“Why is it my heart thirstily welcomes the hue of murasaki
when the dye takes so poorly, and we really cannot meet?30
Could the color not have darkened?”31 He spoke with dauntingly youthful grace, but she managed to reply by reminding herself that he was just like Genji. Perhaps she meant to thank him for her recent promotion, since she had not yet served him at all.
“It was by design that the dyer stained me then with murasaki,
though I never understood just what the color might mean!
After this I shall know,”32 she said.
He smiled. “Perhaps so, but if the color has only just taken on you, then alas, it is too late.33 I should be glad to beg someone else's judgment in the matter, if anyone would hear my complaint.” The profound displeasure visible on his countenance was clearly genuine, and she was troubled. How awful! I must not do anything more to encourage him. How difficult they always end up making things! She behaved so properly that he never managed to strike up a suggestive conversation with her, as he had meant to do, but he decided that time would bring her round.
The news that His Majesty had gone to see her put the Commander in a frenzy of anxiety, and she, too, was sufficiently alarmed by the peril of her position to contrive some plausible reasons why he should release her. At last her father's skillful pleading obtained leave for her to go. “Very well,” His Majesty said, “I know someone who has learned his lesson and will not allow you here again. It is very hard. I who came forward for you first have now fallen behind and can only seek others’ indulgence! I feel as though that man's plight long ago matches mine all too well.”34 He was extremely disappointed. She was far more beautiful in person than report had led him to imagine, and he would not have wished to lose her now even if she had not interested him from the start. For that reason he felt all the more thwarted and angry, but he still did not wish to appear hatefully shallow of heart, and he therefore assured her of his devotion with such depth of feeling that she was abashed and said to herself, But I am afraid I am what I am!
He called for a hand carriage, to the envy of all the gentlewomen whom His Grace and His Excellency had both sent for her, and he did not leave her until the Commander came to fuss and fret officiously beside her. “It is extremely irritating to find you so closely guarded,” he complained.
“Now that ninefold mists must keep you and me apart, lovely plum blossom,
shall I never have from you the least breath of your perfume?”
The verse was unremarkable, but it may well have pleased her, since she had the speaker before her. “I so love these meadows that I hoped to spend the night,35 but there is someone else whom that might offend, and you know, when I take his part, I feel guilty after all. How am I to keep in touch?”
His trouble once more made her feel very small.
“Send me on the breeze just a breath of scent, I pray, though my own perfume
be unworthy there among the flowers on other boughs.”36
No, she seemed not to be keeping herself from him, and as he left, he looked back at her tenderly, again and again.
The Commander had wanted to bring her straight home that evening, but he had said nothing to anyone about it because he was highly unlikely to receive advance leave to do so. Now he blandly announced that all of a sudden he felt quite unwell and wanted to rest somewhere comfortable, but that he would worry about her if she were not with him. With that he took her directly home. His Excellency her father feared that so abrupt a move might violate protocol,37 but he decided that an unsolicited objection from him might only earn him the Commander's hostility. “As you please, then,” he said. “What she does has never really been up to me anyway.”
Delivering a letter
At Rokujō Genji found the brusque change offensive and arbitrary, but what could he do? She, too, was dismayed by the direction the salt fire's smoke was taking,38 but the Commander was so pleased and satisfied that he might as well have made off with stolen treasure. His furious jealousy over the way His Majesty had come to her struck her as crudely obnoxious, and she granted him nothing of herself, which made him angrier still.
His Highness hardly knew what to do or say, despite his brave speeches, and from the Commander he had not a word. Now that the Commander had what he wanted, he was busy day and night.
The second month came. Genji thought what a callous business it was. He felt constantly embarrassed by his own anger at having been caught out that way, since nothing so bluntly possessive had ever occurred to him, and he remembered her with longing. No doubt destiny has played its part in all this, he reflected, but my own carelessness is what has brought this misery on me. Meanwhile, her image haunted him day and night. It seemed to him that as long as she was with that dull and dreary fellow, that Commander, he would have to renounce even the lightest banter with her, and he therefore restrained himself; but there came days of empty calm and ceaseless rain when he desperately missed the way he used to go to her to talk and pass the time, and he wrote her a letter. He sent it secretly to Ukon, although in deference to what Ukon's feelings might be, he kept it short and left his real meaning to the lady's imagination.
“All through these long days, quiet as they are and empty in endless spring rain,
say, what are your memories of that man at your old home?
The monotony stirs many bitter recollections, but how can I spell them out to you now?”
She wept when Ukon found a private moment to show it to her, because her memory dwelled on him, too, ever more fondly as time went by, and she only wished she could see again the father to whom she could never say that she missed him or wished to be with him. Never having told even Ukon how much she disliked his occasionally trying behavior, she could reflect on it only inwardly. Ukon had glimpsed something of the truth, but she still could not quite make out how much had happened between them.
She wrote in reply, “It is an embarrassing confession, but I thought you might want to know:
Wet as my sleeves are with drops falling from the eaves in these long, long rains,
how could not my fondest thoughts dwell on someone I miss so?
The more time passes, it is true, the drearier I feel; but I shall say no more.” Her letter was thoroughly restrained.
Genji felt his own gleaming drops poised to fall when he spread it out and read it, but he feigned detachment lest he betray himself to any onlooker. Still, his heart was very full, and despite memories of how the Empress Mother had kept another Mistress of Staff39 shut away from him in Emperor Suzaku's reign, this was the one who, in her innocence, claimed his greater sympathy. How the roving lover brings his own troubles on himself! he thought. What requires me to now suffer? No, she is not for me! When he failed to dispel his delusions, he turned to playing his koto and dwelled fondly in mind on the dear music that her fingers had once drawn from the strings. “Cut not the gleaming waterweed!”40 he sang as he toyed with the azuma mode, and she who longed for him would not have missed the magic of the sight, if only one could have allowed her to see it.
His Majesty, too, lingered on the face and figure that he had seen so briefly. “The one I saw leave me, red skirts asweep”41—the old poem was crude perhaps, but he kept repeating it as he sat daydreaming. She had secret letters from him. Convinced by now that she was destined for misfortune, she shrank from such unbecoming diversions and did not encourage him in her replies. All things considered, it was Genji's rare kindness that stayed with her after all, and she could never forget it.
By the third month the spectacle of wisteria and kerria rose in her Rokujō garden, beautifully picked out in the light of the setting sun, recalled so vividly the way she had looked when she sat enjoying that same view that Geniji abandoned his own spring garden to go and contemplate it. The glow of the kerria roses artlessly blooming on the woven Chinese bamboo fence was very pleasing. “The color shall I wear…”42 he murmured.
“Would it were not so, but the road do
wn through Ide parts us two as well;
yet in silence I still love blossoming kerria rose.
‘My face betrays…’”43 he went on, but there was no one to hear him. Only now did he truly grasp that she was gone. His heart really did play strange tricks on him. When his eye fell on a large number of duck eggs, he did them up like tangerines and oranges to send her casually,44 and he wrote blandly, lest his words catch anyone's interest, “I have not seen you for a long, long time, and I might protest that you treat me strangely, except that I gather these things are not entirely up to you. I regret that it may be difficult for us to meet except under particular circumstances,” and so on in a fatherly vein.
“One duckling, alas, though hatched in this very nest, nonetheless is gone!
Tell me, then, what sort of man has claimed it now for his own?45
But why does it have to be like this? I do not like it at all!”
The Commander read it and smiled. “A wife may not visit even her parents without sufficient reason,” he muttered. “What business has His Grace, then, to cling to you constantly and to complain this way?” His words grated on her ears.
She had no idea what to write. “I cannot really answer him,” she said.
“Leave it to me.” It was maddening, the way he volunteered.
“Who is it you say should return a worthless duckling, once lost in the nest,
and where would you have it go, to regain what rightful place?
Your apparent displeasure is surprising, and I may have resorted to somewhat vivid language.”
“This Commander has never to my knowledge expressed himself with such imagination—I can hardly believe it!” Genji laughed, but at heart he was furious at the way the man had appropriated her.
This outcome brought the Commander's first wife worsening torment as time went by, and her mental state deteriorated. The Commander provided for her well, and he still looked attentively after his sons, so that he could not detach himself from her completely; in the domain of her basic needs he remained as reliable as before. Although desperate to see his daughter, he was refused all access to her. In her youthful innocence she suffered acutely from everyone's merciless condemnation of her father and from the mounting insistence on keeping her away from him. Meanwhile, her brothers, who were often at his residence, would naturally tell her from time to time about the Mistress of Staff. “She is nice, and she is kind to us,” they said. “She spends all her time doing pretty things.” Their sister envied them and sighed that she had not been born to any such freedom as theirs. It is extraordinary, the way the Mistress of Staff upset everyone, men and women alike!
In the eleventh month of that year she had a very pretty little son of her own, and the Commander, who could not have asked for more, pampered him endlessly. All this is easily imagined, though, and there is no need to insist. Her father, too, was of course gratified by her good fortune. In looks and so on she was fully worthy of the other children whom he had always cherished. The Secretary Captain46 was very fond of this sister of his and treated her warmly, but at times he still betrayed a certain disappointment, and the charm of the new arrival only made him wish that her palace service had borne fruit. He even took the liberty of remarking, “Whenever I hear His Majesty sigh that he has no sons, I think of the honor it would have been.” She still carried out her official duties conscientiously, but there seemed no longer to be any chance of her actually going to the palace. Such, no doubt, was her destiny.
Oh, yes, there was that other daughter of His Excellency's, the one so eager to be Mistress of Staff. She was a bit of a flirt as well, like so many of her kind, and that made things difficult for her father. The Consort, too, lived forever in fear of her provoking some sort of incident. Her father had even forbidden her to appear in the Consort's presence, but she ignored him and went anyway.
On one occasion the pick of the privy gentlemen had gathered at the Consort's and were playing music to a languorous sort of rhythm. It was a delicious autumn evening, and the Consultant Captain,47 who was there, too, was surprising her women with his unaccustomed gaiety. They were exclaiming how remarkable he was when the girl from Ōmi came barging past them.
“Oh, no! What are you doing?” She glared balefully at them when they pulled her back.
“Here comes something outrageous, I know it!” They nudged each other in acute embarrassment.
“He's the one, he's the one!” she whispered enthusiastically, loud and clear, on the subject of that most exceptionally stalwart young gentleman. It was very painful.
“Boat upon the sea, if you know not where to go, lost among the waves,
let me then row out to you; but tell me what port is yours!”
her voice rang out. “You always row your little boat back to the same girl!48 It isn't fair!”
The shocked Captain was wondering who on earth at the Consort's would ever express herself so crudely when he realized with amusement that this must be the young lady of whom he had heard.
“The boatman you see, though uncertain where to go, plaything of the winds,
disdains to approach a shore where he has no wish to go,”
he replied. That, they say, silenced her.
32
UMEGAE
The Plum Tree Branch
“Umegae” (“The Plum Tree Branch”) is the title of a saibara song sung at a festive gathering by one of Tō no Chūjō's sons.
RELATIONSHIP TO EARLIER CHAPTERS
“The Plum Tree Branch” follows “The Handsome Pillar” in chronological sequence.
PERSONS
His Grace, the Chancellor, Genji, age 39
The lady of the southeast quarter, 31 (Murasaki)
His Highness of War, Genji's brother (Hotaru Hyōbukyō no Miya)
The former Kamo Priestess (Asagao)
The Consultant Captain, Genji's son, 18 (Yūgiri)
The Secretary Captain, Tō no Chūjō's eldest son, 23 or 24 (Kashiwagi)
The Controller Lieutenant, 22 or 23 (Kōbai)
Her Majesty, the Empress, 30 (Akikonomu)
The young lady, Genji's daughter, 11 (Akashi no Himegimi)
The Heir Apparent, 13
His Excellency, the Palace Minister (Tō no Chūjō)
His daughter, 20 (Kumoi no Kari)
Genji planned something exceptional for his daughter's donning of the train. The Heir Apparent was to come of age in the same second month, and her presentation to him would presumably follow.
It was the last day of the first month, and Genji passed the lull at home and at court blending incense.1 He felt when he examined the incense wood presented to him by the Dazaifu Deputy that wood from an earlier age might perhaps be superior, and he therefore had the storehouses at Nijō opened and Chinese things of all kinds brought to him. “When it comes to brocades, twills, and so on,” he said as he compared them, “the old ones are still the finest and the best.” To cover her personal accessories or for them to rest on, or to make the borders of her cushions and so on, he chose from among a wealth of twills and madder red and gold brocades,2 ones of a quality beyond any seen nowadays, left over from those presented to the court by the Koma embassy in His Late Eminence's reign; and he bestowed the twills and gauzes he had just received on her gentlewomen. He had his incense woods old and new arranged before him and then passed out to his ladies with the request that they make two blends each. Everyone at Rokujō and elsewhere was caught up in preparing superb gifts for the guests, rewards for the senior nobles, and so on; but now each had choices to make as well, and iron mortars3 rang loudly everywhere.
Genji sequestered himself in the main house and blended away according to the two methods (how had he ever learned them?) covered in the Sōwa Instructions.4 His lady had had herself specially installed in the deepest recess of her eastern extension to master the method taught by the Hachijō Lord of Ceremonial.5 So the two vied with each other, and her strict secrecy moved Genji to remark, “After all, a fragrance wins
or loses according to whether it is shallow or deep!” He was so eager that he hardly seemed to be the father. Few gentlewomen waited on either of them. The ladies had made the accessories as pretty as they could possibly be, and among them the design of the incense jars and boxes, and the style of the censer, were so fresh, novel, and intriguing that Genji looked forward to filling them with the very best once he had sampled the scents they were now all so busy making.
Censer
On the tenth of the second month a light rain was falling, and the red plum before Genji's residence was in magnificent and incomparably fragrant bloom, when His Highness of War came to present his greetings, for everything was to be ready that day or the next. He and Genji had always been especially close, and they were talking happily of this and that, praising the flowers and so on, when a messenger arrived with a letter attached to a plum branch from which most of the flowers were gone.6 The messenger reported that it was from the former Kamo Priestess.
His Highness had heard about that. “What kind of letter has she sent you?” he asked with amused interest.
Genji smiled. “I took the liberty of making a request, and she seems to have met it bravely.” He hid it.
The Tale of Genji: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (Junichiro Breakdown of Genji) Page 69
