That summer she felt increasingly faint in no more than the usual heat. She did not suffer in any particular or alarming way; she simply went on growing weaker and weaker. Nothing about her illness was distressing or demanding. To her women it was darkness to imagine what would follow, and they looked on her with deep pity and regret.
When her condition failed to improve, Her Majesty withdrew from the palace to Nijō. She managed to receive Her Majesty in the east wing, where Her Majesty was to stay. The ceremony was the usual one, but she knew that she would never see it again, and that made it very moving. She carefully heeded each name announced by the gentlemen in Her Majesty's escort.7 Many senior nobles had come to serve the Empress.
Their rare meeting was the first for a long time, and they talked intently together. Then Genji came in. “I feel like a bird banished from the nest! I am useless! I might as well be off to bed!” he said and went away again. His great pleasure at seeing her up was a fragile consolation.
“You are to be lodged separately,” she told Her Majesty, “and I apologize that you will have to come to me; you see, it simply is not possible for me to go to you.” She stayed a little longer. The lady from Akashi then arrived, and they all quietly pursued their intimate conversation. Lady Murasaki had many things on her mind, but wisely she never spoke about when she would be gone. She confined herself to a few, quiet remarks about the fleeting character of life, but the conviction in her voice conveyed her desolation better than any words.
She saw the little Princes and Princesses, too. “I wanted so much to know how each of you would turn out—do you suppose that means something in me still wishes I had longer?” she said. There were tears in her eyes, and her face shone with extraordinary beauty.
Oh, why is she so sure? Her Majesty thought, and she wept.
When the conversation took such a turn that her remarks need not sound ill omened, she mentioned those who had served her well through the years and who invited pity because they had nowhere else to go. “Do give them a thought after I am gone,” she said. That was all. Then she returned to her own rooms, for Her Majesty's scripture reading8 was soon to begin.
The Third Prince was the most attractive of the children, and when she felt a little better for a moment, she had him come and sit beside her. “Would you remember me if I were not here anymore?” she asked him while no one else was listening.
“I would miss you very, very much! I love you, Grandma, much more than Their Majesties! I would be so unhappy without you!” He rubbed the tears so sweetly from his eyes that she wept through her smiles.
“You must live here when you grow up, and you must be sure to enjoy the red plum and the cherry here, in front of this wing, when they are in bloom. You must offer their flowers to the Buddha, too, when those times come.”9
He gazed at her face, nodded solemnly, then rose and went away just as he seemed about to cry. She had reared him and her Princess herself, and she felt very, very sad that she would not see them anymore.
She seemed to revive somewhat when autumn came at last and the weather turned a little cooler, but even so, she was far from well. The autumn wind was not yet such as to pierce her through and through,10 but she spent many a day amid gathering dews.
Her Majesty would soon return to the palace, and she wanted to ask her to stay a little longer, but she thought that that might be forward of her, and besides, an awkward stream of messengers kept coming from the Emperor; so in the end she never asked it at all. Since she could not go to the east wing, Her Majesty came to her. This was thoroughly embarrassing, but it would have been very sad for them not to meet, and she had her rooms done up specially for the occasion.
She was extremely thin, but her infinitely noble grace gained from precisely that a wonderful new quality, because where once the overflowing richness and brilliance of her looks had evoked the magnificence of worldly blossoms, her beauty now really was sublime, and her pensive air—for she knew that her time was nearly over—was more sorrowful and more profoundly moving than anything in the world.
At dusk a dreary wind had just begun to blow, and she was leaning on an armrest looking out into the garden, when Genji came in. “You managed to stay up very nicely today!” he said. “Her Majesty's visit seems to have done you so much good!”
With a pang she saw how happy her little reprieve had made him, and she grieved to imagine him soon in despair.
“Alas, not for long will you see what you do now: any breath of wind
may spill from a hagi frond the last trembling drop of dew.”11
It was true, her image fitted all too well: no dew could linger on such tossing fronds. The thought was unbearable. He answered while he gazed out into the garden,
“When all life is dew and at any touch may go, one drop then the next,
how I pray that you and I may leave nearly together!”
He wiped the tears from his eyes.
Her Majesty added,
“In this fleeting world where no dewdrop can linger in the autumn wind,
why imagine us to be unlike the bending grasses?”
They made a perfect picture as they talked, one well worth seeing, but the moment could not last, as Genji well knew, though he wished it might endure a thousand years. He mourned that nothing could detain someone destined to go.
“Please leave me. I feel very, very ill. Oh, forgive me for being so rude, however reduced I may be!”12 She drew her standing curtain closer and lay down, obviously in greater danger than ever before.
“What is the matter?” Her Majesty took her hand and watched her, weeping. She really did look like a dewdrop that would vanish soon. Countless messengers clattered off to order more scripture readings. She had been like this before and still revived, and Genji, who suspected the spirit, spent the night ordering every measure against it; but in vain. She died with the coming of day.
Her Majesty took it as a very great blessing that she had not returned to the palace and had been there at the end. Neither she nor His Grace could accept this parting as being the kind one expects in life, for it was too strange and too bitter; no wonder they felt lost in a waking dream. Both were distraught, and all the women too were overcome.
The Commander had come closer, and His Grace, who of course had lost every trace of composure, invited him to approach her curtain. “I think it is all over,” he said. “I cannot refuse her now in this extremity what she wanted so much for all those years. I hear no worthy monks and healers chanting scriptures anymore, but they cannot all have gone yet. I know it is too late for her in this life, but please tell them they are to cut her hair, so that she may at least have the Buddha's mercy on the dark road before her.13 Is any monk who can do that still here?” He struggled to speak bravely, but his face belied his manner, and the sorrowing Commander understood all too well his helplessly streaming tears.
“A spirit can apparently do this sort of thing, especially at a time like this, if it intends to make someone suffer. Perhaps that is what the matter is,” the Commander suggested. “At any rate, it might be just as well to do as she wished. They say that one day and night of abstinence will have their reward.14 It would not light her way to the world beyond just to cut her hair, though, if she is gone, and she would only be more painful to look at, so I am not sure that I recommend it.” He summoned this monk and that from among those who had gone to prepare for the mourning confinement, and he arranged whatever else was needed as well.
He had not once during those years thought of her in any culpable way, but he asked himself, When will I ever see her again as I saw her then? I have always been aware that I never heard her voice, and I know that that voice is now one I will never hear, but this is the moment, if there is ever to be one, for me to satisfy this longing for another look at her, or at least at her mortal shell. At the thought he wept without shame. Meanwhile the women were sobbing and wailing. “Do be quiet!” he cried as though to reprove them, and at the same time he lifted the curta
in.
The glimmer of dawn was not bright enough to see by, and his father had put the lamp beside her with its wick raised high. He was gazing at a face of perfect sweetness and beauty, so absorbed that when his son looked in, he seemed not even to think of screening her. “There she is, just as she always was, but you can tell that it is all over,” he said. He pressed a sleeve to his face while the Commander, his eyes dim with tears, blinked hard so as to look longer, though his overwhelming sorrow must have made that difficult. Her exquisitely lovely hair lay simply beside her, each strand in place and gleaming with the kindliest of lights. In the lamp's bright glow her face shone very white. Stretched out this way in all the innocence of her state, she looked even more flawless than she had in life, when she had so studiously kept out of sight. Contemplating her perfection, the Commander longed for her soul to come back from death into her body, but there was no hope of that.
The gentlewomen who had served her so long were beyond making themselves useful, and His Grace was therefore obliged to rally his wits and see to all the final arrangements. None of the many sorrows he had known in the past had ever so wholly engulfed him; he thought that there could never have been one like this before and that there never would be again.
The funeral was somehow done that very day; stern custom in this cruel world forbade him to contemplate her cast-off husk forever.15 The mourners crowded the broad field into the distance, and the last rites went forward with the greatest magnificence, but her frail wisp of smoke pitifully rising to the heavens, athough not an uncommon sight, was still cruelly disappointing. The lowliest and most ignorant of those who watched His Grace wept to see so very great a lord lean on others as though he thought he trod on empty air. The gentlewomen present felt lost in a nightmare, and their attendants worried that as they writhed about, they might even fall from their carriages. Genji recollected that dawn all those years ago when the Commander's mother died, and he realized that he must still have been himself then, since he clearly remembered a bright moon, whereas this evening he was engulfed in darkness.
She had died on the fourteenth, and now the fifteenth day was dawning. A dazzling sun rose over the dewy fields, and life to Genji now seemed more hateful than ever. He had survived her, but for how long? He considered allowing this tragedy to persuade him to act on his cherished desire, but people would then speak ill of him for being so fainthearted, and that convinced him to bear up a little longer, even though he could hardly endure the suffocating pain.
The Commander, who went into mourning confinement with him, stayed with him day and night and never went home at all. Compassion for his father's obvious and natural despair made him wish to do everything he could to console him.
Early one evening, when a stormy wind was blowing, the Commander thought back to the past and longingly recalled that brief glimpse of her. He secretly pondered her last, dreamlike moments, too, and so as not too clearly to betray his grief, he disguised the beads of his tears by counting on his rosary the call to Amida.
“Yearning too fondly for a twilight one autumn many years ago,
I saw the end come at last in a cruel dream at dawn,”
a dream that lingered on in bitter memory. He engaged worthy monks to call the Name, of course, but also to chant the Lotus Sutra, and both moved him profoundly.
Waking or sleeping, Genji's tears never dried, and he spent his days and nights swathed in fog. He reflected, looking back over his life: Everything, beginning with my face in the mirror, assured me that I resembled no one else, and yet the Buddha encouraged me even in my childhood to understand the sorrow and treachery of life, and I bore these bravely, until now at last I suffer a grief unknown before or ever again. Nothing in this world need concern me anymore, and there is nothing to deter me from devoted practice, but this despair could make my chosen path difficult to follow. In his trouble he prayed to Amida, “I beg you, allow me to forget something of my pain!”
Messages of condolence arrived from many places, especially from the palace, and not just for form's sake, because they came thick and fast. Genji firmly declined to read or listen to them, lest anything in them tug too strongly at his heart. He did not wish to appear weak, however, and he refused to have it said of him that he had left the world at last in a fit of feebleminded misery; and so he added to his burden of sorrow the anguish of not following the prompting of his heart.
His Excellency sent many messages, quick as he always was to offer sympathy, for he greatly mourned the loss of a lady unlike any other in the world. In the quiet of an autumn twilight he remembered that this season was the one when the Commander's mother had died, and he reflected sadly that most of those who mourned her then had now passed on themselves. No, one never knew in this life who would go and who would stay. The sky's moving quality prompted him to have the Chamberlain Lieutenant, his son, take Genji a very touching letter, in the margin of which he had written,
“That autumn for me retains the living presence it had long ago,
and the sleeves I moistened then are wet again with fresh dew.”
Genji answered,
“Dews of long ago and dews that settle lately to me are all one,
for alas each autumn night brings the same bitter sorrow.”
To keep up appearances he added thanks for many kind messages of sympathy, because if he had freely expressed his grief, His Excellency, being the man he was, would have seen from his letter how little courage he had left.
He wore a rather darker shade than when he had spoken of “light gray.”16 Some who are blessed with good fortune and success unfortunately arouse envy, and the arrogance of the great may cause much suffering, but she had had a wonderful capacity to attract even those who were distant from her, and her smallest deed had inspired widespread praise. Quite ordinary people with no real reason to mourn her wept in those days to hear the wind sigh or crickets sing, and all who had known her slightly were beyond consolation. The women long in her intimate service mourned bitterly that they survived her at all. They resolved to become nuns and live in the mountains, far away from the troubles of this world.
Moving messages came also from His Eminence Reizei's Empress,17 who expressed her infinite sorrow.
“Had she no love then for sere wastes of withered moors, that the departed
never wished to set her heart on all that commends autumn?”
she wrote. “Now at last I understand.”
Even Genji, to whom all was dim, found himself unable again and again to put her letter down. She alone, he reflected, has the wit and discernment to be any comfort. He went on thinking about her, feeling a little better, while streaming tears kept his sleeve pressed to his eyes. He could not write for some time.
“You who have risen far aloft into the sky, look down upon me,
caught here by a fleeting life hateful to my autumn years.”
Even after wrapping it, he gazed for a time absently before him.
His thoughts were unsteady, and even he knew that he was quite confused about many things. For this reason he sought distraction among the women. He kept just a few before the altar with him while he quietly pursued his devotions. A thousand years with her: that was what he had wanted, and the parting that none evades had been a crushing blow. There now arose in him a pure and lasting aspiration to look only toward the life to come, so that nothing should distract him from the lotus dew of paradise; but unfortunately, he also still dreaded what people might feel like saying about him.
He had said nothing very clear about the memorial rites, and the Commander therefore took responsibility for all that. Time and again he wondered whether he would live out the day, but the days and months somehow passed anyway, and he felt as though he was dreaming them all.
Her Majesty, like others, never once forgot her, because she had loved her, too.
41
MABOROSHI
The Seer
Maboroshi means a seer or sorcerer who travels between this world
and the afterworld. The word is the chapter title because of its presence in Genji's poem:
“O seer who roams the vastness of the heavens, go and find for me
a soul I now seek in vain even when I chance to dream.”
RELATIONSHIP TO EARLIER CHAPTERS
“The Seer” begins in the first month of the year after “The Law” ends and reaches the twelfth month of that year.
PERSONS
His Grace, the Honorary Retired Emperor, Genji, age 52
His Highness of War, Genji's brother (Hotaru Hyōbukyō no Miya)
Chūjō, a gentlewoman in Genji's service
Chūnagon, a gentlewoman in Genji's service
His Highness, the Third Prince, 6 (Niou)
Her Cloistered Highness, 26 to 27 (Onna San no Miya)
The lady from Akashi, 43 (Akashi no Kimi)
The lady of summer (Hanachirusato)
The Commander, 31 (Yūgiri)
The officiant at the Assembly of the Holy Names
The light of spring plunged him only further into darkness, and he felt at heart as though he would never have relief from his sorrow. Outside, people gathered to his residence as usual,1 but he pleaded illness to remain behind his blinds. When His Highness of War arrived, he at last sent out a message that he would receive his visitor privately.
“This house is my home, and yet there is no one here to love the blossoms:
what can have drawn spring again to come round as it did then?”
The Tale of Genji: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (Junichiro Breakdown of Genji) Page 98
