Between periods of prayer he spent his time with his daughters, and since they were growing up now, he taught them music and games like Go and character guessing. To his eye the elder showed greater thoughtfulness and depth, while the younger, more artlessly winning, had a delightfully bashful appeal. Each was different in her way.
One fine spring day the waterbirds were all chattering away, wing to wing, on the lake—a sight he seldom deigned to notice—and while he watched, he envied them for never leaving their mates. Meanwhile he gave his daughters their music lesson. They were so small and sweet, and the way they each played was so touchingly pretty that tears began to come.
“Now that waterbird has left her mate forsaken and gone far away,
how can her nestlings linger in this cruel, shifting world?5
It is so sad!” he said, wiping his eyes. He was a very handsome Prince. Gaunt from his years of pious devotion, he only looked the nobler for it, and in his dress cloak, negligently worn and rumpled from tending his daughters, he made an imposing figure.
His elder softly drew the inkstone to her and traced words on it, as though for casual practice. “Write on this,” he said, and gave her some paper. “They say that one should never write on an inkstone.”
Embarrassed, she wrote,
“I only wonder how this nestling can have grown, and such reflections
tell this little waterbird her uncertain destiny.”
It was not very good, but under the circumstances it was extremely affecting. Her hand showed promise, even if she did not yet connect her letters very well.
“Now you write something!” His Highness said to the younger, who was more of a child and so took a good deal longer about it.
“Why, without those wings you spread wide to shelter me, tenderly weeping,
I would have remained behind ever unhatched in the nest.”
How could he not have looked with pity on such lovable daughters when their clothes were all rumpled and limp and they spent their lonely days with nothing to do because they had no one else to mind them? Sutra text in one hand, he now chanted the scriptures and now sang them their solfège.6 The elder had a biwa and the younger a sō no koto, and they were so used to playing together that they did not sound bad at all; in fact they did very nicely.
He had never acquired much learning because he had lost his father the Emperor and his mother the Consort at an early age and so had been deprived of any real support. How could he possibly have been prepared for life in this world? Even for someone so exalted, he was nobly innocent to an astonishing degree, like a woman. The treasures of past generations and his inheritance from his grandfather the Minister all vanished without a trace, although he had assumed that they would somehow last forever, leaving him nothing but a lot of ostentatiously imposing household furnishings. No one came to call, no one offered him assistance. With little else to do, he summoned first-class musicians from the Office of Music and so on and became very good indeed at that sort of thing, having already devoted his youth to similarly trifling amusements.
His Highness was His Grace Genji's younger brother. In the days when His
The weir at Uji
Eminence Reizei was Heir Apparent, His Eminence Suzaku's mother7 had plotted to have the imperial dignity pass to him instead, but the turmoil she caused by championing him while in power unfortunately led to the other side severing all relations with him, and since after that the world belonged entirely to His Grace's descendants, he had been unable to appear in society at all. He had therefore become a sort of holy man years ago and given up any other hope.
Meanwhile his residence burned down. This on top of everything else was a crushing blow, and since he really had nowhere else to go, he moved to an attractive villa he owned at Uji. The immediate prospect of leaving upset him, despite his thoughts of renunciation. The place was near the weir, and the loud noise of the river ill suited his longing for peace, but there was nothing else to do. Blossoms, autumn leaves, and the flowing river: these were his solace in the gloomy reverie that now more than ever was his only refuge. Even after vanishing into this wilderness, he constantly missed the lady he had lost.
“My old companion and the house where I once lived both have turned to smoke;
why is it that only I linger on just as before?”
So it was that he burned on with nothing left to live for.
Fewer and fewer people came to visit this dwelling of his across the intervening range on range of hills. Only rare, uncouth peasants or mountain rustics saw to his needs. For him the morning fog on the hills never lifted, day or night.8
There lived meanwhile among the Uji hills an Adept and something of a holy man, deeply learned and possessed of no light reputation in the world at large, who yet remained in retreat and seldom went to serve at court. His Highness, who lived nearby in dismal solitude, impressed him with his good works and his study of the scriptures, and he therefore called often at His Highness's house, where he enlarged on the profound meaning of all that His Highness had learned through the years, until he convinced His Highness more thoroughly than ever that this fleeting world is dross. “My heart aspires to the lotus throne and would inhabit the clear lake of Paradise, but you see,” His Highness confessed, “I worry too much about the fate of my young daughters after I have left them, I cannot possibly assume that new guise.”
This Adept served His Eminence Reizei intimately, teaching him the scriptures and so on. Once, when he was in the City and His Eminence was going over worthy texts as usual and questioning him on them, he happened to remark, “His Highness the Eighth Prince knows a great deal, and he has acquired a profound understanding of the Inner Teaching.9 I suppose that he must have been born to it because of his karma. He is so completely devoted to his practice that he has the appearance of a true holy man.”
“Does he not wear the habit yet?” His Eminence inquired. “My young people call him the holy layman, or something like that. It is rather sad.”
The Consultant Captain was in attendance, too, and he took note of what he had heard. I know very well how disappointing this world is, he told himself, but I do not practice to an extent that anyone might actually notice, and so far in this life I have just wasted my time. He wondered about the state of mind of someone who had become a holy man while still a layman.
“He seems to have aspired for a long time to leave the world,” the Adept went on, “but a trifling matter caused him to hesitate, and by now he laments that it is impossible for him to give up his beloved daughters.”
Monk though he was, the Adept loved music. “Yes, Your Eminence, when his daughters play together against the noise of the rushing river, one cannot help thinking of Paradise,” he remarked in somewhat old-fashioned praise.
His Eminence smiled. “How nice! You would hardly think that they knew much of such worldly pursuits after growing up with a holy man. His reluctance to abandon them seems to have put him in a difficult position—I wonder whether he might be willing to give them to me, if I survive him for any length of time.” His Eminence was his father's tenth child. He definitely wanted them, for he remembered how His Eminence Suzaku had entrusted Her Cloistered Highness to His Grace of Rokujō, and it occurred to him that they might relieve the tedium of his life.
What caught the Captain's interest, on the other hand, was this Prince's spirit of quiet devotion. He very much wanted to meet him, and he discussed the matter with the Adept before the Adept began his journey back. “Please sound him out discreetly so that I may go and study with him,” he said. “My mind is made up to it.”
His Eminence sent off a messenger to say, “Having learned indirectly of the sad circumstances under which you are living…” and so on, together with the poem
“My heart scorns the world and goes to you in your hills—are you then the one
who conceals yourself from me yonder beyond eightfold clouds?”
The Adept let the messenger reach His Highness first, and
His Highness received the man with surprise and delight. Practically nobody ever came to him here below these hills, even from anyone far less exalted, and he entertained his guest with such delicacies as the place afforded. He replied,
“It is not, alas, that I am lost forever in enlightenment;
I only deplore this world from here in the Uji hills.”10
To His Eminence's regret, his modesty about his accomplishment as a holy man betrayed a lingering bitterness against the world.
The Adept described the Captain's apparently profound religious aspiration. “He told me that he has longed since youth to grasp the meaning of the scriptures,” he explained, “but that, like it or not, he has had to accept life in the world and to remain caught up day and night in concerns public and private. He says, ‘It is not that someone like myself, since after all I hardly matter, need really be that shy of shutting himself away to study the scriptures or of showing an interest in renouncing the world, but as things are, I cannot help being neglectful and distracted, and the news of your thoroughly admirable example has so inspired me that I wish to learn from you.’ That is what he said, Your Highness, and very earnestly, too.”
“The insight that the world is dross, hence the first thoughts of hatred for it, generally follows from personal unhappiness, for it is at such times that one rejects the world and conceives the aspiration to higher things; and it is remarkable to hear of so fortunate a young man, who presumably lacks nothing that he might desire, being so preoccupied by the life to come. I suppose that I myself was destined to take this path, since it was as though the Buddha himself urged me to shun the world, and in due course I had my wish for peace and quiet. Still, I doubt that I have much time left now, and considering how approximate my mode of life really is and how little likely I am ever fully to understand the past or the future, he will be a friend in the Teaching before whom I should properly feel deficient.” He talked on like this for some time, and after an exchange of letters the young man himself arrived.
It was a sadder place than he had been led to imagine, and considering who His Highness was, everything about his life there suggested the drastic simplicity of the grass hut built to last little more than a day. There are other quiet mountain villages with an appeal all their own, but here amid the roar of waters and the clamor of waves one seemed unlikely ever to forget one's cares or, at night amid the wind's dreary moan, to dream a consoling dream.
Surroundings like these undoubtedly stir thoughts of renunciation in His Highness, the Captain reflected, inclined as he is to seek a holy life, but how must they affect his daughters? He easily imagined them as having few of the common feminine graces. Only a sliding panel separated the chapel from what he took to be their room. A man given to gallantry would have approached them all aquiver to discover what they were like, for there was something about them that made one want to know more; but the Captain thought better of it, since any venture of the
“Grass hut”
kind would frustrate the wish to renounce all such things that had first led him to seek out His Highness among these hills. Under the circumstances it might be out of place for him to indulge in suggestive pleasantries. He instead plied His Highness with questions touching on His Highness's melancholy plight, and he returned to visit him again and again because, layman or not, His Highness had a deep understanding gained from practice among these hills, and he enlightened the Captain wonderfully on the scriptures, just as the Captain had hoped that he would.
There are many saintly men and many learned monks in this world, but it seemed to the Captain that the high and mighty prelate, with his lofty title and his air of impatience with trifles, was too forbidding to question on the deep meaning of things, while the more humble disciple of the Buddha, despite meritorious observance of the Precepts, was crude in looks, rough in speech, offensively familiar in manner, and sufficiently repellent that when he called a man like that to his bedside to talk, on a quiet evening after a day spent on nothing but official business, the outcome was certain to be unpleasantly disappointing; whereas His Highness was superbly distinguished, and he mingled with his every word and with all his talk of that same Buddha's teaching such familiar similes that although by no means profoundly enlightened, he certainly had a wonderful gift for making a listener of good birth understand. After each such intimate visit the Captain wished to stay with His Highness always, and the welter of duties that kept him away only made him miss His Highness more.
The Captain's reverence for him led His Eminence Reizei to write to him frequently, too, so that callers again appeared sometimes at the lonely residence of a Prince whom hardly anyone had even mentioned for years. A message from His Eminence, when the moment prompted one, was always delivered magnificently, and our young gentleman, too, took every opportunity to cultivate His Highness's goodwill with attentions both pleasant and practical. Meanwhile, three years passed.11
Late one autumn, when the time had come for his season-by-season calling of the Name, and when the noise of waves against the weir was too loud to give one a moment's peace, His Highness moved to the main hall of the Adept's temple to spend seven days at his devotions. His daughters were suffering more than ever from the dreariness and tedium of their life when the young Captain remembered how long it had been since he last visited His Highness and set straight off, in disguise and so discreetly as to be almost alone, under a moon that still hung in the predawn sky. He rode, since the place was on the near side of the river and there was no need to bother with a boat.
The farther he went, the thicker the fog before him, and while he struggled through brush dense enough to hide the path, a blustering wind showered him with heavy dew from the leaves until he was thoroughly cold and wet, although he had no one but himself to blame. Caught between misery and excitement, he felt as though he had never been on such an adventure before.
“More fragile than dew that the winds down mountain slopes sweep from off the leaves,
my tears, though I know not why, fall in an unending stream.”
He enjoined silence on his attendants lest a peasant waken and wonder, and the splash of their horses' hooves in rivulets here and there, skirting brushwood fences, made him more cautious still. Even so, in some houses startled sleepers caught on the wind a perfume they did not know12—the scent he could never hide.
A forlorn music greeted him as he approached, although from what instrument he could not tell. They say His Highness often plays this way, he thought, and I have never yet had a chance to hear his famous music! I have come at a good time! He found it when he entered to be a biwa tuned to the ōshiki mode. The quite ordinary playing sounded unfamiliar in this setting, and the notes struck on the return of the plectrum were beautifully clean. The sō no koto, which came in now and again, had a touching, graceful tone.
Wishing to listen awhile, he kept out of sight, but a kind of watchman who had clearly heard him arrive, a gruff sort of man, now appeared. “His Highness is off on retreat, my lord,” he said. “I shall inform him that you are here.”
“But why? It would be wrong of me to disturb him while he has a set number of days of practice to accomplish. I will be quite satisfied if you will kindly tell his daughters how disappointed I would be, after arriving here soaking wet, to return with nothing to show for my journey.”
The unlovely face broke into a smile. “I shall do so, my lord,” the man said and started off.
“Just a moment!” The Captain called him back. “For years I have been hearing such reports of their music that I have been eager to hear it, and this is the perfect moment to do so. Is there no nook or cranny where I might hide for a little while to listen? It would be a shame if my unforeseen arrival obliged them to stop.”
The Captain's manner and looks could only deeply impress anyone so hopelessly common. “They play that way day and night when no one else can hear them, but they make not a sound when anyone from the City, even an underling, is here. Most of the time His
Highness keeps the presence of women here hidden, and his instructions are that we are not to let anyone know.”
The Captain smiled. “That is not very nice of him, is it! There he is, keeping secrets, and meanwhile everyone seems to be citing him as a model for all the world! Anyway,” he insisted, “I want you to help me. I have no gallant intentions! Their life here intrigues me, and I can hardly imagine them to be like other young ladies.”
“Very well, my lord. It might be thought rather silly of me to refuse.” He led the Captain to a bamboo screening fence that set the garden before their rooms entirely apart. Then he invited the Captain's attendants into the gallery to the west, where he seated them and looked after them himself.
The Captain cracked open the door that seemed to lead through the fence and peered in through prettily moonlit mist to where the women sat, beyond the rolled-up blinds. A single page girl was on the veranda, thin and looking awfully cold in her rumpled costume. One of the women within, partially hidden behind a pillar, had a biwa before her and was toying with the plectrum. Just then the moon, which had been clouded, burst forth brilliantly. “You can call out the moon with this, too,” she said, “though it is not a fan.”13 Her face as she peered outside was wonderfully fresh and appealing.
The one reclining beside her was leaning over her instrument. “There is a plectrum that calls back the setting sun,” she said, “but what odd ideas you have!”14 Her smiling figure suggested somewhat greater dignity and depth.
The Tale of Genji: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (Junichiro Breakdown of Genji) Page 106
