no more than remains of the wind that blows through the pines.” Even as he spoke, his form receded from view until he could no longer be seen. His retainers were struck speechless. And when they thought of how even birds that course the heavens slow their wings to wait for their young;122 how even a beast that roams the earth,123 while its mate flees will itself approach the hunter’s torch; how even the wind, invisible to the eye, seems to come calling at one’s lodging—at the thought of all this, the two men124 wept and wept, their heads on each other’s shoulders.125
Now that there was no one at all at the mountain temple, even those times now past evoked fond memories. He would go to the Reizei126 Retired Emperor, Korehide decided, and having done so, he related respectfully all that had taken place. Once again, His Majesty’s mind was in turmoil. “These ten years and more he lived on in this same world as I, and quite close by; yet never, even in a dream, did he tell me.” That he should be overcome was more than natural. “And when the moment came, did he say anything?” he asked. “Tell me that much at least.”
Korehide, respectfully reticent, hung back a moment before he spoke:
fuku kaze no ato mo tamaranu amatsusora ni / shibashi wa kumo no tatazumai shite
In the high heavens, where naught remains even of the rushing wind,
there lingers on, for but a little while, a trace of cloud.
2. Watching over the Nest (Sumori)
Now their days were filled with the unremitting grief of His Lordship’s disappearance. The Reizei Retired Emperor in particular had not known a moment’s respite. In the hope that he might somehow find a way to go wherever it was that His Lordship had gone, he was ever and unflaggingly at his prayers to the Buddha. He wished, of course, that he might simply forsake this world that he held in such contempt. But the First Princess127 still had no guardian and then there were the young Prince and the Second Princess, his children by the Consort,128 and both so lovely that his fondness for them made it difficult indeed to take the final step. “Oh dismal world,” he thought,
monogoto no misutegataki ni hodasarete / ware zo sumori ni narinubeki kana
Bound by that and those I cannot bear to abandon, I, then, it must be:
the unhatched egg left behind to watch over the nest.
Weak indeed was his resolve that he could still think this way. Well may the seed of Buddhahood lie in the heart of every man; but so long as it lay undiscovered, his deluded distraction must remain a source of shame before the world. How long, he wondered, could he carry on in such a wretched state? This way and then that, he turned the matter over in his mind, yet naught could dispel his melancholy. He could not help but liken himself to the proverbial thread that took on whatever color it was dyed.129 Splendid indeed, though, was the way he strove to subdue these thoughts, still so incorrigibly subject to vacillation, and persevered in his quest until ultimately he could grasp in the very depths of his mind the principle of Fundamental Void.130
His Majesty summoned the Abbot from the mountain131 and told him all that was on his mind. “Even for monks, who devote long years of austerity to the quest, it is rare to reach the level of enlightenment that Your Majesty’s mind has attained. It is quite magnificent, what Your Majesty has achieved. Surely,” the Abbot declared, a bit grandiloquently, “Surely this will bring tears of joy to the eyes132 of all the Buddhas of the Three Worlds.” At this, His Majesty took heart.
After all, having attained this highest of all ranks, he could not imagine that the sins he had committed could be too grievous.133 Still, all things are relative to rank; for different transgressions committed by those of different degree may nonetheless be deemed equally blameworthy. Even those who were revered as Sage Emperors, we are told, were condemned to the agonies of hell for the merest misstep or two.134 How much more so now, inferior creatures that we are, living in these defiled times, must the ties of delusion ensnare and deter us, thus thwarting the growth of the strong resolve we need to shun and break free from them. Once he [the Emperor] had attained this realization, his anxiety over the future of the Prince and Princesses vanished from his thoughts, and the Secretary Major135 was quite mystified to see how repellent His Majesty seemed to find the sight of the Dame of Honor of whom he had once been so fond.
“Whence cometh man, and whither goeth he?” he would chant softly, day and night. He could see that as surely as dusk gives way to dawn, each new day marched vainly to its close. His own days, accordingly, were spent in silent meditation. When his meals were offered him, he showed no desire to partake of them, yet neither could anyone see any sign that he was wasting away. He then had a lock shaved from the top of his head and had the vows administered.136 Waiting on him was the Secretary Major, who had donned the same humble black garb and was overcome with grief at what he saw. “What a joy it is,” His Majesty told him, “to escape the flames of the burning house and find the jewel hidden in the lining of my own robe.137 No cares whatever beset me now.”
The Palace Minister [Kaoru] had at length retrieved the young lady from Ono and had even restored her to secular life. He himself, he said, had certain matters on his mind and so had entrusted her to the care of Her Ladyship [his wife, the Second Princess]. All the jealous resentment that had plagued him in the past had vanished; his mind now was quite at rest. “But what might he be up to?” the Emperor and Empress wondered. “If only our royal father were here.” For they knew not a moment’s peace in their fond concern [for their daughter] and their pity for her.138
And so the passing of the reign approached; yet the Second Prince hadn’t the least desire to be named Crown Prince and succeed to the throne. More particularly, his attainments as a scholar of Chinese were, at best, faltering. “All things being equal,” he said, “the Third Prince [Niou] should be named to succeed.” “But how dare we violate the proper order of precedence?” His Majesty asked. “There are precedents even in foreign lands,” the Prince replied, “and long ago, on the accession of the Seiwa Emperor, the First Prince [Koretaka] was ten years his senior.139 Even so—not to fly in the face of fate, I suppose—he succeeded to the throne. In our case, moreover, there is no such disparity between us;140 no matter which of us is appointed, who could object?”141 And, indeed, if pressed on the matter, both the Emperor and the Empress would have admitted that this was exactly as they had for years hoped things would turn out. And so it was decided that the reign would pass to the Third Prince.
When Kaoru became Palace Minister and assumed control of the government, he commanded the devotion of those who served him to a degree that surpassed even that of His Late Lordship [Genji]. These were times, so it was felt, that would one day be seen as the very model of a prosperous reign.
On the evening of the passing of the reign, the mistress of the Nijō mansion [Nakanokimi] proceeded to the palace, where she was to be known as the Wisteria Court Dame of Honor. In the autumn of that year, in the Eight Month, when an Empress was to be appointed, it was this very lady of the Wisteria Court whom His Majesty named. Now, surely, she must have realized how extraordinary had been his regard for her all these years. The sixth daughter of the Minister of the Left [Yūgiri] was likewise accorded great distinction, she being made mistress of the Shōkyōden.
The daughter of the Prince Minister of Ceremonial was now in the service of the [Akashi] Empress Mother, where she was known as Miyanokimi.142 When the present Emperor was still the Prince Minister of War, he had taken a fancy to the Princess; but the Palace Minister, at the time still Commandant, was determined to give him [Niou] a taste of the ire he had harbored for so long and had himself made advances to Miyanokimi. For the Prince this had been disheartening, but chastened perhaps by the memory of his own behavior, he bore his friend no great grudge. Unfortunately, the Princess had borne a child, which the Minister found a most unwelcome turn of events. What had begun as an affair with a woman he had never loved, meant merely to spite the Prince, had ended in a situation that was hardly a matter for jest.143 It was in the midst of His Lordship’s disturbing ruminations on these sordid events that the Third Prince had succeeded to the throne. As there was no one among the Prince’s own gentlewomen who might serve as his Imperial Emissary,144 His Lordship, of his own volition, took this opportunity to relinquish his own claim to Miyanokimi. Mortifying though it was, she assumed the position and was thereafter known as Her Ladyship of the Third Rank.
The Minister [Kaoru] conducted himself in the most exemplary manner, according equal rank and ceremonial precedence to both [his wife] the Second Princess and the young lady from the Eastlands [Ukifune]. For this he was greatly esteemed by both high and low for his rare sensitivity. His guardianship of the Wisteria Court Empress [Nakanokimi], too, the Minister undertook to continue exactly as before, and he discharged his duties to her, both at court and beyond, with great dignity.
On some occasion, though I cannot say when, he went secretly to call at the Wisteria Court. As they talked, so easily and intimately, of times past, he found himself unable to resist the feelings that came over him:
tsukikage zo mishi yo no aki ni kawaranu o / yadoreru sode no sebaku mo aru kana
The moonlight differs not from that of another autumn we knew, yet
this sleeve is too narrow to hold the tears that reflect it.145
Hearing this brought back fond memories, and she was deeply touched:
kumo no ue ni omoinoboreru sumika ni mo / mishi yo no tsuki no kage wa wasurezu
Even in this dwelling above the clouds to which I have aspired,
never do I forget the moonlight we knew in times past.
And so it was, that even though both of them had prospered, from time to time he would still say, “If only Ōigimi were still alive…,” and never were his sleeves quite dry. Even the most ordinary people, they say, would speak with obvious emotion of what an exceptionally feeling man he always was.
3. Cherry Blossom Man (Sakurahito)146
Even after rising to such unanticipated eminence, never for a moment did the reigning Emperor [Niou] forget Lady Murasaki. “Ah,” he thought, “if only she were still in this world, now that I can do as I would wish—then I would be able to care for her in truly proper fashion. Of all the royal children, and there were many of us, it was the Princess First Rank and myself, by far, of whom she was fondest and looked after the most solicitously. Young though we were, we knew her affection for us was something special, as deep and unchanging, it seemed, as Cathay crimson. During her illness, there was a time when the incessant prayers and incantations took effect and she seemed to revive a bit. But her affliction persisted, and she spoke sadly of her regret that she would not live to see me rise in the world. ‘Think of me,’ she said forlornly, ‘when you see the blossoms at the Nijō mansion, and offer some of them to the Buddha.’147 By then, she was already looking ahead to the next world.” Even now, his faint memories of those times filled him with sorrow, and he sighed softly. Thinking it must be late, he at length had the shutters lowered, whereupon she appeared before him, no less beautiful than she had been in life—no dream was this!
“Even when you were young, I could see you were no ordinary child,” she said. “What a joy it is, now that you have done so brilliantly, to know that my attentions—for I’ve never left your side—were of some avail and you have prospered precisely as I’d hoped you might:
kimi ga atari saranu kagami no kage soite / kumori naki yo o nao terasu kana
Ever at your side, as constant as is the image in a mirror,
shall I continue to light this world of your flawless reign.”
She seemed so alive to him, so much of this world, but all in vain; for as he reached out to grasp her sleeve, he awoke. And he had not spoken even a single word to her; the bitterness of that would be a source of unrelenting sorrow to him. Though he had been but a child when he was parted from her, he had only to think of those times to recall how delicately beautiful she had been; that was an image there would be no forgetting. “…they fall without surcease,”148 he murmured softly in his grief at these recollections of times past. Yes, he decided, he would have the Eight Recitations performed at the Nijō mansion, which she had bequeathed to him. And sutras must be chanted at the temple in Saga.
Many of the prayers the Emperor himself chanted, which brought back poignant memories [of Murasaki]. Of late he had been thinking how much the Wisteria Court Empress [Nakanokimi] resembled her. Over the years, his memory of her had faded. In his dream, though, it all came vividly back to him, and he was drawn all the more to her. He went at once to the Wisteria Court. There he found her fussing tenderly over the Second Prince, who had grown to be such a beautiful boy. Flustered by His Majesty’s unannounced approach, she blushed brightly. She was as delicately beautiful as ever, and quite apart from the fact that she was the mother of so many of his royal children, he was filled with a sense of how infinitely precious she was to him. His gaze fixed upon her, and the demure discomfiture that this caused her he found unspeakably lovely.
He called for Chinese kotos, which they were playing together when her gentlewomen announced that the Palace Minister waited upon Her Majesty. “Do show him in,” she said. His accustomed seat of honor inside the blinds was prepared, and he was ushered into the presence of Their Majesties. They fell to talking of times past in the most intimate detail. As close as they were to one another, there may well have been some unspoken ties of affection among them. But really, I have no idea what may have gone on in their minds.149
“Can it be true, what they are saying,” His Majesty asked, “that you have found the girl who disappeared? In any case, I hope you’ll not hold that against me now. I was dreadfully immature back then and had my mind set on something I ought never to have done. Ultimately it drove us both to our wits’ end. But this lady here made such a deep secret of it all that I simply ached somehow to find out who that girl was. Jijū was only a child then, and when she came in saying she had a letter from out there, I snatched it and read it. That’s what got me started. People shouldn’t be so secretive as all that.” He spoke so unreservedly of his own guilt in the matter that His Lordship forgave him. Yet even now it brought tears to his eyes.
Even as a much younger man, His Lordship had been so deeply thoughtful as to put others to shame, and he hardly ever gave vent to his own feelings. By now, life being what it is, he was even more aware what a frail and fleeting thing this body is, in which we take lodging for a time. He knew now what to think of all those moments in the past that had so charmed him, the good as well as the bad.150 Indeed, he understood full well how profoundly sinful they had been, and to a degree that would put the most austere of monks to shame. To this affair, too, he now gave hardly a thought. His own lot had been but compensation for the considerable mental anguish that his father, for a time, had caused the lord of the Rokujō mansion [Genji].151 He had been made to witness this with his own eyes, he was convinced, and thus not the slightest bit of the old bitterness remained. “What is the point,” he said, “in condemning what is past? It was naught but the working out of fate.” In the end he talked about this person and that and how superbly and beautifully they had played. “And now, alas, so many of them gone…,”152 he intoned. Today, in their talk of old times, he felt as if all the old transgressions had vanished, which brought him great comfort. “Until I have the honor of another audience…,” he said to Their Majesties as he took his leave.
“The Minister has been an incredible source of strength over the years, closer, indeed, than a real brother. Even so,” His Majesty grumbled, “he is the sort of person who time and again has made me look so capricious that I’m still quite uncomfortable in his presence.”153 It rankled him to hear some of the older gentlewomen in his service whispering among themselves about “how very considerate a person the Minister always is.”
Though the Minister [Kaoru] now proceeded to the palace in great splendor, never did he forget the old villa in the mountains.154 As the years passed—for there is no halting them155—he held an imposing succession of the Eight Recitations—in the Eighth Month on the anniversary of the death of the Holy Layman, the [Eighth] Prince; in the Tenth Month for the Suzaku Retired Emperor,156 and in the Eleventh Month for the Agemaki lady [Ōigimi]. This rare degree of devotion was regarded by all as a significant precedent.
The Governor of Hitachi, too, had been the beneficiary of the Minister’s good offices and now held the title of Governor of Yamato. His wife, who in the past had been an object of derision, had now become a lady of some consequence. His Lordship, thinking it a blot on his own reputation that such a woman should be known as his mother-in-law, had installed her in a grand mansion that he had built in the northern quarter of his own estate. She declined to offer the Governor of Yamato quarters where he might live at his ease but treated him as a mere servant. This, of course, was because on rare occasions, the lady from Sanjō [Ukifune] would grace the mansion with her presence when forced to avoid directional taboos.157
The Major of the Left Bodyguards, though now over forty, remained a mere major, just as in the past. Kogimi, however, who had once seemed so far his inferior and still was only about twenty, had, through His Lordship’s influence, become an Imperial Adviser Colonel and was a Privy Gentleman of considerable consequence. Both the Governor of Yamato and the Major now deeply regretted their past. Pure gold158 she was, they now realized.
In the Second Month of that same year, hearing that the cherries, which were his keepsake of Lady Murasaki, were at their peak, His Majesty made an imperial progress there [to the Nijō mansion]. He gazed upon them [the cherry trees] in wonder, for indeed their beauty bore no resemblance to any ordinary blossoms, and their fragrance evoked fond memories.159 “‘And after they shall have fallen…,’”160 he mused,
naki kage no katami to omou hana nareba / katsu miru kara ni aware to o shiru
Since to me these blossoms are a token of one no longer with us
merely to see their beauty is to be moved to sorrow.
Wistfully he beheld them, “oblivious to the darkening day…,”161 “the beauty [of the blossoms] unchanged,”162 while his thoughts turned despondently to the past, wishing it “were something that might be turned back.”163 Suddenly, from the shadows beneath the blossoms, the shade from his previous dream appeared to him:
adashi yo to omoi na hate so sakurahito / hana no chiru chō koto no narai o
“Dismiss it not as a world of futility, cherry blossom man:
this eternal round of flowers that bloom only to fall again.
Even the Buddha, when he vanished into the clouds of his nirvana, as they say, did so but to teach us the nature of this world of mere mortals. Deep though the sea of life and death may be, and high though the waves of blind delusion may rise, still you must realize, it is all but a dream. In the end, rank and office, too, are of no avail. In this life, as well as in that to come,” she meticulously counseled him, “turn your thoughts toward enlightenment to the True Way, and let that be your companion throughout the two worlds:164
moto yori mo mumarezariseba ima mo mata / tazunete kaeru furusato mo nashi
Were one never to have been born in the first place, then now one would have
no old home, once more to seek out and thither to return.”
Then, from beneath the blossoms, her voice alone resounded to the heavens and, in a rush of wind, was swept far off into the clouds.
4. Teacher of the Law (Nori no shi)
With each passing month and day, the Palace Minister [Kaoru] grew ever more weary of life in this mundane world. Yet he now had a young son and a daughter by the Sanjō lady [Ukifune] and another son by [his wife] the Second Princess, in whom the Retired Emperor165 had taken an extraordinary interest. His lot in life had left him no cause for regret, even he himself [Kaoru] had to admit. His son by the Lady of the Third Rank [Miyanokimi] was now a Chamberlain of the Fourth Rank and on very close terms with the reigning Emperor. He had grown to be a handsome gentleman, impressive for his prudence. “Though I suspect,” he [Kaoru] had observed, “that the young gentlewomen at court may find it difficult to be at their ease in his presence.”
The Fujitsubo Empress [Nakanokimi] had borne three sons, each one of whom was so impeccably and elegantly handsome as to invite comparison with foreign courts—as even their royal [father], to his own delight, had remarked. The First Prince had taken the place of the [former] Crown Prince, who had relinquished his claim to the throne. The Second Prince, in deference to past precedent no doubt,166 had become Prince Minister of War, while the Third Prince, as Prince Minister of Central Affairs, enjoyed a very special place in the affection of the Emperor and Empress.
The tenth day of the Third Month had come and gone, and the cherry blossoms at the Southern Hall were more beautiful than ever before. “Too beautiful to let pass,” the Emperor decided, and he commanded that there be a festival of cherry blossoms. The music and the gifts evoked times past,167 and as they sang that old favorite, “My Great Lord,”168 they enjoyed themselves riotously.
That same evening, the Third Prince fell ill, and the following morning, around the first quarter of the Hour of the Tiger,169 he passed away, like the flame of a lamp that had flickered and failed. The shock left his people distraught and utterly forlorn, as if the world had lost all its color and been plunged into eternal darkness. The Emperor and Empress felt they might perish of grief at any moment, while for everyone else it was as if the earth had been pulled out from under their feet and their very breath cut off. This Prince, as it happened, had harbored a secret fondness for the Palace Minister’s daughter by Kozaishō,170 a young lady reputed to be a great beauty. The Minister thought this would make a highly desirable match and hoped that all would go as the young man wished. But his sudden death, following the briefest of illnesses, left His Lordship consumed with grief.171
In her grief, the Fujitsubo Empress [the Prince’s mother] sighed that she wished she, too, might follow the same path, and only five or so days later, she herself passed away. So great was the shock to the Emperor that he was denied even the consolation of tears.172 He would recall how in times past, in everything she did, she had been so graceful and charming. Though she knew full well how faithless he had been, she quite genuinely bore him no resentment and was determined to speak of him in only the best of terms. And if ever she did allow herself to weep, she did her best to disguise the fact and do so discreetly. There was a fetching beauty in the way that she bore her pain, for which none of the old tropes of birds and flowers offered any adequate description. If only there were some way he could see her again as she had once been. In foreign lands, it was said, there was an incense that could recall the spirits of the dead.173 “But had anyone ever succeeded in finding it and bringing it back?” he lamented day and night. When he saw the young Princes, he would murmur to himself, “those ferns of remembrance…,”174 but to no avail. Even in lives to come, there would be no forgetting his despairing grief for her. His people were struck with admiration to hear his voice as he repeatedly chanted the scriptures.
Even had this never happened, the Palace Minister knew only too well what a dream this life is. And now that he had seen just how frail it could be, he felt he must no longer continue to vacillate, even for another moment. Then he sent to His Majesty a letter filled with talk of times past:
aware yo no nageki wa izure kawaranu o / onaji keburi no sora ni kuraben
Ah the pity! For whom are the world’s sorrows any different? And yet
we watch which wisp of this same smoke will rise first to the sky.
“How wretched indeed is fate,”175 he thought as he wrote,
ochitagiru namida no kawa no hayaki se ni / okurete ima zo ware wa ukitaru
In the raging rapids of this torrential river of falling tears,
I am left behind, now but to float dismally about.
It must have pained him to go on this way, passing his days as if everything were perfectly normal. The Sanjō lady had once attained an exceptional degree of serenity, and yet, he explained to her, “I was so dissatisfied with the way things had turned out that I decided to go through with it, no matter how deep the sin it might plunge me into, and that is how it happened. But that stage in my life is now past. Such is this world, and so frail this body, that if one grows old in vain pursuits, one cannot even perform one’s devotions with as much perseverance as one would wish. I want to enter upon the Way just as soon as I can.” With no further ado he summoned the Prelate down from the mountain and talked to him at some length, even about his painfully complex personal ties.
“I had decided to concern myself no more with matters of this world, but hindrances of one sort and another arose—matters I simply could not neglect—which kept me from my goal. And now here I am. I even blocked the Way in which Her Ladyship here had reached an extraordinary level of enlightenment. I knew it was wrong, and yet I was painfully desperate to keep her with me that little bit longer. I simply could not banish the vision of what once had been, though I knew perfectly well how perverse this was. I did manage, despite myself, to calm my thoughts somewhat; yet even then, for some reason, I could not endure it, and so I did what I did just to be rid of the obsession. But now that I have seen with my own eyes such appalling disasters as these and know the ultimate extreme of grief, what is there to keep me in this world even one day longer? I’ve now come to feel that it would be just too painful to do so. I would become your disciple, as would Her Ladyship here, together with me.”
“This is noble indeed,” [the Prelate replied], “but His Majesty is deeply dependent upon you. And in times past, Her Ladyship carried such a load of resentment against certain people and the world at large that she became a nun and for a time went into seclusion. Yet as if to prove that the bond between you had not run its course, you were reunited, like the undersash in the poem.176 Nor will the fact that you will now find it difficult to leave behind your noble children,” he thought, “accord with the will of the Buddha.”
“I have often spoken to her of this of late,” His Lordship said. “But alas, the decision is ineluctable. Besides, if we remain together like this, we will only come to abhor what we did in the past. Not a trace of the old attachments now remains. If we persist in putting it off, myriad other hindrances are certain to arise.”
And so he administered the vows. “Now then, you no doubt know the gravity of these vows from what I told you in that mountain village. Waver not in your resolve. For even if the dream of enlightenment leaves no trace of cloud in the dawn sky, how much more are the divigations of the mind mere figments of fantasy,” he went so far as to tell them:
tōkaranu kokoro ni komoru nori no shi o / yama no oku made nani motomeken
That teacher of the Law, so near, secluded in your very own heart,
why was it that you sought him so deep in the mountains?177
No distance at all, he [Kaoru] realized upon hearing this. In the customary manner,178 [the Prelate] shaved only a lock from the top of her head. All that remained of her hair she herself cut, and on the paper in which it was wrapped she wrote:
tokeyaranu kokoro no soko no midaregami / sashikushinagara kezuru matsukaze
This turmoil, deep in my heart, as untamed as untended tangled hair:
I cut away, combs and all; and feel the wind in the pines.179
The Minister was delighted that he should at last have had his way. That evening they went forthwith to Yokawa, where they took vows and lavished extravagant gifts on the temple.
“Do teach me the essentials of the easiest of the Ways. There remain a few questions that I would like to clear up.”
“The True Way to which the Buddha was enlightened can never be reduced to words or described in all its fullness. But I do doubt the wisdom of seeking it outside one’s own self. To what avail are one’s devotions if even a mote remains in the depths of one’s mind? You must realize that delusion and enlightenment alike are but as yesterday’s dreams. If you will but probe the depths, is your understanding likely to be shallow?” The Prelate counseled them in a fine resonant voice with frequent meaningful glances from his eyes.180
“Alas, what hope is there for me?” he [Kaoru] thought. “Why did I never come to that realization by myself?” He felt as if a bank of mist in which he had been shrouded had been cleared away:
yo no naka ni ari ya nashi ya to iu made wa / nao wasurarenu kokoro to o shiru
So long as I should even ask whether I be of this world or no—
I see now I was still unable to forget it all.
With these words he made as if to step outside for just a moment—and vanished without a trace.
“What wearisome and painful experiences the man must have endured during his wanderings in this ephemeral world. And that his distaste should reach such heights that he would flee it all!” the Prelate mused, unable to resist a touch of envy. “What a saintly figure.” If only, he thought, he might urge this example upon the many monks in his charge.
5. A Fledgling Lark (Hibarigo)
The world was in turmoil. So painful was the loss and so great their grief that many could think of naught but how keenly they wished he were still alive.181 His Lordship, the Major [Shōshō no Kimi, Kaoru’s son by the Second Princess], was a most attractive young man whose looks were a poignant reminder of [his father in] times past. Now that he had taken such a brotherly interest in the children left behind at the Sanjō mansion,182 whose plight distressed him greatly, everyone marveled at his kindness as well.
It must have been about the middle of the Fourth Month when on his return from paying his respects at the temple in Saga,183 he commanded his guardsmen to shoot arrows into the distance,184 at which there came the faint cry of a lark as it ascended from the clumps of plume grass:
izuku o ka yado to sadamete hibarigo no / kono kusamura o nakite izuran
And where will you now call home, fledgling lark,
as you flee, crying, from this tussock of grass?
Long ago, one very snowy day, when hawking on this moor, His Lordship [Kaoru] had recited a poem in which he referred to [something said by] the Commander of the Left Gate Guards, Tokishige:185
oshinabete tsumoru miyuki o nado sareba / wagami hitotsu to kikiwabinuran
When the snow falls equally on one and all
why do you lament for yourself alone?
“Had he lived, he [Kaoru] would not be of such an age that his looks would have deteriorated. Even people who are not good looking may appear quite presentable, even in their later years.186 But what a blessing it would be if he who was so superlatively attractive were still alive.” At this bitter thought, he [Shōshō] was suddenly choked with emotion, and his tears flowed without surcease. This came as such a shock to his retainers that they, too, were left with dampened sleeves. Just then there came the cry of wild geese passing overhead:
yukikieshi ato o hakanami ware nomi ka / kumoji mo ushi to kari zo naku naru
Do I alone find it sorrowful that he vanished without a trace?
Sad, too, is this way through the clouds, the wild geese seem to cry.
Even after he had returned home, he felt as if the shade were quite close to him, and a steady stream of memories, of times past and present, filled his thoughts and made him sadder than ever. Hoping perhaps for some respite from his relentless cares, he lay down and pillowed his head on his writing box when a figure in wondrously scented ecclesiastical robes and a surplice of what appeared to be Tōgyōkin brocade187 awakened him gently.188 Who could it be, he wondered, as he looked up, only to see that it was he, in no way less handsome than in life. In what seemed a reply to [his son’s poem of] the hunt on the moor, he said:
oshinabete kari to shi kikaba suteshi yo ni / kokoro suzushiki michi motome seyo
If you accept that all is as transient as passing geese, seek then
serenity of mind in rejecting this mundane world.
But just when he wished to reply, he awoke from his dream. So he had been coursing the heavens above the moor where they had been hawking, he realized.189 How marvelous that he should be watching over this mundane world even more than before! He wished ever so much that he could obey [Kaoru’s] command to abandon this world as quickly as he could. Yet there were too many ties and cares to allow him rashly to retreat without a trace, the thought of which only made his sorrow more intense.
6. Eight Bridges (Yatsuhashi)
The reigning Emperor,190 passing his days in a state of despondency, inquired of the Venerable Keikin:191 “Numerous are the teachings of the Buddha’s dharma, each of which, in its own way, I find truly wondrous. But which of these Ways192 in particular ought I to follow, so as to attain my goal forthwith?” The holy man is said to have replied:
nani sen ni sono yatsuhashi o motomubeki / hitotsu no mizu wa kumode naritomo
“How is it that you wish to choose among these eight different bridges,
though there be but one stream flowing in myriad channels?193
Whence are we born into this world? Wither lies the way by which we may return thither? So deign you to ask in your quest for that knowledge now lost to you. Yet I implore you, seek not that which lies within your good self in some place far removed from yourself.194 The several teachings that the Buddha has bequeathed us, different one from another though they may seem, have, as he himself has taught us, but a single source. People’s desires and aspirations are as different as their faces,195 and thus the Buddha teaches through a variety of Expedient Means. Yet the Way by which one endeavors to attain enlightenment, whether one be of high station or low, can be no other than to penetrate to the very source of consciousness. The rain falls alike on all plants and trees; and though the season of their bloom may be early or late, all blossom forth in colorful splendor.196 Likewise is it with the many different teachings of the Buddha; they are like the dewdrops, having but a single hue of their own, [but appearing to differ] because the cast of people’s minds is not constant.197 The body, be it that of one either deep in sin or one exalted in virtue, ends ultimately in the same form, as dew upon the mossy path. That which knows no limits, from the distant past into the future, which has neither beginning nor end, lies within your own honored mind. If it be tied by earthly cares and attachments, then never will it escape from the Three Worlds198 but must wander aimlessly through the Six Realms.199 In the dark of night, the three thousand greater worlds200 are far removed and invisible to the Corporeal Eye.201 Yet open the Mind’s Eye202 and that far-off world of enlightenment may be seen unobstructed. So you see, there is no need for you to become a monk and relinquish your reign. Even in your present exalted position, if you just set your mind upon it, you can attain enlightenment.”
yukusue o fumishiru hito no kokoro yori / moto no michi o mo omoitorinuru
In the mind of one who walks with the knowledge of what is yet to come
lies likewise an understanding of paths trod in lives past.
These six Kumogakure volumes bring to completion The Tale of the Shining Genji. Despite this, Murasaki Shikibu, on the example of the Shiki hyōrin, gave them as a votive offering to the treasure house of Kannon.204 They are thus the legitimate property of the Bodhisattva and a valued possession of this temple. Carelessly to reveal their contents would be to trifle with the intentions of Shikibu. Generation upon generation of Superiors have treasured them and kept them secret; let their example stand as a warning to future Superiors.
KŌHEI, FIRST YEAR (1058), FIRST MONTH, ——DAY
SUPERIOR, ISHIYAMADERA
Having secluded myself in prayer and supplication at Ishiyamadera, in response thereto, at dawn, after six full days in retreat, this humble official was vouchsafed these six volumes in a miraculous vision. I there-upon read them in the treasure house. They complete The Tale of the Shining Genji, beginning to end, in every detail. How profound, how profound! Their wondrous words penetrate to the very marrow of one’s bones. I, too, have kept them secret and have given them as a votive offering to the treasure house of Kiyomizudera.
GEN’Ō, FIRST YEAR (1319), NINTH MONTH, SECOND DAY
SECOND RANK SENIOR GRADE, ACTING MIDDLE COUNSELOR
TRANSLATED BY T. HARPER
“Sumori” is the second of the two “lost” chapters, only fragments of which survive.207 The “Sumori” fragments, however, are somewhat more substantial than the “Sakurahito” fragments. The title of the chapter appears in various sources; four poems from it were selected for inclusion in Leaves in the Wind (Fūyōwakashū, 1271), a massive anthology of poems drawn exclusively from works of fiction; and another three poems are found in what appears to be a fragment of a similar anthology (the “Horibe fragment”). In addition, some of the characters in the chapter are described in the “old Genji genealogies.”208
From the poems alone, we can identify the main characters of the chapter as Niou and Kaoru, and we can reconstruct at least the outlines of one of the episodes it depicts. In the “Horibe fragment,” Niou, true to form, slips into the carriage of a woman known only as Sumori as she leaves the palace, declares his undying (but unrequited) love for her (H-1), and spirits her away to the Shirakawa estate,209 where he further protests her cruelty (H-2) and she in turn berates him for unfairly thinking such unkind thoughts of her (H-3). Leaves in the Wind, by a stroke of good fortune, also contains Niou’s poem (F-2). The woman to whom it is addressed is not identified, but we at least can be certain that we are in the same chapter at the same time and the same place. Here, however, Kaoru is the focus of attention. He, too, visits the Shirakawa estate, ostensibly to view the late-blooming blossoms of the mountain cherry (F-1). Following Niou’s poem, Kaoru addresses another poem to Sanmi, whom he has visited in a “mountain villa” (F-3), to which she responds quite favorably (F-4).
Unfortunately, these poems presuppose a reader who knows something of the story from which they are extracted, and thus they are introduced with only minimal reference to their context. Were it not for the “old genealogies”—through which we are able to reconstruct some of that context—we would have to guess, and many of our guesses would be wrong. For example, in 1943, Horibe Seiji, who seems not to have had access to the genealogies, identified Sumori with Nakanokimi, the younger daughter of the Eighth Prince in Uji. His guess was well founded, for in “Hashihime” (16:115), Nakanokimi addresses a poem to her father in which she describes herself as a sumori (unhatched egg):
naku naku mo hane uchiki suru kimi nakuba / ware zo sumori ni narubekarikeru
Were it not for you, sheltering us under your wings, weeping all the while,
I should surely have been left in the nest, the unhatched egg.
And in A Nameless Notebook, there is a discussion of “Sumori no Nakanokimi” and “Sumori no Kimi,” whom some commentators still take to be a daughter of the Eighth Prince.
From the genealogies, however, we know that Sumori no Kimi, or Sumori no Sanmi as she is called elsewhere, is the daughter of Gen Sanmi, a son of the Hotaru Prince Minister of War (G-1f, G-3g, G-5g), who may have been the boy, Jijū, who makes a brief appearance in “Umegae” (14:413) when his father sends him home to fetch some samples of calligraphy that he wants to show to Genji (G-1b, G-2b, G-3d). The genealogies further suggest that Sumori no Nakanokimi is the younger sister of Sumori no Sanmi (G-1g, G-3h, G-5h), whom the young lady in A Nameless Notebook criticizes as “lustful” for preferring Niou to Kaoru. The elder sister, Sumori no Sanmi, as the granddaughter of a prince renowned for his talent as a lutenist, has inherited his skill on this instrument and is, moreover, a great beauty. These qualities earn her promotion to the third rank and a position as teacher of the lute to the Princess First Rank (G-1f, G-3g, G-5g). They also attract the amorous attentions of the princess’s younger brother Niou, who at the time was having an affair with her younger sister (G-3h). Through the good offices of the sisters’ younger brother, Sanmi no Jijū, he succeeds in seducing Sumori no Sanmi as well, for which the boy is rewarded with promotion to First Secretary Colonel (G-1e, G-5f). Ultimately, though, she is offended by Niou’s frivolity: “The attentions of Commandant Kaoru being more sincere, her affections shift and she bears him a son. Thereafter, however, the Prince’s persistent pursuit of Sumori makes her the object of suspicion, and she goes into seclusion at Ōuchiyama,210 where the fourth daughter of the Suzaku Emperor dwells” (G-1f). There she takes the tonsure and spends her days with the Fourth Princess,211 performing her devotions (G-3b, G-5g, G-5i). Her son by Kaoru is “the last of the Genji progeny” (G-5j).
In short, the old genealogies make it clear that the surviving poems from “Sumori” in Leaves in the Wind and the “Horibe fragment” depict Niou and Kaoru in pursuit of the same woman, Sumori no Sanmi, a granddaughter of Prince Hotaru. We have here another love triangle almost analogous to the Niou–Kaoru–Ukifune triangle, except that in this case Kaoru seems to be the more successful competitor. In the “Horibe fragment,” we probably have the remains of an episode depicting Niou’s persistence even after Sumori has rejected him in favor of Kaoru.212 The first poem in Leaves in the Wind seems to depict one of Kaoru’s advances, and the last two are an exchange between Kaoru and Sumori, probably after she has moved to the Fourth Princess’s mountain retreat.213
How, then, does this fit into The Tale of Genji as we now know it? When, and by whom, was it written? Why does the whole chapter no longer exist? These questions are complex; the sources that can be brought to bear on them are meager and often equivocal, and very few scholars have made more than a cursory attempt to answer them. It is clear, nonetheless, that “Sumori” is in some way inextricably involved with the latter chapters of the canonical Genji, from “Niou Miya” through “Yume no ukihashi.” Nakano Kōichi regards both “Sakurahito” and “Sumori” not as supplemental additions to Genji but as independent tales, some of the characters of which also appear in Genji and others are new creations.214 Tokiwai Kazuko prefers to think of “Sumori” as the work of a reader-author who was dissatisfied with the latter chapters of Genji—in particular their inconclusive ending and their treatment of Kaoru—and who thus decided to rewrite this part of the work using many of the same materials that the original author used.215 But the most concerted effort to deal with these and other fragments was made by the late Inaga Keiji, and it is the hypotheses that he has wrought from them that are the most convincing.216
Inaga’s thesis is closely argued and covers many issues that would be impossible to discuss here without extensive quotations from the Genji text. Its broad outlines may be summarized as follows.
Inaga first discounts the notion, prevalent since Hakuzōshi and perpetuated by Horibe, that “Sumori” was “the work of a later author that was appended” to the canonical fifty-four chapters. Instead, he notes the close affinities among “Sumori” and “Kōbai” and “Takekawa”: the young lady descended from a prince and highly skilled as a lutenist, Niou’s amorous interest in her, and the role of the lady’s younger brother in advancing this interest, all of which suggest that “Sumori” was written not as an after-thought but as a continuation of the plot already in progress in the “Niou Miya,” “Kōbai,” and “Takekawa” sequence of chapters.217 And since the action of these chapters parallels that in the earlier of the ten Uji chapters (Inaga’s Hashihime monogatari), the question then arises why these three chapters, which many scholars consider highly spurious, were included in the canonical Genji whereas “Sumori” was not.218 The answer, Inaga suggests, lies in the even closer affinities of “Sumori” with the latter of the ten Uji chapters (Inaga’s Ukifune monogatari). The love triangle involving Niou, Kaoru, and Sumori no Sanmi is so similar to that involving Niou, Kaoru, and Ukifune that the resemblance could hardly be coincidental. Added to which, the lady being pursued ends up retreating to the mountains and taking the tonsure, just as Ukifune does. None of this would make sense as an extension of the ten Uji chapters. What is far more likely is that “Sumori” was instead the source of the Ukifune monogatari and that it was dismantled and its components recycled in the composition of the last four chapters of Genji, after which, like “Sakurahito,” it was discarded as superfluous.
In this case, however, Inaga is unwilling to venture that the author of “Sumori” might have been Murasaki Shikibu or even the author(s) of “Niou Miya,” “Kōbai,” and “Takekawa.” What we can say, however, is that “Sumori” was still found in many twelfth-century texts, that around 1200 the author of A Nameless Notebook regarded it as a canonical chapter of Genji, and that Inaga himself sees no reason to doubt that it was composed within or not long after Murasaki’s lifetime.219 Nor is this likely to be the last word on the subject. In 2008, the National Institute for the Study of Japanese Literature (Kokubungaku Kenkyū Shiryōkan) acquired a hitherto unknown “old Genji genealogy,” which is both older and more detailed than any of the previously known genealogies.220 And in 2009, Ikeda Kazuomi discovered two fragments of text that he believes were taken from a copy of the lost chapter “Sumori.”221 The unexpected appearance of these new materials has rekindled scholarly interest in “Sumori” and may yet add materially to our knowledge of this “apocryphal” chapter, which was by no means “apocryphal” to all readers in all times.
T. HARPER
H-1. As Sumori is leaving the palace, the Prince slips quietly into her carriage. The Prince:
itou itou aware narikeru kimi ni yori / nadote inochi o oshimazariken
For you, my lovely one, who detests, yes, simply detests me so,
why am I nonetheless prepared to throw away my life?
H-2. They go directly to the Shirakawa estate, where he lies down. She talks of one thing and another, trying to evade his advances. He finds the sight alluring. The Prince:
tsurakarishi kokoro o mizu wa tanomuru o / itsuwari to shimo omowazaramashi
Had I never experienced the agony of your cruelty,
never should I think false these words that I would wish to trust.
H-3. In reply, the woman:
kotosara ni tsurakaran to wa omowanedo / ika ni ika naru kokoro ni wa mishi
Though never at all has it been my intent to treat you cruelly,
how can you even imagine me to have had such thoughts?
Leaves in the Wind (Fūyōshū)223
F-1. Composed when he went to view the cherry blossoms at the Shirakawa estate, where Prince Minister of War Niou was then present. Commandant of the Right Bodyguards Kaoru:
chirichirazu mite koso yukame yamazakura / furusatobito wa ware o matsutomo
Only after I see whether your blossoms scatter or not shall I leave,
mountain cherry, though someone in the city awaits me.224 [108]
F-2. The woman talked on, evading his advances, treating him coldly; once again she was trying to concoct an excuse, and so…. Prince Minister of War Niou:
tsurakarishi kokoro o mizu wa tanomuru o / itsuwari to shimo omowazaramashi
Had I never experienced the agony of your cruelty,
never should I think false these words that I would wish to trust.
[849]
F-3. Sent, after he had returned from the mountain villa,225 to the woman who remained there. Commandant Kaoru:
akatsuki wa sode nomi nureshi yamazato ni / nezame ikani to omoiyaru kana
In the mountain villa where at dawn my sleeves were soaked, how fares she,
I wonder; does she awaken sleepless in the night? [1393]
F-4. In reply, Sanmi of the house of the Princess First Rank:226
matsukaze o otonau mono to tanomitsutsu / nezame serarenu akatsuki zo naki
Ever hoping that he will come to call upon the wind in the pines,
never comes there a dawn when I’ve not lain awake, sleepless. [1394]
G-1. SHŌKA (1257–1259) GENEALOGY227
a. Prince Minister of War Hotaru [Hotaru Hyōbukyō Shinnō]: Formerly known as the Viceroy Prince [Sochi no Miya]. Appointed Minister of War on the occasion of the Emperor’s progress to the Suzaku Palace in “Otome” [14:66].228 His death is mentioned in “Kōbai” [16:33]. He was deeply in love with Tamakazura.
b. Chamberlain [Jijū]: In “Umegae” [14:413], he is the person dispatched from the Rokujō mansion by his father the Prince to fetch the calligraphic specimens.
c. Daughter of the Prince [Miya no on-kata]: Her mother is the Makibashira lady; daughter of Higekuro. After her father the Prince [Hotaru] dies, her mother takes her to live at the home of the Inspector Grand Counselor [Azechi Dainagon], Lord Kōbai [16:33]. Prince Minister of War Niou shows particular interest in her.
These next four persons do not appear in the standard text.
d. Gen Sanmi: An accomplished player of the lute, which he learned from his father the Prince. After his first wife dies, he lives an austere life. His present wife is a sister of his first wife. She was formerly the wife of the late Vice Minister Middle Counselor [Suke Chūnagon].
e. The First Secretary Colonel [Tō no Chūjō]: His mother is the daughter of the Fujiwara Middle Counselor [Tō Chūnagon], formerly Captain of the Palace Guards [Hyōe no Suke]. He was an intermediary in the affair between his elder sister Sumori no Sanmi and Prince Niou. He lives a most pitiable life. His present wife is a sister of his first wife. She was formerly the wife of the late Vice Minister Middle Counselor [Suke Dainagon] [sic].
f. Sumori no Sanmi: Same mother, enters the service of the Princess First Rank [Ippon no Miya], awarded the third rank for her accomplishment on the lute. The Prince Minister of War has an affair with her, but she is offended by his frivolity. The attentions of Commandant Kaoru being more sincere, her affections shift and she bears him a son. Afterward, however, the Prince’s persistent advances make her the object of suspicion, and she goes into seclusion in Ōuchiyama, where the fourth daughter of the Suzaku Emperor dwells. She was a woman of beauty and a superb player of the lute.
g. Second daughter [Nakanokimi]: Gentlewoman to the Princess First Rank.
G-2. GENEALOGY ATTRIBUTED TO SHIMIZUDANI SANEAKI229
a. Prince Minister of War Hotaru: Formerly known as the Viceroy Prince, appointed Prince Minister of War on the occasion of the Emperor’s progress to the Suzaku Palace in “Otome.” His death is mentioned in “Takekawa” [16:105]. He was deeply in love with Tamakazura.
b. Chamberlain: In “Umegae,” he is dispatched from the Rokujō mansion by his father the Prince to fetch the calligraphic specimens.
c. Sumori no Sanmi: A lute player. She appears in “Tenarai.”230
d. Daughter of the Prince: Her mother is the Makibashira lady, daughter of Higekuro. After her father the Prince dies, her mother takes her to live at the home of the Inspector Grand Counselor, Lord Kōbai. Prince Niou shows particular interest in her.
G-3. EVERYONE, GREAT AND SMALL, IN GENJI MONOGATARI231
a. Prince Minister of War Hotaru: Formerly known as the Viceroy Prince. Appointed Prince Minister of War on the occasion of the Emperor’s progress to the Suzaku Palace in “Otome.” His death is mentioned in “Kōbai.” He was deeply in love with Tamakazura.
b. Of the sons and daughters of the Suzaku Emperor, the Fourth Princess: When the Retired Emperor went into seclusion, she entered the service of the Reizei Emperor, but perhaps because he took little interest in her, she rejected the mundane world and went to live at Ōuchiyama.
c. Commandant Kaoru—his son: His mother is Sumori no Sanmi.
d. Gen Sanmi: In “Umegae,” where he is called the Chamberlain, he is dispatched from the Rokujō mansion by his father the Prince to fetch the calligraphic specimens.
e. The young lady [Himegimi]: Her mother is the Makibashira lady, the daughter of Higekuro. After her father the Prince [Hotaru] dies, her mother takes her to live at the home of the Inspector Grand Counselor, Lord Kōbai. She is a “reserved” person, “but not at all timid in nature or manner.”232 Prince Niou shows particular interest in her.
f. The Colonel [Chūjō]: His mother is the first wife [of Gen Sanmi], the daughter of the Fujiwara Grand Counselor [Tō Dainagon]. He was formerly known as the Captain of the Palace Guards [Hyōe no Suke].
g. Sumori no Sanmi: Same mother. After Prince Niou’s clandestine visits, she enters the service of the Princess First Rank, [daughter of] the Akashi Empress. Because she plays the lute so marvelously well, she serves as a teacher to the Princess and rises to third rank. She is the object of Commandant Kaoru’s affections.
h. Senji: Same mother. Formerly Chūnagon no Kimi. She, too, is a gentlewoman to the Princess first rank. She has an affair with Prince Niou, but when his affections shift to her elder sister, the Second Prince takes up with her.
Fujiwara Major Counselor
Wife of Gen Sanmi: Mother of Sumori no Sanmi.
Princess First Rank: This is Senji.
Wife of the late Viceroy Middle Counselor [Sochi Chūnagon]: Same
mother as the wife of Gen Sanmi.
G-5. A LITTLE MIRROR OF GENJI GENEALOGY234
a. Prince Hotaru [Hotaru no Hyōbukyō]: The Fourth Prince, by Lady Shōkyōden. Called Prince Sochi [Sochi no Miya] when he sings “Autumn Winds” in “Momiji no ga.”236 At the time of the Emperor’s progress to the Shujaku [sic] Palace in “Otome,” he is called Minister of War. He is still alive in “Maboroshi” but dies in “Kumogakure.” He has only three children.
Hotaru
b. Chamberlain Third Rank [Sanmi no Jijū]: An accomplished player of the lute, which he learned from his father the Prince. In “Umegae,” he is dispatched from the Rokujō mansion by his father the Prince to fetch the scrolls.237
Hotaru
c. The two younger Princes, who thereafter dance “Myriad Years” at the rehearsals for the celebrations238 in “Wakana, ge” [15:269]. They are the sons of the fifth daughter of the Nijō Minister [Tō no Chūjō].239
Hotaru
d. Apparently only the youngest of the young ladies [Himegimi] is a child of Makibashira. After her father the Prince dies, she goes with her mother to Kōbai’s home. She was “reserved,” it says, “but not at all timid in nature or manner.” Prince Niou is interested in her and makes overtures through Taifu, her younger brother.240
e. Hotaru’s three grandchildren are the Colonel [Chūjō], the elder sister [Ōigimi], and the younger sister [Nakanokimi], all children of the Chamberlain.
Chamberlain
f. Of these children, the First Secretary Colonel [Tō no Chūjō] was formerly a Captain of the Palace Guards [Hyōe no Suke], but through the good offices of Prince Niou he was made a Colonel of the Bodyguards [Chūjō].
Chamberlain
g. The elder sister enters the service of the Princess First Rank and becomes teacher of the lute to this lady, for which she is raised to third rank. Niou makes love to her, but she seems to have found his frivolity unseemly. Kaoru visits her in secret and her affections shift to him; she bears him a son. Depressed, however, by the gossip that Prince Niou’s subsequent annoying attentions arouse, she goes into seclusion in Ōuchiyama, where the fourth daughter of the Suzaku Emperor dwells, and with whom she spends her time at devotions. This, it seems, is Sumori no Sanmi. She was a woman of beauty, it says, and a superb player of the lute.
Chamberlain
h. The younger daughter, the young Princess, was in the service of the Princess First Rank. Niou visited her secretly, but his affections shifted to her elder sister Sanmi. Thereafter, the Second Prince, a son of the reigning Emperor, visited her. She is the last of the progeny of Hotaru.
i. The Fourth Princess was a Dame of Honor [Nyōgo] to Renzei [sic], but he took little interest in her. Resentful of this treatment but telling no one, she went into retreat at Ōuchiyama and cut her hair. Her mother, too, it says, had been a Dame of Honor before she died.
The last of Genji’s line is the reigning Emperor, a son of the Akashi Empress, followed by:
j. Kaoru’s only son, it says, was borne by Sumori no Sanmi. He was the last of the Genji progeny.
TRANSLATED BY T. HARPER
(Yamaji no tsuyu)
“Yamaji no tsuyu” is a noncanonical final chapter to The Tale of Genji in which a few loose ends of the plot, left hanging at the end of “Yume no ukihashi,” are tidied up—at least partially. The narrator, however, in an introduction reminiscent of the opening lines of “Takekawa,” insists that “Yamaji no tsuyu” is by no means a fictional sequel to Genji; that, in fact, it is an eye-witness account of what passed between the “real” Kaoru and Ukifune after he learned that his love was alive and living in Ono. “Yamaji no tsuyu” in no way advances the plot of The Tale of Genji. It nonetheless can be read with pleasure as a collection of imaginatively conceived and consummately executed vignettes depicting the reunion of Ukifune with her brother, her mother, Ukon, and Kaoru.242
As with most of the Genji apocrypha, we have no definite idea who wrote “Yamaji no tsuyu” or when. At first, the failure of the ladies in A Nameless Notebook (ca. 1200) to mention the title, as well as the absence of any poems from the work in Monogatari nihyakuban utaawase (1206) or Fūyōwakashū (1271), led naturally to the assumption that it postdated all those works. And the fact that the first mention of the title appears in a Genji kokagami attributed to Kasannoin Nagachika (d. 1429)243 only strengthened this assumption. In 1802, however, in his bibliographical compendium Gunsho ichiran, Ozaki Masayoshi (1755–1827) mentioned a “tradition that this is the work of Sesonji [Fujiwara] no Koreyuki” (d. 1175). Masayoshi offers no source for or substantiation of this “tradition,” nor has any been found since his time. But his brief mention of it inspired a twentieth-century scholar, Hon’iden Shigeyoshi (1908–1983), to explore its implications. Hon’iden found no evidence to suggest that Koreyuki himself was the author, but concluded that Koreyuki’s daughter, Kenreimon’in Ukyō no Daibu (1157?–1233?), may well have written “Yamaji no tsuyu” around 1188/1189. If he is right, this raises the interesting possibility that “Yamaji no tsuyu,” like A Nameless Notebook, is another work written by a woman who grew up in the house of a Genji scholar. As the descendant of the renowned calligrapher Fujiwara no Yukinari (972–1027), Koreyuki probably would have possessed a copy of the Genji text that was considered to represent most authentically that of Murasaki Shikibu, and his collected marginalia constitute the first “commentary” on Genji.244 His daughter would have been well equipped to undertake a project of this sort. Hon’iden’s thesis is based on numerous lexical and stylistic similarities between “Yamaji no tsuyu” and Kenreimon’in Ukyō no Daibu shū that he sets forth in detail in the introduction to his edition of the apocryphal chapter.245 He notes, too, that Ukyō no Daibu would have experienced both life in Ono and a fire in the city like that described in “Yamaji no tsuyu.”246 None of this amounts to proof positive, of course, but as a circumstantial case, the evidence is quite persuasive.
Two lines of texts of “Yamaji no tsuyu” survive: the “printed text line” (kanpon-kei), so called because it was printed as a supplementary volume to E’iri Genji monogatari in 1654, and the “manuscript line” (shahon-kei).247 The printed line is the fuller of the two and is generally considered to represent the original form of the work more accurately, whereas the manuscript line appears to be marred by the loss of a fold of two pages from a no longer extant text that later copyists have attempted, ineptly, to repair. Inaga Keiji, however, proposed a more complex and potentially interesting explanation of the discrepancies between the printed line and the manuscript line. He noted first that the earliest extant copy of “Yamaji no tsuyu” has an entirely different title, “Sumori.”248 As we have seen, this is also the title of a once canonical but no longer extant chapter (or set of chapters) that, Inaga suggests, may have been dismantled, rearranged, and expanded to form the basis of the present ten Uji chapters of Genji. The love triangle involving Niou, Kaoru, and a young lady (Sumori) descended from a prince resembles the story of Ukifune far too closely to be coincidental. In addition, the lady being pursued by these two men extricates herself from this impossible situation in precisely the same manner as Ukifune does. She retreats to the mountains and takes the tonsure. At this point in the narrative, The Tale of Genji ends. In the lost chapter, “Sumori,” however, the story continues. The heroine in the mountains, now a nun, is visited by Kaoru, which is exactly what happens in “Yamaji no tsuyu.” The fragments from which we know about this visit are too slight to prove a relationship between “Sumori” and “Yamaji no tsuyu.” But the fact that the oldest copy of “Yamaji no tsuyu” is entitled “Sumori” strongly suggests that this may be an expanded version of the story of Kaoru’s visit to Sumori, a reworking of materials left over from the Uji chapters that still bear the title of their source. Unfortunately, Inaga died before he was able to explore this hypothesis further. For the time being, then, the genesis of “Yamaji no tsuyu” must remain an open question, but one in which, one hopes, future scholars will take an interest.
T. HARPER
This that follows concerns the progeny of the Shining Genji, the Commandant Kaoru by name, which makes me painfully reluctant to reveal it lest this seem merely a sequel to that tale. In fact it is nothing of the sort. This is the testament of one who saw with her own eyes all that passed when the Commandant discovered his lady living in Ono, one so moved by their dreamlike moments together that she could not rest until she had somehow set it all down in writing. I doubt she had any intention of showing it to anyone else. But then, while briefly away from home, the lady herself passed away. In sorting through all the writings she had accumulated, trifles though they were, so as to have them remade into sutra scrolls for the benefit of the poor woman in lives to come, this was found. It is nothing of any great merit, yet it does reveal what ultimately became of the girl we have so long wondered about. For this, perhaps, it may have seemed sufficiently interesting to preserve.
He had not known a moment’s peace since he had heard those whispered rumors of the whereabouts of his vanished drake fly.249 Thereafter, he had several times sent her brother in search of her, but the boy had always returned no wiser than before.250 In this pitiable state, more tormented than ever, he would rehearse yet again in his memory all that had passed, both before and after she had gone.
The depth of his affection for the departed elder sister [Ōigimi] had been anything but ordinary, so much so that at times the burden had become difficult to bear. Still, he had waited patiently in the hope that she might one day relent. The anguish he felt when those hopes were dashed would be difficult to forget even in lives yet to come. His only consolation was in those moments when he would yearn for a glimpse of her, even if only in the smoke of that incense so famous in foreign fable.251 And then her face and form, so lovely and so like that of her dead sister, would sometimes make him wonder whether it was she whom he had loved. What had possessed him? he would wonder, as fondly he recalled those moments. Why, even now, was his longing still so painfully acute? Despite his best efforts, he knew he was powerless to help himself.
He had tried one way and another to quell these misgivings, but what was he to do? In the year or more that he had believed her dead, he had at least managed to carry on in the belief that nothing further could be done. Now, hearing this news, he found it excruciating to be unable to ascertain whether it was all a dream or, in fact, real. He resolved to go to her himself, in secret.
The taboo at the palace was to lift today. Dressed to perfection for his appearance, he proceeded to the quarters of [his wife] the Princess. She was wearing a russet gown lined in willow green and, over it, a robe of aster mauve, a combination she wore with great grace. There could hardly be a more elegant figure than she who reclined at his side, her hair flowing over her robes, not a strand out of place and impeccably trimmed at the tips. Yet her beauty only made more intense his memories of how easy and amiable had been the lady who had disappeared.
Her hair, too, had been at the very height of its beauty; and now it was cut short! She had weighed on his mind of late to the exclusion of all else. What, he could not help but wonder in bewilderment, had become of his resentment of that distasteful affair of hers? His feelings for her had never been shallow. But the shock of that incident, coming so unexpectedly, had made him doubt he could ever again trust her. Yet when she disappeared without a trace, the state of agitation in which he found himself was not one he could readily quell. There were, of course, encounters of various sorts with other women. But—was he still in the grip of that perverse attachment that had plagued him from of old?—these three sisters were the only ones for whom he felt any special attraction.
With the Prince’s wife [Nakanokimi] he had remained on particularly close terms, while she for her part looked to him as a trusted friend. But over the years, both of them had risen to great eminence, and their prominence in the public eye now permitted them even fewer of those long evenings of reminiscence than in the past—which left him only the more inconsolable and unable to forget her of yore.
Yet why should he not have this one whose face so naturally reflected hers? Incorrigible, he had from time to time hinted casually at his feelings for this exquisite creature, only to be left feeling like the poet at Abandoned Crone Mountain.252 There could hardly be another substitute, he realized, who resembled her as perfectly as this woman did. And the thought of that only exacerbated his bitter regret for his mistake of the past.253
At Ono, she had given herself over with unflagging zeal to her devotions, surpassing even those nuns who were several years her senior and developing a profound sense of dedication to her calling.254 To the old nun, so moved by all she was seeing, it seemed that this indeed must be the life for which she was destined. She said as much to the Prelate when he came down from the mountain. He nodded and, after a moment, said, “This is indeed a rare accomplishment. In the case of the Commandant, even the most inept monks were inspired by the hope that they might emulate what they had seen in him. But a woman, pursued by a man of such intense devotion; well, I regret to say, I could not help but feel that, no matter how sincere the motives with which she sought us out, she was bound to regret the step she had taken. What a wondrous thing that her mind remains so untroubled. How touching this must be even to the Buddhas of the Three Worlds.” She looked so young and so pretty as she turned away in embarrassment at his grandiloquence. Could she truly have been meant for this life of mortification? the old nun wondered to herself, trying to hide the tears that welled up as spontaneously as if she had been the girl’s real mother.
No longer was she so downcast as she had been at the outset. The floating bridge of dreams, now behind her, had in the end withstood the winds. She had found the pearl in the hem of her own robe;255 she had found tranquillity; and now, she realized, it had been her “guide to this village.”256
As autumn deepened, the moan of the wind and the pale glow of the moon grew ever more affecting. Sleep anywhere would have been but fitful on these long lonely nights; but here, where gusts from the mountain beat against the brushwood gate and the deer cry longingly through the night for their mates, she was denied even the brief respite of dreams. Inevitably memories rushed back, but saddest of all were those of her mother. She had always striven to do at least as much for her as for an ordinary child, in return for which she had caused her endless disappointment and worry. How must she have felt when, just as all seemed about to go as she had hoped it might,257 I disappeared without a trace? That she might learn, through some rumor carried on the wind, that this was what had become of her was too painful even to contemplate. And that he who had loved her258 would now know everything—how wretched if that should be the cruel fate she would have to endure. Still, should she be permitted something to show for having lived as long as she had, she would wish that she might just once more see her mother. But she could never bring herself to come out and meet the messenger [her brother Kogimi] who had made his way over the mountain path. Nor could she even come up with words to compose a message for him to take back. Such was the state of despondency in which she passed the days. Yet it seemed that the boy must have known from the start. Why had he not told their mother? It was all too mysterious and unsettling.
The Commandant had not been well of late, and in the throes of the commotion caused by the frantic concern of his mother the [Third] Princess, his thoughts had for long been distracted from matters in that other quarter. The myriad elaborate incantations seemed to have taken effect, though, and his illness subsided apace. Still, he continued to take advantage of his lingering indisposition as a pretext for not venturing forth.
One pleasantly uneventful day, as he lay lost in thought in his private quarters, her little brother came to call. He summoned the boy to his side. “While I’ve been ill, there have been so many people about that it’s been all but impossible to do anything, but it is terribly frustrating not to know where she might be. You must go out there straightaway. And this time, may I say, it would be most unspeakable if you were to return as ignorant as ever.” Taking the letter that was proffered to him, the boy set out while the sun was still high in the sky. Yet though he rode as fast as his horse could be driven, it was already growing dark when he entered the shadow of the mountain.
Out there, with naught else to distract her, she was, as usual, sunk in reverie, when one of their people came into the room and whispered something to the nun, who was quite taken aback by such an unexpected turn of events at this hour. “Please,” she said in a voice full of pity, “Please speak to him yourself. He’s no one you have to behave formally with, and think how unpleasant it must be for him, left out there, at such a distance.” At this, the others chimed in: “Poor thing, he’ll never get to see enough of her, the wretched way she treats him,”259 all of which made her feel perfectly miserable. And, indeed, when the nun sent someone to tell him, “This way, please,” as she always did, he came forward and knelt at the edge of the veranda.
The nun moved out closer to him. “I’m sure it must be embarrassing to both of you to have to listen to a meddlesome old woman carry on about how you’ve come over the mountain path so many times with nothing to show for it. But for whatever reasons, it would distress her for anyone to discover her here, and it distresses me to see her in such a state.” With almost pitiable charm he replied, “I’ve been told this time not to return without an unequivocal reply.”
When the nun, speaking now in tones of great seriousness, relayed his appeal, the girl put her things in order.260 Deeply reticent though she was, she nonetheless knew that with inquiries thus far advanced, her mother might soon learn everything, and it pained her to think how she might feel to find she had been kept in the dark by her own daughter. Often she had wished she could somehow get word to her before it came to this. Now she was quite beside herself.
“Do come in,” the nun Shōshō was saying as she ushered the boy into the room. The other nuns slipped out of sight. The boy was overjoyed as he handed her the letter he had brought and gazed at her. Such an exquisitely slight creature she was and not in the least changed from the image of her he carried in his memory. And then he noticed her hair, which was not as it had been. Suddenly it all seemed a bitter dream, and he broke down in tears. The young lady, too, could not but recall all those events of the past that she had long forgotten. Above all, she longed to ask what had become of their mother, but she simply hadn’t the words to express the wish.
Finally, after a time, she collected herself. “When I disappeared, everyone must have thought I was indeed dead, but this seems to be the cruel fate for which I was destined, for somehow, to my amazement, I survived. For days it felt as if I were in another world. But then, as one does, I gradually grew calmer, and as I did, I began to worry myself sick about Mother…” With which she broke off.
“After you disappeared, she was almost insane with grief. It looked very bad. But the Commandant did everything he could to console her. She is always saying what a comfort it is that he should deign to look after the likes of her as kindly as he does and that this is what saved her life. But of course she is still in a daze. She just doesn’t seem her old self anymore. When I heard about you, I wanted to tell her immediately. But the Commandant warned me time and again that I mustn’t tell anyone just yet. So I wasn’t able to tell her.” It was a sorrowful speech and spoken in so childlike a manner.
“Oh, how dreadful,” she said. “I didn’t want him to know, under any circumstances. How ever did he find out? This is just miserable. Tell him it turned out it wasn’t me after all; make up something like that.” That, he knew, was virtually impossible.
“But even in this wretched state,” she went on, “I do want to see Mother again. Here, give this to her in secret.” She took out a letter from beside her screen and handed it to him.
“But what will His Lordship say,” he said as he inserted it in the fold of his robes, “if there is no reply to his letter? Do please let me have something to take back to him, even just a line or two.”
“Oh, that’s outrageous,” she replied, a bit resentfully. “You’ve really changed this last year or so. Can’t you bring yourself at least to conceal my shame from him and tell him there’s been a mistake?” The boy lowered his eyes, utterly unable to speak.
She had never had much to say or been very forthcoming; that was just her nature. It was touching therefore that, to him at least, she was willing to reveal a bit of what she really felt, the result, no doubt, of their having been inseparable from the time they were children.
“How can you possibly return this evening?” said the same somewhat oversolicitous, and now commiserating, woman who had shown him in.
“Yes,” the nun said, “how indeed? These mountain roads are steep and dangerous. Even someone who knows them well could easily go astray. Please, do stay over, at least this evening.”
“How can I stay when His Lordship has told me to return as quickly as I can?” the boy said. “In the moonlight, the way will not be hard to find.”261 The other nuns were murmuring approvingly among themselves about how very grown up he was. And, indeed, he did inspire considerable confidence, having come with an escort of fully armed archers, in anticipation of a long night’s journey.
The night was far advanced when he arrived, and all the gates had been locked. Well then, he would go home for the night, he thought; but that, he realized, could prove troublesome, for his mother was sure to ask where he had been. No, he had the good sense to realize, he should first report what he had heard from the girl and only then speak to his mother. Yet to knock at the gate would attract far too much attention. For a time he simply stood there, at a loss what to do, whereupon there arose a tumult of voices, apparently people in a great panic. Hardly had he time to wonder what might be the matter when flames burst forth and smoke billowed into the air. He was shocked to realize that the fire was very close by, in the immediate vicinity, and he set his men to beating on the gate.
The night duty gatekeepers, too, had just then discovered the blaze and were bustling around as quickly as they could, opening the gates.
“Why was this locked?” the boy demanded.
“His Lordship had forgotten that this was a day of abstinence,” the man replied. “We had to lock up immediately.” But now their precautions had come to naught. All the men in the guardhouse were up now. “Well, didn’t you get yourself here in a hurry!” one of them said, which greatly amused the boy.
Word had spread of a fire near the mansion, and the night now reverberated with the din and bustle of the horses and carriages of those come to inquire after the safety of its occupants. The blaze had spread dangerously, but then suddenly the wind shifted to another quarter and the mansion was saved. Everyone marveled at what a miraculous escape it had been, and then, en masse, they departed.
The fire had been dreadful, but before very long, it had burned itself out. Calm returned, the crowds dispersed, and soon all was as still as if nothing had ever happened. Traces of dawn appeared in the sky, and His Lordship, drawn by its beauty, stepped out into the gallery. It was then that he sent for the boy.
“I waited up until late last night,” he said. “When did you arrive?”
“It was during all that confusion that I came.”
“How did it go? I can’t bear to think that you might carry the same dismal answer.”
In the boy’s memory, there arose the image of his sister, so genuinely forlorn as she asked him to say that she was not to be found. Touched and disturbed, for a moment he hung back. But ultimately, he knew, the secret would come out. To lie would be wrong. He told every detail of what had happened.
His Lordship had lately heard reliable reports to the same effect, but somehow he could not bring himself to believe they were true. To learn that this was indeed how she felt both astonished and crushed him.
“She has become a nun,” the boy said. “I hardly recognized her, she looks so different.”
“Did she seem—distant?”
“She was—just the same.” The boy was weeping, his face in his hands in an attempt to hide his tears. His Lordship was overcome with emotion at the sight.
“And the letter she told you to deliver?” The boy produced a small, tightly rolled bit of blue-gray paper, a strangely affecting sight in itself,262 which made His Lordship only the more curious about its contents.
“I’m a terribly ill-mannered fellow, aren’t I?” he said with a smile as he made to open the letter. “How is it that even I have come to stoop this low?”263 It was clearly the same hand, but noticeably unsteady, the flow often broken.
itoitsutsu suteshi inochi no kieyarade / futatabi onaji ukiyo ni zo furu
This life I wearied of and tried to cast away refuses to perish;
again I go on living in this same dismal world.
mayowaseshi kokoro no yami o omou ni mo / makoto no michi wa ima zo ureshiki
Yet when I recall the darkness of the heart264 in which I once wandered,
what a delight it is now as I travel the True Way.
It distressed him deeply to read this. Even as he struggled to control his feelings, tears welled up to wet his sleeves. In the pale glow of the dawning sky, he was unutterably handsome. The sight of him overcome with emotion was most fetching, and the boy gazed in wonder at the splendor of it. What a pity, he thought, and what a waste that she has done this pointless thing when His Lordship so obviously yearns for her.
“For the moment, I think, this can wait. I have something in mind. You can deliver it tomorrow or the next day,” he said, still grasping the letter. “This may seem rash, but I will go to her tonight in secret. Have everything in readiness and report to me this evening.” The boy winced as he thought of how his sister would feel, but of this he could say nothing. He bowed in assent and took his leave.
He would depart at dusk, in a woman’s carriage of the most inconspicuous sort. Where the road entered the mountains, he switched to horseback. Shrouded in the evening mists, the way was very hard to find, but guided as much as anything by deep determination, he pressed on. He felt, strangely enough, that at this point there was little sense in what he was doing; yet driven by the desire at least to reminisce with her about those dreamlike times long past, he hurried on to his destination.
In a sky swept free of drifting cloud by the rushing wind, the moon rose bright and clear, lighting the way for his thoughts, he mused, as they raced on a thousand leagues ahead of him.265 He was determined that he would leave no cause for regret. The farther into the mountains he went, the more dew drenched was the way, but it made a scene of great beauty as his outriders brushed away the dew, their garb, humble though it was, in perfect harmony with the setting.266
There at the foot of the mountain stood the tiny dwelling. First he sent the boy ahead to check on the state of things.
“The gate, such as it is, seems to be locked, but where the bamboo fence runs, there seems to be a path they use to go in and out. You can enter there; there’s no sign of anyone nearby.”
“Wait here a moment, and don’t make a sound,” His Lordship told them; then he went on alone.
The flimsily constructed brushwood fence, though much the same as any other, held for him a particular charm and attraction. The door to the veranda was open, from which he surmised that some of them might still be up and about. Keeping close to the rank growth in the garden, he drew near and hid himself in a thick clump of evergreens that stood almost under the eaves. His vantage seemed to be somewhere near the altar, for the scent of fine incense permeated the air and wafted out into the garden; and just inside the room, there seemed to be someone at her devotions. The soft rustle of a scroll being rewound, heard so close at hand, touched him with such poignancy that suddenly, without warning, he felt on the verge of tears. He watched, transfixed. Presently, she seemed to have completed her devotions, for he heard her say, as if to herself, “How bright the moonlight!” She lifted a corner of the blind and gazed enrapt at the face of the moon. The sight of her profile brought a fresh flood of memories of the girl as she had been in times past that overwhelmed him with emotion. In the moonlight that flooded in on her, she appeared, from what could be seen of her sleeves, to be wearing blue-gray over russet,267 a captivating combination. And the gentle sway of her trimmed forelocks and her eyes;268 they were exquisitely beautiful. Yes, he thought, she was in some ways even more delicately beautiful than before. To watch her was almost more than he could bear. She stayed a moment longer, gazing at the moon, and then went within. In a soft voice, suffused with tears, she spoke as if to herself:
sato wakanu kumoi no tsuki no kage nomi ya / mishi yo no aki ni kawarazaruran
The moon in the heavens that shines alike on each and every village:
can its light be the only thing unchanged from autumns past?
It was a scene so touching that even the most sober of men would have found it impossible to quell his emotions, and he replied:
furusato no tsuki wa namida ni kakikurete / sono yo nagara no kage wa mizariki
To the moon that shone on that village of old I was blinded by tears;
of the light it cast on the rest of the world I saw naught.
As he spoke, he moved swiftly to her side, which gave her such a fright that she thought he must be a ghost or a goblin. She recoiled in horror and attempted to flee into the house, but he caught her by the sleeve. At the sight of this tearful figure,269 she realized that, yes, it was he, and her fear gave way to shame and chagrin. If indeed it had been some specter, it would at least have been beyond her power to save herself. But that he should discover she still lived! It was just too dismal. She had tried her best to think of a way to mislead him. Now she had been discovered, and there was no escaping him. Utterly helpless and touchingly forlorn, her tears began to flow.
How could he ever tell her of all his misery and anguish? Where should he begin? “I was in such a state when I heard, as I understood it, the news of your death that I was simply dumbstruck. Then later, to hear of the ghastly way it had happened—that was even more upsetting. Yet another instance of the uncertainty of this world, I took it to be. When I had only her [Ōigimi’s] death to lament, I could still find some solace thinking of her as I gazed ‘at the morning rains, the evening clouds.’270 But with this new thing [Ukifune’s death] to weigh upon my thoughts as well, I felt I could hardly go on living. Then someone told me everything that had actually happened. It seemed to be a dream. How could this be so? Now I was so perplexed that it seemed I was myself wandering in a daze, from dream to dream. But how was I to divine whether any of these dreams were true? Can’t you comprehend at least a bit of the grief I endured? In any case, the gods and buddhas seem to have taken pity on me for making my way through the dew on that mountain path over which my yearning drew me—for never did I imagine I would again be talking to you as I am now. For once I am delighted to have gone on living this worthless life.” He went on at some length, for he could never hope to convey all that he felt. She was, of course, deeply touched by much of what he told her, but to speak was more than she could do. She only wept, with great dignity and delicacy.
“Yes,” he went on, “I must admit it hurts me terribly to be abandoned like this. I have for long known how fickle life can be. But given the depth of my own love for you, I was convinced there could be no one else so enamored of you, that I must be the only one, which no doubt only aggravates this foolish resentment that I feel.” His veiled allusion to that painful incident271 filled her with shame, and she felt more than ever at a loss for words. Yet to let it pass as if she hadn’t even noticed would surely seem strange.
nagaraete aru ni mo aranu utsutsu oba / tada sono mama no yume ni nashite yo
This life that I still lead, living yet not living, real and yet unreal;
pray think of it as no more than in itself a mere dream.
Her subtle attempt to put him off made him think affectionately of how little she had changed. Perhaps it was the result of what she had learned from all she had been through, but he felt that she had grown more gracious and considerate than she had been in the past, more charming and mature. How very like the lady he had lost, he thought. But how perfectly extraordinary, that notion of hers! However excruciating the turmoil of these past months may have been, now that he was with her again, there was no way in the world he could force himself to consign her to the realm of dreams.
omoiidete omou dani koso kanashikere / mata ya ukarishi yume ni nasu beki
When I recall those times, if even the mere thought itself is painful,
how, then, can I now dismiss it as but a dismal dream?
His love for her was truly profound. Indeed, no one of even the slightest sensitivity could have remained unmoved by the sight of him trying to wipe away his tears as inconspicuously as he could.
His feelings for her were unchanged from of old, and the appeal of this she found so moving and so difficult to resist that, were she anyone but herself, she knew, she would not hesitate to heed the Prelate’s advice.272 Still, he made no attempt to go within. He sat there decorously and continued to converse tenderly of all that still filled his mind.
“For you to go on in your present state is a sin. Why couldn’t you have remained as you were until we were able to meet just once more?” But of course, his attempt to change her mind only caused her pain.
From the peak that rose almost immediately before them came the eerie moan of the wind in the pines mingled with the cry of the hart. The dew-drenched clumps of grass in the garden at which they gazed glistened as if sprinkled with jewels while the moon that shone in the clear sky seemed to wear a look of sorrow at the advent of autumn, all of which, added to the waning cry of the insects, created a scene of almost overwhelming beauty.
Any meeting of lovers who meet but rarely is bound to be fraught with emotion, but what of one who has lost all hope of ever gaining a clear glimpse of his love in this life, even in a dream—and then finds himself face to face with her? How can his feelings be anything but overpowering? He was certain that no one could ever again feel as he did. From his sleeves as he wiped away the ceaseless flow of tears, rose a scent of unearthly fragrance. No words could describe the pristine beauty of the scene as the moonlight flooded in upon them.
Despite all she had been through, the woman understood well how he felt, and her replies were, for the most part, earnest and affectionate. Yet never once did he transgress the bounds of propriety, which struck her as rare indeed, and made her, if anything, even more susceptible.
Meanwhile the same old busybodies were peering pruriently at them from a crack in the shutters of the wing opposite.
“Whatever will he think of the way she looks?”
“After all that other dismal business, it is a pity she’s got herself up in such a shabby way.” He appeared to be sitting just inside the gallery door, for they could catch only a glimpse of the hem of his trousers protruding from beneath the blind. This threw them into a none-too-attractive flutter of delight.
“What a splendid figure, not like other young men nowadays. And how considerate of her he is.”
“And that scent on the wind is uncanny, as if from another world.”
“Yes, it must be the very scent of sandalwood that the Buddha tells us of in his sermon.” Throughout the night, oblivious to the time, they lingered out of sight behind their shutters, whispering to one another.
“They’re still right where they were.”
“Oh, he does seem to love her so!” Their impertinences, it must be said, were quite disgraceful.
Sensing the approach of dawn, he prepared to leave.
“I try to tell myself that this dreadful depression and melancholy of yours is the recompense for my own wretched fate, but that makes it no less painful to endure. For long, I, too, have inclined in a religious way; thus your present state impresses me only the more. I do hope that in this new and very different intimacy between us, we shall not grow apart. But I must see to it that you are moved to some place less remote than this. When the [Eighth] Prince was still alive, I was quite attached to the old villa in the mountains; but after that dismal incident, the very name of the place became so repellent to me that I’ve let it fall to ruin as never before.273 Never, though, has the dawn left me so worn with care as today. These sleeves soaked with dew in the depths of night—I wonder if you realize what makes them so?
omoiyare yamaji no tsuyu ni sobochikite / mata wakekaeru akatsuki no sode
Pray pity them, these sleeves soaked with dew on the mountain path, and again
to be soaked as at dawn we part and I wend my way home.”274
How could this expression of distress, or the depth of his emotion, ever have been feigned?
tsuyu fukaki yamaji o wakenu hito dani mo / aki wa narai no sode zo shioruru
Even so is it for one who plies not the dew-drenched mountain path;
tear-soaked sleeves are but the commonplace stuff of every autumn.
“Quite so,” he said, “but you belittle my feelings. I mean to write to you in all sincerity, so this time you must answer and not leave me in suspense. That would be too distressing.”
With this oft-repeated injunction, he hastily took his leave, lest he linger until too unseemly an hour. His hunting costume, though far beneath his station, he wore with such simple charm that surely she must have been touched as she watched him set off through the dew-drenched tufts of grass.
No sooner had morning come than the nuns who had been so curious about that intimate scene in the presence of the Buddha hurried around to the place where he had sat. The fragrance that lingered there set them raving with delight.
“It’s a rare scent that permeates her purple trousers now that he’s brushed them with his sleeve.”275 Their prattle, all of it terribly pretentious, was painfully irritating. But then, even people of the capital never ceased to marvel at how uncommon a scent it was. Small wonder that such minds—for whom so unremarkable a man as Chūjō, the nun’s son-in-law, seemed the shining light of their village—should now be so astonished.
The young lady, vaguely embarrassed by all that had happened, did her best to seem absorbed in a sutra, no sooner than which, a letter arrived. As usual, she refused to look at it.
“Now that is a bit childish,” said the nun, and she opened the letter and showed it to the girl. It was written on stiff, pale-blue Chinese paper.
tachikaeri nao koso madoe nagaki yo no / yume o utsutsu ni samashikanetsutsu
“I return, yet wander still in the confusion of that long night’s dream,
for never can I wake from it into reality.
I am more bewildered than ever this morning, yet despair of telling you all that I feel. At this point I would have expected a particular sensitivity of you. Yet you remain as cold as ever before, which seems to me anything but pure of heart.”
She was extremely chary of replying precipitately and dismissed the matter from her thoughts, but the nun chided her sharply.
“It would be most inconsiderate when he has written to you in so seemingly sincere a manner. Indeed, it could seem to him that you are putting on airs.” Hearing this, she broke down in tears. In the margin of his letter she scrawled:
sono mama ni mada waga tama no mi ni sowade / yume ka utsutsu ka wakare dani sezu
Quite the same as ever, my spirit resides no longer within me;
be this a dream or be it real, even this I know not.
It was in state of great emotion that he awaited her reply. Should she hastily choose a paper the color of which alluded pointedly to her changed condition, what then? Surely that would belie the truth of the matter. Then again, a delicate paper of a more alluring shade would, at this point, hardly make an appropriate impression. But the casual manner in which she dashed off her reply in fact reminded him that in the past, too, he had noticed with approval her attention to just such small details as these.
That past, he could now see to the delivery of her letter, which he still held.276 “But how painful,” he said, “to think of that old woman going into raptures of delight, with all her people there to hear everything.”
Yet there was the woman known as Ukon. Although Jijū had gone almost immediately into the service of the Akashi Empress, Ukon, he had heard, remained stricken with grief and was living in seclusion in a poor quarter of the city. He had been touched by this, for he knew her to be a mature and dependable woman. He sent word that she should come quietly to him and, with his message, sent robes of fine fabric. Utterly delighted, she came immediately. In manner and appearance she had always stood out from her peers; yes, a comely woman, His Lordship thought.
The Ukon who had waited on Yūgao lacked even the presence of mind to respond to [Genji’s] “smoke as clouds” poem.277 This Ukon, however, not only was young and attractive, but also seemed never at a loss in matters of this sort. He gave not the least hint of the dreamlike news that he was to impart to her. But then, when no one was around, he seized the moment to summon her to him. What could compare with the feelings of his listener when he related his tale? Small wonder that she was utterly astonished.
“I, too,” he said, “could hardly imagine what might have happened. At first I laid the blame entirely on the roar of the river; but then, the person who, by a strange stroke of luck, had discovered her told me that it must have been the work of a malign tree spirit and that she had suffered unremittingly long afterward.278 That old estate, I thought, would be just such a place. But it appears from her letter to her mother that she herself had grown weary of life, yet, against her will, found herself wandering about, still alive. What actually happened, I’ve no idea. But surely one who saw what went on at the time would know better what to make of it.”
“At first,” she replied, “as I’ve told you, she was so distraught that she did nothing but weep night and day. From time to time she would get up and go to her devotions, so as to lighten the burden of sin she would carry to the next life. Then she would break down sobbing, ‘How I wish I could die.’ After she disappeared—without a trace, as I thought, and indeed until this very moment—I never doubted that she lay at the bottom of the river. Certainly the poem that she wrote on that scroll279 gave the impression that she had finished with life. But yes, what did in fact happen?” she said, weeping bitterly.
“Mount Tsukuba280 will be in hysterics. What a dreadful uproar there will be before she manages to get control of herself. The boy is by no means imprudent; still, I think it would be best if you were to go with him to keep her quiet, lest she spread the whole story around. It is difficult enough to keep any secret, even if one is careful to tell only one or two others. If this gets out to all and sundry, and the Prince [Niou] hears about it, then anything could happen, which at this point would do no one any good.”
Straightaway she ordered her carriage, and in great haste they boarded it and set off. She stopped it a short way past the gate and told the boy, “You’ll alight here, and this is what you’re to say.”
“Now what’s all this,” his mother said when he had spoken his piece, “announcing yourself as if you were some grand gentleman?281 Just come on in.” They went to the family’s private rooms, which to eyes that had last looked on that splendid palace seemed utterly bereft of grace or charm. As it happened, the Governor, too, was at home.282
“To what do we owe the honor of so unexpected a visit?” the mother said. “I must say, you grow more handsome every time I see you. And when I think how kind His Lordship the Commandant has been, looking after all of us who were related to her. If she were still among us, I am sure we’d now see her settled in comfort. Oh, but it does break my heart!” She burst into tears, at which the Governor himself rambled on.
“We are most grateful for His Lordship’s solicitude. The joy his favor brings us is far beyond anything we in our station have any right to expect, though I have neglected to say as much lest I seem presumptuous. If ever you have the opportunity, pray convey our very best to His Highness.283 When I see how he goes out of his way to treat us so kindly, merely for the sake of our late young lady, I cannot help but marvel that we are still so privileged as to bask in the glow of his favor. How much more so might it be if she were still among us. It’s such a great pity. And His Lordship the Commandant’s gentlewoman, if I may say so, is looking very grand indeed. I would hardly have recognized you as the girl we once knew.” He rambled on thus for some time and then left the room. From the way the mother and the Governor spoke, they seemed to pride themselves on the girl’s connections even after her death.
By now, the others in the room had dispersed, and the conversation became somewhat more intimate. Ukon drew nearer.
“I’ve come because there is something I must tell you in confidence.”
The woman flew into a panic. “Whatever might that be?”
“It was precisely to caution you against outbursts of this sort. The details of the matter Kogimi himself will tell you.”
“Oh come now,” she replied, “nothing my son might have to tell me is likely to be of any consequence.”
The sheer absurdity of the woman brought a broad smile to Ukon’s face. Without another word, she produced the letter and handed it to the woman. Mystified, she opened it as quickly as she could. But it was not at all the sort of thing the significance of which one might grasp in an instant, and she sat for some time staring at it blankly. But the hand was unchanged, and as she examined it, the truth gradually dawned upon her. Why of course, it was from—her! The shock of her discovery was beyond comparison.
“How can it be?” she said, and then collapsed in a heap on the floor. It was all exactly as she had anticipated, Ukon thought sadly.
“It would be very bad if the others were to hear you carrying on like this. His Lordship insisted that I warn you to be calm and act as if nothing had happened. This is why I have come to you.” She tried every way she could think of to cajole her, and after a time the woman did manage to collect herself and sit up again. Still, it was hardly surprising that she should remain in a daze, wondering whether it were all a dream, or what.
The boy, for all his youth, gave his mother an excellent account of all that had happened, from the very beginning. She was stricken with grief, and her tears welled up until there was no containing them.
“So she is still alive! Then I simply must see her, now, without another moment’s delay!” Small wonder she should be burning with agony.284
“Of course,” Ukon replied, “but the girl is nowhere nearby. If suddenly you go rushing off into hiding without a word of where you are going, the Governor is sure to come looking for you. Be patient for just a day or two, and then make as if you are setting off on an ordinary pilgrimage to Hatsuse. The best thing would be for you to go to her sometime the day after tomorrow.” Halfheartedly she nodded assent, though she could not begin to imagine how she might endure the anxiety of the next two days. A pitiful sight she was, with tears streaming from her eyes.
Her common old waiting women were aware, though only dimly, of the scene in the next room, but how could they have guessed what was actually afoot? Madam had been unpredictably prone to tears of late. It must have seemed likely to them that all this talk of the Commandant’s kind concern had been enough to upset her yet again.
“I’ll not fail to accompany you there,” Ukon promised her repeatedly. “Indeed, I’d be dreadfully disappointed if you were to leave me behind.” When she finally had to depart, the woman was left with the boy as her sole companion in conversation and source of consolation, and she kept him constantly by her side.
“Now tell me, how was she—everything you know. And how does the Commandant feel about all this?”
“His Lordship never indulges in idle talk or jest, yet never have I seen him as concerned as he is now. I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw him weeping so hard he couldn’t take his sleeve from his eyes. For all your rolling about on the floor, I’m sure he is far more affected than you.”
“Now see here!” She could not but smile at the boy, though it did nothing to diminish her painful sense of the futility of it all. Her daughter had become a nun. And that meddlesome old woman, her nursemaid, never did recover from her grief. In the end, she had become sick and, this past spring, died. If only she could have lived just a little longer, she thought back sadly.
As Ukon had instructed her, she told her people that she would be making a pilgrimage to Hatsuse. That same evening she sent for Ukon, and very early, even before the night had given way to dawn, they hastened on their way.
At Ono, they first sent in the boy [Kogimi] who had guided them to announce their arrival. The girl’s mind was in such turmoil that she was helpless to do anything but weep. The nun, ever indomitable, tidied up an appropriate room for them and ushered them in. The young lady would have to appear in her habit, but she at least had her change into robes that were fresh and bright.
“I must say it’s a sad sight to see these drab shades on a girl like you,” she said, her own tears now beginning to flow.285 “I shudder to think how someone who has never seen you in them before will feel.” Yes, what would her mother think, the girl began to wonder, and she became so downcast she could scarcely move from the room.
“Come now,” the nun urged her, “you wouldn’t want your mother to think you don’t want to see her.” From the central sliding panel, before which stood a curtained screen, she emerged, inching forward on her knees.
Her mother, when at last she caught sight of her [daughter], was so overcome that she could hardly think and only sobbed uncontrollably. It had not been so very many months, but already the woman had wasted away to a mere shadow of her former self. Such a pleasant-looking woman she had been (if a bit too plump); now even her face was changed, almost beyond recognition. “And all because of me!” the young lady thought, and suddenly, filled with a sense of her own guilt, she wept bitterly. To Ukon, the sadness of the scene as she had imagined it now seemed as nothing before the sight she actually beheld, and her own eyes darkened with a fresh flood of tears.
It seemed an eternity before either was able to utter a word. At length, through stifled sobs, the mother spoke. “How I have managed to survive until now—on the verge of death as I’ve been—is a mystery to me. Had I died, I would never have seen you today. Why couldn’t you have sent something—even just a hint on the wind—to let us know how you were? It’s been so dreadfully painful! If I could have seen you just once as you were then, it would have been some consolation, but now that you’ve become a nun it upsets me more than ever.” On she went until she collapsed on the floor. Well aware how right her mother was, the girl was too abashed and choked with tears even to reply.
Wanting to know everything that had happened from the very start, the mother turned to the nun and said, “I’ve come here so upset by this nightmarish situation; I do wish you’d be so kind as to tell me about it.”286
Quite so, the nun thought as she faced the woman; it could hardly be mere chance that had brought them together this first time.
“So then,” her guest said, weeping as she spoke, “how was it that you discovered her? In the wretched state she was in, she would surely have fallen to ruin. I shall never be able to tell you, in this life or the next, how grateful I am that you were kind enough to take her in.” The nun proceeded to tell her, from the very beginning, though not in full detail, just what had happened.
“All through the Fourth and Fifth Months,287 she hardly seemed alive. Indeed, we had all but given up hope. But just when we were thinking that any day we would see the poor creature die before our very eyes, our prayers and incantations seemed to take effect, for, praise be to the gods and buddhas, she came around as we see her now. Ever since then, the joy of looking after her has been a great solace to us in the dreary life we lead here. Yet we’ve never had even the slightest notion who she was or where she came from. Now and again, we would try to ask her what it was she was hiding, but this seemed to cause her such pain that we never pressed her.288 We knew, to our constant distress, that such a lovely creature could hardly be any common person. But how terribly distressing that you have sought her out only to discover that she’s become a nun.”
The mother wept inconsolably. “I have several daughters, but this girl was different. From the time she was a child, she’s had no one else she could depend on, and I’ve tried my best, day and night, to see that she should have as good a match as any of the others. And all for naught. She abandons me, doesn’t leave so much as a body behind; so then what? Bereavement is something we all must experience, for such is the way of this world. But imagine, if you can, the agony of unknowing added to it all. To ignore all my best hopes and plans and hide herself away—and both of us still alive in this world—truly a case of ‘not a fraction of the love a mother has for her child.’ It made me feel so painfully bitter. I suppose it’s only natural that she should turn in disgust from someone as worthless as me. All the same, it does seem a pity that I couldn’t have seen her again as she was before. But what does all that matter now? Just the joy of seeing her again—and so unexpectedly—when I had thought her dead and gone. That makes up for everything.” And on and on she went.
“Yes, indeed, how very much it must,” the nun said, now in tears herself. “Even after she had recovered somewhat, she continued day and night in the most dreadful despond, with never a moment’s respite from the torment. When she did speak, which was very seldom, it was only to drop some hint of—well, this. I always told her what a great shame, indeed how wrong it would be. But then, perhaps, she’s only done what she’s been fated to do. Since it was I who had looked after her from the very start, I decided I really must make a pilgrimage to Hatsuse to pray for her.289 At the time, I suggested, very gently, that she might like to come along, but she seemed to feel it would be too much for her, and so, reluctantly, I left her behind. It was just then, as it happened, that my brother the Preceptor290 came down from the mountain, and she pleaded with him, all in tears. Now, even for a monk he is a frightfully severe man, but it was he who granted her plea. When I saw what had happened, I was utterly aghast; I hardly knew where to turn or what to do. So I can imagine only too well how much it must grieve you. And the gentleman who came in search of her: he, too, it seemed to me, cared very much for her. It must have been a terrible disappointment to him to find her in this state.” These women had a great deal to say to each other.
In the meantime, Ukon drew near to the girl and asked, “Just what was it that happened?”
“There was nothing I could do. I hardly felt I was alive, I was so dreadfully depressed,” said the girl, who had never stopped weeping. Ukon was deeply touched. Even old and ugly women look wonderfully rejuvenated when they put on the habit, she thought. But it only made her seem even more helpless and frail, like a little child. And the sight of her hair—once so abundant and now cut short yet spreading more luxuriantly than a five-fold fan,291 so that the tips were even lovelier than before—only plunged her into a dark depression.
“Why on earth did you do this?” Ukon asked. “When I was waiting on you, why, I never would have dreamed that you were contemplating anything so dreadful. And to think that you kept it all to yourself! From the time we were children, your Ukon has been utterly devoted to you; I would have followed you anywhere. And all for naught. If only you could have let me give him some small hint; that’s what really hurts.”292 She was sobbing helplessly.
[Ukon] went on to talk about the Prince [Niou]. “He seems to have taken on in a way that was embarrassing to see. But before long, I heard, he was back to his old amorous ways, as much the rake as ever; it was pathetic.293 His Lordship, however, took it all so calmly that he appeared positively chilly, but in fact it touched him so deeply that there was never a moment when you were out of his thoughts. He was even so good as to seek me out and take me in. And all, it seems, because he thought of me in connection with you. I’m terribly grateful to him. When no one was around,294 he would summon me to his side and talk about all those things that still weighed on his mind. ‘When she was alive,’ he would say, ‘I must not have inspired much confidence in her. Yet could anyone have been more steadfast? My feelings for her have remained the same throughout. But this habitual diffidence of mine can make me look terribly shallow in the eyes of others.295 But no matter. Who is to tell her now? Were there some wizard who could convey my thoughts to her,296 she might even now realize how I feel, but…’ It was such a pitiful sight when I waited upon him in moments like this.” The girl’s mind was in turmoil, overwhelmed with both pity and shame. So in fact, his feelings for her were quite deep! How strange, she thought, that she could be so capricious as to be taken in, even slightly, by the Prince’s outward charms. How utterly depressing. Ah well, this could hardly be the recompense for one life alone. What right had she to blame it on anyone else? It was her destiny to drift aimlessly through life, and that alone had been the cause of that sordid affair. All the misery that was now her lot, she concluded sadly, was simply the recompense for countless lives past; there was no escaping it.
Sitting here with someone from her old home, who had long thought her dead and gone, listening to tales that took her back to a world she had long since left behind, she felt as if she were listening to the story of a dream. How could it not but strike her as strange and sad? Yet as long as she might go on living, there were bound to be more and more of these encounters, which made it only the sadder to recall her old nursemaid, who had fretted over her right up until that very last evening, and then, heartbroken, had died.
Since their guest was to stay the night, the nun had an elegant basket of food prepared, full of fruits and nuts seldom seen in the capital, all beautifully arranged. Unable to sleep, the woman and her daughter talked on and on, and the long night passed in what seemed no more than a moment. Much still remained to be said, they both felt, when at dawn the lady had to leave.
“Despite the distance, we do, after all, inhabit the same world,” her mother said, still in tears. “I really must see that you are moved someplace that will not be such a worry. Do you remember that rather rustic lodge [in Sanjō], where you hid yourself away from time to time in those days? It’s quite a large place. I could have it done up nicely and move you there. But then His Lordship the Commandant says we’re to keep this a secret; that does make one hesitate. But how is anyone to know? I think we can do it all very discreetly.”
It was wrong, the girl knew as she listened, all wrong! But her tearful reply was only evasive. “I don’t wonder that you find this depressing. But it would be most improper for someone in my condition to forsake this retreat in the mountains, which it’s my duty to endure, and to go to live in plain sight of everyone again.” Her profile as she averted her face was inexpressibly beautiful, yet to her mother only the more distressing to see.
“But even if it is in the capital, why would there have to be so many people about? I could have them do it up just like a place in the mountains.” There was something touching in the woman’s efforts to persuade the girl that all would be to her liking. She then produced a wealth of silks and damasks. Some, of course, were for the young lady’s wardrobe, but to the nun, too, she gave extravagant gifts, which set her raving with delight. To a nun, unaccustomed to such largesse, who lived such a chaste life, gifts of this sort seemed dazzling.
“I am quite at a loss,” the mother sent in to the nun, “to express my joy and my gratitude for all that you’ve done. But somehow, when next I make my way up this mountain path and my mind is more composed….” The nun and all the lesser nuns soaked the sleeves of their dark robes with tears to think how touchingly regretful and sad the woman must feel.297
Ukon, for her part, wished to remain right there with her mistress.
“But how,” the girl said, “how ever could you live shut away in such a forsaken place as this? No, it will never do!
aranu yo to omoinashitsuru yama no oku ni / nani tazunete kite sode nurasuran
In the depths of these mountains, this world apart where I have found refuge:
why should you seek me out, only to soak your sleeves with tears?”
Ukon, deeply troubled, said:
tachikaeru nagori dani kaku kanashiki ni / nagaki wakare to omowamashikaba
If even the lingering regret of returning can cause such grief,
how must I feel to think this may be the longest of partings?
“I wonder whether we shall ever again witness such extraordinary events,” the nun said. “With so many such unexpected comings and goings, this mountain path may make quite a name for itself. And I can’t help feeling that, all things being equal, it may ‘grow only the more so.’”298 As she spoke, the nun came out and slid closer. As their sleeves grew wetter, even the long road the mother had traveled came to seem quite unreal to her. Her joy, her astonishment, even what the nun had told her about what the malign spirit had said and about their guide on the road to Hatsuse, she treasured. Now weeping, now smiling, the mother chatted with Ukon on their way home.
Yet as they made their way down the road and she watched even the mountains that surround the place fade into the distance, she grew more and more forlorn. Back in Ono, an air of sadness lingered, and the young lady, to distract herself, gave herself over to the performance of her customary predawn devotions.299
At dusk, Ukon proceeded to her lord’s mansion. It was a tranquil time when fewer of his people were around than was usual. He sat near the veranda, the blind rolled up, whiling away the time playing his flute. Then he caught the sound of her voice as she spoke softly with his gentlewomen. He summoned her by name and asked how it had gone. In reply, she related in great detail all that had taken place. And when she told him about the girl murmuring, “Why should you seek me out?” this touched him with particular poignancy, and tears welled up in his eyes. Yes, he thought, she would think that. Perhaps, were she still unchanged from of yore, he might not have been so stricken. But now he was only the more painfully moved. Not a moment went by when she did not weigh upon his mind.
The Prince, too, had never ceased to look back on those days. No, on many occasions he had mused, there could be but few like her in this world. Yet she was by no means the only one to occupy his thoughts. His old nature had again come to the fore,300 and it had not been long before he had gone in pursuit of Miyanokimi. As always, their affair blossomed for a time, but lately he seemed to have lost interest in her. His affection for the mistress of his own mansion was as strong as ever, so much so, indeed, that it must have inspired the admiration of everyone. His Lordship the Commandant, too, was as constantly attentive and considerate of this lady as ever in the past. A rare thing, she knew well.
The young Prince grew steadily more handsome. Even in a large family, he would have had special attention, but in all this time there had been no others, and he had become the sole object of his parents’ hopes and affection. His future seemed assured. The Emperor and Empress had expressed their desire to see their grandchild, but the young Prince being still childishly shy, his father had not yet presented him to Their Majesties.
Oh, and yes: His Lordship, having been promoted Commandant of the Left Bodyguards and, at the same time, appointed Palace Minister, seemed more radiant a figure than ever. The Princess, his wife, however, had been feeling out of sorts. Her nurses and gentlewomen knew at once what this meant, and when they told their lord, the news brought at least a small measure of cheer to brighten his joyless existence. His mother [the Third Princess], needless to say, was delighted, and she added forthwith to her round of devotions a plethora of prayers for safe delivery.
At Ono, the endless succession of dreary days dragged on, and then it was winter. Even in the capital, there had been a great deal of snow and hail, while here it had “snowed upon snows not yet thawed.”301 As she gazed out at eventide toward the road that wound through peaks buried in layer upon layer, the wisps of smoke that trailed ever so faintly above the snow left her with a feeling of inexpressible loneliness and desolation. No “peak of Fuji”302 this, but yes, these must be those mountain folk, the charcoal makers of whom one hears.303
sumu hito no yado oba uzumu yuki no uchi ni / keburi zo taenu ono no sumigama
From amid the snow that buries the very homes of those who live here,
the smoke of the Ono charcoal kilns rises without surcease.
It was a time when the dark gloomy days, so familiar in this season, had lingered longer than usual, and even the footprints of the mountain woodcutters had vanished from the scene. Then came the sound of the shoes of a messenger who, to their amazement, had somehow forced his way through to them. Her people went out to see who it might be.
“In these days,” he had written, “when even the capital wears an air of gloom, I wonder how you fare?
ika bakari nagame waburan kakikurashi / yuki furu koto no ono no yamabito
How downcast they must be as they gaze out at the falling snow
that darkens their lives these days, the mountain folk of Ono.”
That he should send someone all this way, and at just this time, deeply touched her. She took some care with her reply.
tou ni koso ato oba mitsure shirayuki no / furiuzumitaru mine no kayoiji
Only because you sent to inquire could I even see it was there,
the road through the peaks buried far beneath white falling snow.
Her feelings, expressed so openly, moved him almost to tears. He sat gazing at her letter, unable to put it down.
Well then, just how was he to manage this? Her situation was entirely of her own choosing. And yet, even now he wished he could do something for her, if only to console himself for all that time spent devoid of any joy worth remembering. But she herself seemed unwilling to consider any dwelling that might be frequented by great numbers of people. Indeed, even in times past when no one could have objected, she had remained in that forsaken place [Uji] lest there be talk. If now she were to come out in the world, the gossip would in every way be devastating. Yet how excruciating to have her shut away in that hermitage up in the mountains. What should he do? He had had his heart set on building a proper retreat in the hills nearby and moving her there secretly. But with everyone making such a fuss over the Princess, and the countless prayers and incantations that went with it, none of his most competent stewards from any of his estates had a moment to spare. It was an awkward time; even the slightest hint of his plans might arouse an uproar of criticism, he told himself, as incurably cautious as ever.
As the year drew to a close, bustle and confusion prevailed, leaving no one any time to regret its passing; but His Lordship, at least, was unruffled by it all. He had written to the lady in the mountains, lest she feel forgotten, and had sent, in the guise of gifts from Ukon, great quantities of everything he thought she might need for the New Year. To the nuns, living as frugally as they did, this seemed more convincing evidence of his concern than the fact that he had not failed to think of them in their most trying moments and had sent his messenger through snow and hail to inquire after them. For the lady herself, it was painful to hear them go on so.
Her mother, too, had overlooked nothing and had sent gifts to the nuns as well, who regarded this with properly reverent joy, as succor for the poor sent at the behest of the Buddha himself. One can imagine, then, how their humble servants raved about the munificence of their lady and rushed about doing whatever they could for her.
The nun, too, busied herself night and day looking after the girl, for to her this was a source of solace in her life and a ray of light in her mountain retreat. But this largesse, so munificent that it might fill Treasure House Mountain, she could explain only as the Buddha providing for her, far beyond her needs, in both this life and the next.
On a quiet evening His Lordship the Commandant went to call on the Prince Minister of War. The Prince, he was informed, had just gone to Rokujō,304 and so he proceeded instead to call upon the mistress of the mansion [Nakanokimi]. To the soft rustle of robes, a sound that never failed to delight him, he was offered a cushion.
“Since when,” he sighed, “am I not allowed within the blinds? Bitter compensation, this, for my years of devotion.” Someone must have reported what he said, for he then heard the voice of Shōshō.
“You are quite right not to let this error of an ignorant person pass unchastised. I would hope, though, that on ‘the hunting ground of Ono,’ I should instead get to know you better.”305 She then lowered the blinds of the main hall and ushered him in.
“That was a bit harsh,” he said. “And your admonition is quite uncalled for. I am always asmolder.” The faint smile that came over his face as he spoke was infinitely alluring.
Presently, there were signs that the Princess was about to appear, and he adopted a more formal posture.
“It is a pity,” he said, “that the Prince is out just now. But I did hope that I might be granted the honor of, as the common folk seem to call it, a ‘once yearly audience.’306 What a delightful opportunity His Highness’s absence provides.”
“Yes, it does seem a bit forlorn, doesn’t it, when the end of the year finally…” Her subtle evasion charmed him into wishing he might hear what else she might have to say.
“And how futile,” he replied, “the way we rush about, ushering out the old year and seeing in the new, as if we were oblivious to where it all leads as they pile up upon us.” He drew close to her, and they talked, as always, in the most intimate detail of times past and present, but he revealed nothing about the hermitage at Ono.
Ultimately, though, they would have to talk to each other about her. Were he to say nothing whatever and she were later to find out, it would create a distance between them that could prove painful. She herself could not have been ignorant of those strange goings-on at the time of her sister’s disappearance, yet she acted as if she knew nothing. For him, too, there were certain matters he was loath to discuss. Were he to try to pass it off lightly, pretending that there had been only some distressing little incident, that would hardly strike her as credible. This wasn’t the sort of thing he could satisfy her with vague hints of. If once he were to start, it all would have to come out. Yet even if he were to tell her as a matter of confidence and she were not carelessly to reveal it, still, if he were to speak openly of it in the Prince’s own household, what if someone hidden from them should happen to hear? In his reluctance to speak lingered some of the old enmity, still unresolved.
TRANSLATED BY T. HARPER
Notes
When the mother of Kanetada Ason died, it was decided that Kanetada would go to the house of the [now] late Biwa Minister of the Left, and her daughter would be placed in the service of the Empress, and I was sent along at the outset to take them both to the Biwa house. The nursemaid in the service of the mother of Kanetada Ason:
musubiokishi katami no ko dani nakariseba / nani ni shinobu no kusa o tsumamashi
Were not at least this child left behind as a keepsake,
what then would there be by which to remember her?
Sent to someone with plum blossoms he had plucked. [Ki no] Tomonori:
kimi narade tare ni ka misemu ume no hana / iro o mo ka o mo shiru hito zo shiru
If not you, then to whom might I show these plum blossoms,
for only one who knows will know their hue and fragrance?
sode hichite musubishi mizu no kōreru o / haru tatsu kyō no kaze ya tokuramu
The frozen waters that once wet my sleeve
may well melt in the breeze of this first day of spring.
On the first day of the Third Month, after a secret conversation with a certain person as rain poured down, he sent this to her. Ariwara no Narihira no Ason:
Oki mo sezu ne mo sede yoru o akashite wa / haru no mono tote nagame kurashitsu
Having passed the night neither rising nor sleeping,
I spend the day in reverie, a very thing of spring.
awazu shite koyoi akenaba haru no hi no / nagaku ya hito o tsurashi to omowamu
Should day break after this night kept apart from her, then for long, as long
as this spring day is long, I shall think her obdurate.
koishinaba ta ga na wa tataji yo no naka no / tsune naki mono to ii wa nasutomo
Should I die of love, whose name shall then be sullied;
protest though you may that it be but the uncertainty of life?
In the Second Month on a bright moonlit night, when a number of people spent the night sitting up and talking, the Palace Attendant Suō, reclining, said as though to herself, “How I wish I had a pillow.” Hearing this, Dainagon Tadaie slipped his arm [kaina] under her curtains and said, “For your pillow.” She then composed this poem. Suō no Naishi:
haru no yo no yume bakari naru tamakura ni / kai naku tatamu na koso oshikere
To pillow upon someone’s arm as briefly as a spring night’s dream—
a pity indeed the ill fame one should gain for so little.
ta ga yo ni ka tane wa makishi to hito towaba / ikaga iwane no matsu wa kotaen
Should anyone ever ask him who planted the seed, and in what reign,
what shall he answer, this little pine growing from the rock?
asaborake kiri tatsu sora no mayoi ni mo / yukisugigataki imo ga kado kana
Lost though I am in the mists that rise in the dim first light of day,
I am loath to pass it by, this gate of my beloved. (“Wakamurasaki,” 12:321)
At that time there was a seer who came to the king and said, “I have a Great Vehicle text called the Sutra of the Wonderful Law. If you will never disobey me, I will expound it for you.” When the king heard these words of the seer, he danced for joy. At once he accompanied the seer, providing him with whatever he needed, picking fruit, drawing water, gathering firewood, setting out meals, even offering his own body as a couch and seat, never stinting in body or mind. He served the seer in this manner for a thousand years, all for the sake of the Law, working diligently, acting as a provider, and seeing to it that the seer lacked for nothing. (Burton Watson, trans., The Lotus Sutra [Columbia University Press, 1993], 183)
hokekyō o waga eshi koto wa takigi kori / na tsumi mizu kumi tsukaete zo eshi
The Lotus Sutra have I attained! Serving as a hewer of wood,
a gatherer of greens, a drawer of water have I attained it. (Shūishū 1346)
Sent by a man who was deeply enamored of a woman who had a husband. Kunimochi:
ari tote mo iku yo ka wa furu karakuni no / tora fusu nobe ni mi o mo nageten
Though one lives, how many reigns does one survive? I shall abandon myself
on that plain in far Cathay where the tiger lurks.
Elsewhere in the same anthology (Shūishū 508):
Sent by a man who was deeply enamored of a woman who had a husband. Author unknown:
inishie no tora no tagui ni mi o nageba / saka to bakari wa towamu to zo omou
Should I throw myself before the tiger, as did Shaka long ago,
then, I trust, you will understand and ask after me.
And in Kokin rokujō 2978:
hitozuma wa mori ka yashiro ka karakuni no / tora fusu nobe ka nete kokoromimu
That other man’s wife: is she a grove, a sacred shrine, a plain in far
Cathay where the tiger lurks? Let me sleep with her and see.
murasaki no ue oku tsuyu ni odorokite / hajimete yume no yo o ya shiruran
Awakened by the dew that forms upon the murasaki, then,
for the first time, you must have known that this is a world of dreams.
wasurete wa yume ka to zo omou omoiki ya / yuki fumiwakete kimi o min to wa
When I forget myself, it all seems but a dream. Would ever I have thought it:
that I should trudge through the snow to visit my lord?
omoitsutsu nureba ya hito wa mietsuramu / yume to shiriseba samezaramashi o
Was it because I fell asleep longing for him that he appeared to me?
Had I but known I dreamed, I should not have awakened, but….
sue no tsuyu moto no shizuku ya yo no naka no / okuresakidatsu tameshi naruran
The dewdrop on the tip of the leaf or the droplet on the stem?
Whichever falls first, or last, ’tis but the way of this world.
arinu ya to kokoromigatera aimineba / tawaburenikuki made zo koishiki
Can I survive without her? I wondered, yet when I stopped seeing her,
I yearned for her so, it was hardly a matter for jest.
tsukikage no yadoreru sode wa sebakutomo / tometemo mibaya akanu hikari o
Narrow though they be, these sleeves of mine wherein dwells the light of the moon,
how I wish they might stay its glow, of which I never tire. (“Suma,” 13:167)
nukimidaru hito koso arurashi shiratama no / ma naku mo chiru ka sode no sebaki ni
Someone, it would appear, has loosed them; for the white jewels, in disarray,
fall without surcease, though my sleeves be too narrow for them.
yo no naka ni aramashikaba to omou hito / naki ga ōku mo narinikeru ka na
Those friends of whom we think, “Were they but still among us in this world…,”
and now it has come to this, alas, so many of them gone!
toritomuru mono ni shi araneba toshizuki o / aware ana u to sugoshitsuru kana
Since one cannot, after all, put a stop to them,
the months and years I pass simply sighing, “Ah how wretched.”
iro mo ka mo mukashi no kosa ni nioedomo / ueken hito no kage zo koishiki
Their beauty and their fragrance radiate with a redolence of old,
yet how I long to see the face of she who planted them.
sakura iro ni koromo wa fukaku somete kimu / hana no chirinamu nochi no katami ni
Let me wear a robe dyed deeply the color of the cherries
as a keepsake of their blooms after they shall have fallen.
waga yado no hana migatera ni kuru hito wa / chirinamu nochi zo koishikarubeki
He who came to call by way of viewing the blossoms in my garden
after they shall have fallen, then surely shall I miss him.
tazunemiru hana mo nagori ya shitauran / kururu mo shirazu niou yamazakura
Do even these blossoms we come to view lament their passing beauty,
these mountain cherries, oblivious to the darkening day?
furusato to narinishi nara no miyako ni mo / iro wa kawarazu hana wa sakikeri
Even in the capital of Nara, now become our home of old,
the cherry blossoms again have bloomed, their hue unchanged.
torikaesu mono ni mogana ya yo no naka o / arishinagara no waga mi to omowan
How I wish that this world we live in were something that might be turned back,
that I might once again be what I had been in the past.
ikani semu shinobu no kusa mo tsumiwabinu / katami no mieshi ko dani nakereba
What am I to do? When desolate, I pluck the fern of remembrance
without even a child to serve as a keepsake of her?
shita no obi no michi wa katagata wakarutomo / yukimeguritemo awan to zo omou
Though the road parts, and like the undersash, we go our separate ways;
however we may wind about, surely we’ll meet again.
shiratsuyu no iro wa hitotsu o ikani shite / aki no ko no ha o chiji ni somuran
The clear dew has but a single hue; how then does it
dye the autumn leaves their myriad colors?
chirichirazu kikamahoshiki wo furusato no / hana mite kaeru hito mo awanan
I should like to ask whether or not they scatter; would that I might meet
someone who returns from viewing the blossoms in the old capital.
ari to mite te ni wa torarezu mireba mata / yukue mo shirazu kieshi kagerō
There it is, yet I cannot take it in my hand; again I see it,
only for it to vanish without a trace, this drake fly.
waga kokoro nagusamekanetsu sarashina ya / obasuteyama ni teru tsuki o mite
Utterly inconsolable was my heart, there in Sarashina,
gazing at the moon that shone on Abandoned Crone Mountain.
ama no sumu sato no shirube ni aranaku ni / uramimu to nomi hito no iuramu
Though I be no guide to this village where fisherfolk live,
everyone seems to be saying, “Let us tour this shore.”
ise no ama no asa na yū na ni kazuku chō / miru me ni hito o aku yoshi mo ga na
Like the “see” weed for which the fisherfolk of Ise dive day and night,
how I wish I might “see” her as often as I should like.
yūyami wa michi tadotadoshi tsuki machite / kaere waga seko sono aida ni mimu
In the dusk the way will be hard to find; so await the moon, my dear,
before you return, and in the meantime let us make love.
nanihito ka kite nugikakeshi fujibakama / kuru aki goto ni nobe o niowasu
Who is it that comes and takes off his purple trousers, then hangs them up,
thus scenting the fields with the coming of every autumn? (Kokinshū 239)
nushi shiranu ka koso nioere aki no no ni / ta ga nugikakeshi fujibakama zo mo
A scent the bearer of which I know not pervades; yet who is it
that takes off his purple trousers and hangs them up in the fields?
(Kokinshū 241)
mishi hito no keburi o kumo to nagamureba / yūbe no sora mo mutsumajiki kana
If I think of these clouds as smoke from the pyre of my love,
then even this cloudy evening sky seems lovely.
kane no oto no tayuru hibiki ni ne o soete / waga yo tsukinu to kimi ni tsutaeyo
To the fading echo of the bell, pray add the sound of my weeping,
to carry the word to her that my life has run its course.
tokiwa naru matsu no midori mo haru kureba / ima hitoshio no iro masarikeri
Even the everlasting green of the pines, with the coming of spring,
takes on a shade that has grown only the more so.
shita kōru miyama no yuki no kenu ga ue ni / ima ikue to ka furikasanuramu
Upon snows fallen deep in the mountains upon snows not yet melted
how many more layers will fall to cover them over?
fuji no ne no kemuri mo nao zo tachinoboru / ue naki mono wa omoi narikeri
Higher still than the peak of Fuji rises its smoke
and even higher than them all burn these flames of passion.
miyamagi o asa na yū na ni koritsumete / samusa o kouru ono no sumiyaki
Night and day, cutting and gathering wood from the mountains,
hoping all the while for cold weather, the charcoal makers of Ono.
and to Horikawa hyakushu:
ōhara ya ono no sumigama yuki furite / kokorobosoge ni tatsu kemuri kana
Ōhara! Snow falling on the charcoal kilns of Ono
while their smoke rises up forlornly.
and to Shokugoshūishū 497:
towabaya na ono no sumigama onozukara / kayoishi michi wa yuki fukakutomo
I would ask of you, charcoal kilns of Ono,
how fares that road I once traveled, deep though the snow may be?
mikari suru kariba no ono no narashiba no / nare wa masarade koi zo masareru
As with the twigs of oak on the imperial hunting ground at Ono,
our intimacy fails to progress while my passion only mounts.
