“I had had the impression that she was better,” he said after regaining something of his composure, “and the idea lulled me into complacency. A dream is over soon enough, but this a terrible thing!”
This is the man who destroyed my mother's peace of mind, Her Highness said to herself. Perhaps her mother's time had come, but this tie with him was so bitter that she did not even answer.
“But we must let him know your reply, my lady!” her women protested.
“He is a very great lord, and it would be too much if you failed to acknowledge the kindness that has brought him here in such haste.”
“Sort it out yourselves, then. I can think of nothing to say.” Her Highness lay down, as well she might.
“My lord, my lady is hardly among the living just now,” Koshōshō informed him, “but I have let her know that you are here.”
“I have no help to offer. I shall be back when I myself am a little less agitated, and when she is feeling more composed. However, I should like to know how it came to happen so suddenly.”
Little by little, Koshōshō told him some, although not all, of what had so troubled her late mistress. “I am afraid that I may seem to be criticizing you, my lord,” she said apologetically. “I am more and more muddled today, and I have probably got some things wrong. My lady will not always be in such a state, and I hope that you will inquire again when she is a little calmer.”
She really did not seem to be herself, and the Commander withheld what came to his lips. “Yes, I, too, feel lost in darkness. I hope that you may yet console her well enough for me to have a token answer from her.” With those words he started back, because it would not become him to linger, and there were after all a great many people present.
He had never imagined that everything would be finished tonight, and he disapproved of the summary character of the arrangements; summoning people from his nearby estates, he left them orders for the services they were to perform. He saw to it that wherever haste had encouraged excessive simplicity, there was a sufficient crowd to convey grandeur. The Governor of Yamato was very pleased and thanked him earnestly. Her Highness lay prostrate with vain misery that nothing of her mother remained. No one should be that close to anyone, not even to her mother. The sight saddened and disturbed her women.
“You cannot just go on being so unhappy, and there is nothing here to distract you,” the Governor said once he had had everything tidied up; but she meant to end her days in this mountain village, since here at least she felt near the hill where her mother had turned to smoke. The monks who had come for the mourning confinement had arranged flimsy rooms for themselves on the east side, on the bridgeway nearby, in the servants' hall, and so on, and one hardly knew they were there. In the western aisle, now stripped of all decoration, Her Highness hardly recognized the passage of day or night, but the months went by nonetheless, and soon the ninth had come.
Strong winds swept down the Mountain, the trees were bare of leaves, and all things weighed so on her heart that the skies drew from her endless sighs and tears. She bitterly resented it that her very life was not hers to command. The women in her service were despondent and distraught. The Commander called often. He provided whatever might cheer up the lonely monks chanting the Name and meanwhile poured forth countless, heartfelt assurances and reproaches to Her Highness, showering her with endless letters. She would not even pick them up to read them, though, because she remembered how her already weakened mother had died convinced that that unspeakably wicked moment had ruined her daughter, and she knew with awful certainty that the thought would harm her mother even in the life to come. The mere mention of the Commander brought on ever more bitter, anguished tears. Her women hardly knew what to say.
When the Commander got not a single line in answer, he assumed at first that she was just too upset, but soon far too much time had passed for that. Surely grieving has an end, he reflected angrily. How can she so completely fail to understand me? She is hopelessly immature! It would be all very well if I were pursuing her with talk of flowers and butterflies, but someone who actually shares one's feelings and asks after one's sorrows deserves a warm, sympathetic response. I felt my grand-mother's death deeply, but His Excellency hardly seemed affected—for him it was just a matter of course, and it hurt and upset me that he did her no more honor than what public decency required. It was actually His Grace who saw to everything, and that especially pleased me, even from my father. That was when I became particularly fond of the Intendant. He was so quiet and thoughtful, and it seemed to me that he felt things more deeply and warmly than other people. Such reflections as these filled the Commander's leisure day and night.
His wife continued meanwhile to wonder what was going on between him and Her Highness. She could not make out why he had corresponded so freely with Her Highness's mother, and she therefore had their little son take a note to him, where he lay gazing out at the twilight sky. She had written on a slip of paper,
“How am I to take the sorrow I see you feel, that I may soothe you:
is it the living you love, or is it the dead you mourn?”
He smiled ruefully. How thoroughly disingenuous of her, after all she has been imagining and saying, to pretend she thinks I may be mourning that lady! He wrote straight back, quite casually,
“Why should either one rouse me to a partial grief, when the fleeting dew,
so swiftly gone, speaks of more than the lives of fragile leaves?
My melancholy is all-embracing.”
Yes, he was still keeping something from her, she knew it, and bother the dew on the fragile leaf; she was angry and hurt.
Bird clappers
The Commander set forth again, anxious to know how Her Highness was getting on. He often told himself that he must move gently once her mourning retreat had passed, but that degree of restraint was beyond him. Why was he still so intent on upholding the lost cause of her honor? He might as well do as others did and have his way with her at last. He would no longer argue the matter with his wife. He would appeal to the authority of the reproachful letter that single night had earned him, even if Her Highness hated him for it. No, she would not succeed in presenting herself as unblemished.
It was a little past the tenth of the ninth month, and no one, however dull, could have failed to be stirred by the prospect of the moors and hills. Down a mountain wind that stripped the trees and swept a rushing storm of leaves from the kudzu vines on high came faint scripture chanting and the calling of the Name. The place was all but deserted beneath the gales; a stag stood by the garden fence, untroubled by clappers in the fields,51 while others belled plaintively amid the deep green rice, and the waterfall52 roared as though to rouse the stricken from their sorrows. Crickets among the grasses sang forlornly, in failing voices, while tall, dewy gentians sprang from beneath withered weeds as though autumn were theirs alone. These were no more than the sights of the season, but perhaps the place and the moment made them unbearably poignant.
Woman in a kouchiki dress gown
He walked up to the double doors as usual and stood looking about him. The deep scarlet gown beneath his soft dress cloak, beaten beautifully transparent, glowed in the waning sunlight that lay guilelessly upon him, and with an enchantingly casual gesture he lifted his fan to cover his face, looking, so it seemed to the watching women, exactly as a woman should look, although none ever quite succeeds. He smiled as though to charm away their cares and expressly summoned Koshōshō. The veranda was narrow, but he worried that there might be others farther back in the room, and he still did not go straight to the point.
“Come closer,” he said. “Do not fail me now. I have not come all the way into these hills to have you ignore me. Besides, there is a thick mist.” He pointedly avoided looking in and gazed off toward the mountains. “Closer, closer,” he urged, until she finally pushed a gray standing curtain partially out through the blinds and sat behind it, rearranging her skirts. Being the Governor's sister, she was a
close relative of the late Haven,53 who had brought her up since childhood, and her costume was therefore very dark. She wore her dress gown over a dark gray layering.
“Quite apart from the enduring sorrow of our loss, Her Highness's unspeakable coldness has so added to my cares that the heart and soul have left my body, as all those who know me attest, until I can no longer bear it.” He enlarged at length on his complaint and wept copiously when he spoke of the Haven's last letter.
Koshōshō wept even more than he. “When no answer came from you that evening, my lady, who knew she was dying, sank straightaway into herself, and after nightfall her mind wandered. The spirit seemed to seize that moment of weakness to take her. She nearly lost consciousness that way several times when his lordship54 was so ill, and it was her resolve to comfort Her Highness, who was in equal despair, that returned her at last to herself. After this most recent loss Her Highness seems hardly to be aware of her surroundings, and most of the time she has been oblivious to the world.” She spoke haltingly, amid many tears and sighs.
“That is just it. She is much too removed and distant. If I may say so, I do not see who else she can turn to now, except me. His Eminence lives off on the mountain among clouds that cut him off from the world, and she will not find it easy to keep in touch with him. Please tell her how much her treatment of me leaves to be desired. All things turn out as they must. She may be weary of life, but life does not heed our wishes. After all, would she have suffered this loss if it did?” He talked on at length, but she had nothing to say in answer and only sat there sighing.
Just then a stag belled loudly. “Shall I do less?”55 he said, and he went on,
“Having made my way through broad wastes of bamboo grass to far-off Ono,
I would gladly join the stag in lifting my loud complaint.”56
“In our mourning weeds all too often wet with dew, we of autumn hills
add our voices to the stag's, to cry aloud our complaint,”
she replied. It was not very good, but spoken just at that moment, in her hushed voice, it pleased him well enough.
He managed to have Her Highness given his regards. “I shall acknowledge the kindness of your many visits when life ceases to be so cruel a dream,” she answered curtly. That was all. He went away again, sighing over her extraordinary obduracy.
All the way he gazed up to the boundless heavens, where a thirteenth-night57 moon shone in such glory as to illumine even the road past Dark Mountain.58 Her Highness's Ichijō residence was on his way, and it was more ruinous than he had known it. Through a gap in the crumbling boundary wall, near the southwest corner, he glimpsed rows of lowered shutters. There was no trace of human presence. Moonlight alone gave life to the garden brook, and he remembered the many occasions on which the late Intendant had made music here.
“That beloved form has now vanished from a lake whose waters detain,
to watch a deserted house, only a late-autumn moon,”
he murmured to himself. Even when he was home again, his eyes remained on the moon, and his heart wandered off into the skies. The annoyed old women muttered, “What a spectacle he is making of himself! He never used to do things like this!”
To put it plainly, his wife was furious. He seems to have lost his mind! I suppose he is thinking of those paragons at Rokujō, who have long taken this sort of thing for granted, and making me out to be brash and forward—well, I cannot help it! I would not mind so much either, if I had been used to it as long as they; in fact, things might have been a lot easier that way. Everyone, including my family, thought I had the most perfect luck, what with his being such a model of devotion, but now it looks as though all these years may only end in humiliation! She was deeply wounded.
Dawn approached while they sighed their separate sighs in mutual silence, until the night was over and the Commander hastened as always to write her a letter; he could not wait for the morning mists to lift. She was extremely put out, but she did not snatch it from him as before.
He wrote intently, then put the paper down and hummed his poem, keeping his voice low; but she still heard it.
“And when will it be, that you would have me rouse you—for that word of yours
asks me to refrain until you wake from the long night's dream.
‘What am I to do?’”59 That, she gathered, was what he had written. He wrapped it up and still went on humming “O what am I to do?” and so on. Then he called for a messenger and sent it off. I should like to see her answer, she thought, consumed by curiosity. What on earth is going on?
The sun was high when the reply arrived. It was on dark purple paper, short, and from Koshōshō as usual. What she had to report was the same as always: nothing. “I felt so sorry, my lord, that I made off with your letter—my lady had done some writing practice on it.” She had torn off those parts and enclosed them.
She actually looked at my letter! He felt a ridiculous rush of joy. By piecing together a word here and a word there he managed to read,
“In these Ono hills, where in sore lamentation I cry night and day,
are the ceaseless tears I weep to be the Silent Cascade?”
That seemed to be right. The old poems she had written out dejectedly here and there were in a fine hand. Others who burned with this sort of desire had always seemed to him laughably mad, and now that he was doing it, too, he understood how unbearable it could be. How strange! He kept wondering why he should have to suffer this way, but there was nothing he could do about it.
At Rokujō, Genji heard what was going on. He had always taken the Commander's thoroughly mature, deliberate manner and his blameless mode of life as a credit to himself, one that redeemed the unfortunate reputation his own somewhat gallant ways of the past had earned him. How sad this is for them both,60 he thought, and what a very difficult time they are going to have! What can His Excellency think of all this, when they are so close to him? Surely the young man understands that much. Destiny drives us in the end, though. No, it is not for me to speak up or to intervene. At this distance the news moved him to lament particularly the pain this would cause the women.
While musing to Lady Murasaki on things past and future, he remarked how this sort of thing reminded him to worry about what would happen to her once he was gone, at which she blushed and wondered unhappily just how long he expected to leave her on her own. Ah, she reflected, there is nothing so pitifully confined and constricted as a woman. What will reward her passage through the world if she remains sunk in herself, blind to life's joys and sorrows and to every delight? What will brighten the monotony of her fleeting days? And will she not bitterly disappoint the parents who reared her if she turns out hopelessly dull and insensitive to anything around her? What a waste for her to shut herself up in her thoughts, like that Silent Prince the monks cite as the patron of their own trials,61 and when she knows the good from the bad to say nothing at all! How to strike the proper balance? These questions absorbed her now only for the sake of the First Princess.
Genji was curious to know how the Commander felt about all this, and he remarked once when that gentleman was at Rokujō, “The mourning for the Haven must be over. Why, thirty years are gone before you know it!62 How sad and cruel it is, the way we cling to what lasts like evening dew! I long to shave my head and give it all up, but here I still am, enjoying my comforts. No, it is no good, no good at all.”
“How true!” the Commander replied. “Even the man without regrets must have trouble taking that step.” He continued, “The Governor of Yamato is looking after the memorial services for the forty-nine days all on his own. What a pity! Someone with that little support may prosper in life only to come to a sad end after all.”
“I imagine that His Cloistered Eminence sent his condolences. How Her Highness his daughter must mourn her! The Haven had more to be said for her than most, judging from what I gather lately—more than I knew. It is a great loss for us all. The people who deserve most to live are always the ones to go.
It has been a great shock for His Eminence. He was particularly attached to this Princess, after Her Cloistered Highness here. I am sure she has much to recommend her.”
“I wonder what she is like. The Haven was beyond reproach in manner and disposition—not that I was ever particularly close to her, but even little things can reveal a great deal about character.” On the subject of her daughter he gave away nothing at all.
If he is that set on her, nothing I can say will make any difference, Genji decided; there is no point in my offering unwanted advice—he will just ignore it anyway. He gave up.
So it was that the Commander took the memorial rites in hand. Word of this naturally got about, and His Excellency therefore heard it, too. He was outraged, and unfortunately he blamed it on the lightness of the Princess's ways.63 His sons took part as well because of that old tie, and he provided generously for the scripture readings and so on. Everyone was eager to excel, and things were done as though for a very great lady.
Lintel curtains
Her Highness wanted to spend the rest of her life where she was, but when His Eminence learned of her desire, he declared that out of the question. “It is perfectly true that you should not properly pass from one such involvement to another, but someone without a protector can easily assume the guise you have in mind only to err and to provoke a scandal that leaves her caught between this world and the next, and guilty in the eyes of all. Now that I have left the world and Her Cloistered Highness has, too, people are saying that I have no posterity. That need not distress someone who has renounced the world, but it certainly would not become you to be too eager to follow her example and mine. It actually leaves a poor impression to reject the world merely because of some bitter experience. Do what you like, but not until you have collected your thoughts and considered the matter more calmly.”
The Tale of Genji: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (Junichiro Breakdown of Genji) Page 95
