“Very well, I am wrong, but this does have something to do with the moon!”15 her sister answered, and their casual, bantering exchange struck him as more engagingly attractive than anything he had imagined. When he heard young gentle-women read old tales with scenes like this, he always assumed disappointedly that nothing of the kind could actually happen, but there were after all such corners in real life! He was already losing his heart to them.
The mist was too thick for him to see them very well. If only the moon would come out again! But then someone must have announced from within that a visitor had arrived, because the blinds were lowered and they all went inside. The unhurried way they slipped from sight without a sign of alarm or so much as a rustle of silks entranced him with its grace, and their wonderfully noble elegance touched his heart.
He stole away and with all haste sent a man to the City for a carriage. To the watchman he said, “Although I came at the wrong time, it has given me joy and some relief from my cares to do so. Please inform His Highness that I was here to wait upon him. I should like him to know how very wet I got on the way.” The man went to give His Highness the message.
His Highness's daughters, whom his arrival had so surprised, burned with embarrassment that he might have overheard their casual remarks to each other. In shame and dismay they bewailed their dullness—the hour was so improbable—in having failed to notice anything even when a strangely delicious perfume reached them on the wind. The woman charged with taking them his message seemed hopelessly inexperienced, and he decided that there was a time for all things. Under cover of the mist he sallied forth to go down on one knee before those very blinds. The rustic young women had no idea what to answer and hardly managed even to offer him a cushion.
“It is awkward for me here, outside the blinds,” he declared earnestly. “I would hardly have come all the way here along those impossible mountain trails on a frivolous whim, and this is not how I expect to be greeted. I trust that repeated visits from me, through these dews, will nonetheless gain your understanding.”
The younger women, incapable of mustering a proper reply and apparently fainting with shyness, did so painfully badly that someone was sent to rouse the older, wiser ones now asleep in an inner room, but this took some time, and the young ladies did not wish to leave the impression that they were toying with him. “How are we to address you as though we understood, when we know nothing of these things?” the elder replied with barely audible reticence, though in a most elegant and distinguished tone.
“It is the way of the world, I know, to feign ignorance of sorrows one sees all too well, but I regret that you in particular should insist on remaining aloof. It seems to me that you who enjoy the company of a gentleman of rare understanding should have a fine insight into all things, and that it would therefore become you to judge fairly how deep or shallow are the sentiments that I cannot disguise. Must you reject me on the assumption that I have nothing better in mind than common gallantry? Should anyone wish to urge me in that direction, I assure you that I am far too stubborn to yield. You are undoubtedly acquainted with my reputation. How happy I would be if I might trust you with confidences on the tedious life I lead, and if you would accept me well enough to call on me to distract you from the melancholy of your lonely existence.” He spoke at considerable length, but she was too reserved to respond. Instead she ceded her place to an older gentlewoman who had been woken up and who now came forth.16
The woman expressed herself excessively freely. “Goodness, we cannot have this!” she cried. “Look how poorly my lord is seated! He belongs inside the blinds. You young things seem to have no idea who he is!” This sharp rebuke in an aged voice pained the two young ladies.
“When the world so strangely ignores His Highness that very few who by rights should keep up with him ever actually do so, your devotion to him, my lord, is a wonder for which even I, who hardly matter, am very grateful indeed, and my young mistresses undoubtedly appreciate it; it is just that they find their sentiments a little difficult to express.”
What he gathered of her presence suggested genuine distinction, despite her disconcertingly voluble familiarity, and there was quality in her voice. “Your presence is very welcome,” he replied; “I hardly knew what to say next. I am delighted to know that the young ladies really did understand me.” The women peering round their standing curtains in the gathering light of dawn noted that his hunting cloak, indeed a discreet one, was thoroughly damp and that meanwhile a fragrance not of this world strangely filled all the air around him.
The older one to whom he was talking began to weep. “I might restrain myself for fear of appearing too forward,” she said, “but for many years I have added to my prayers the hope one day to take up with you the sad story of your past and to tell you at least some of it, and a moment that seems to answer that prayer is therefore a joy to me—if it were not that importunate tears blind me until I can no longer speak!” Her trembling made plain the emotion she really felt.
He had both heard and seen for himself how much more easily old people cry, but he still wondered that she should be so deeply affected. “I have visited this house many times,” he replied, “but there was no one to commiserate with me, as you do now, when I followed the path here alone and arrived soaked with dew. If this is as you say a happy occasion, please, tell me all!”
“A chance like this may never come again, my lord, and even if it were to do so, I myself may not live from one day to the next. I only want you to know that there was once an old woman like me. The news that Kojijū, once of Sanjō17 had passed away managed dimly to reach me, and in my declining years, when most of the women her age whom I knew then were gone, I therefore came up from a distant province, and for the last five or six years I have been in service here. You probably never knew the present Fujiwara Grand Counselor's elder brother, my lord, the one who when he died was the Intendant of the Right Gate Watch. Perhaps you have sometimes heard people talk about him. I can never help feeling as though he passed away only a little while ago. It seems to me that my sleeves are still wet from the sorrow I felt then, and I think that I must be dreaming when I count the years to see how old you are now. I am Ben, and my mother was his nurse. I waited intimately on him day and night, and although I hardly mattered, he occasionally confided to me glimpses of things that he had told no one else but could not keep to himself. Near the end of his illness, when he lay dying, he called me to his side and told me a certain number of things, one of which, my lord, I should tell you in my turn; but, having said that much, I leave it to you to hear the rest at your leisure, if you wish. The shocked young women seem to be nudging each other as though they feel I have gone too far already, and I cannot blame them.” She managed to stop talking after all.
The astonished young gentleman felt as though he had dreamed her speech or else heard it blurted out by a medium, but it concerned things that had always stirred and puzzled him, and it therefore aroused his intense curiosity. It was true, though, that they were being observed, and besides, it would also be impolite of him so quickly to spend the night caught up in talk of the past. “I can make nothing of what you say,” he replied, “but it is moving to listen to talk of times gone by. Yes, you must tell me the rest. For the present, however, I would not wish to be seen dressed as I am once the mist lifts, and it would be embarrassing to have your mistresses catch sight of me; not that I would not much rather stay.” As he rose, he caught the faint sound of the bell at the temple where His Highness was. Everything was muffled in the mist.
Already regretting that banks of cloud clinging to the peaks should so come between himself and His Highness, he sympathized more keenly than ever with the mood of His Highness's daughters. What sorrow would spare them here? he wondered. No wonder they are so withdrawn!
“Day now is breaking, but the path I must take home is invisible,
and the wooded hills I crossed lie thickly shrouded in mist.
I feel so forlorn!”
he wrote, still reluctant to leave. He who caught even the jaded eye of people in the City must have looked a marvel here.
The elder sister, anxious to skirt any indiscretion, replied cautiously as before,
“Yes, this is the time when clouds sit upon the peaks and the autumn mists
shroud all the paths up the heights, to remove them from our world.”
Her little sighs were extremely touching.
Nothing about the surroundings especially appealed to him, although much elicited his sympathy, but day was coming on, and he felt uncomfortably visible. “I regret that we cannot talk any longer,” he answered, “because there is so much more that I would like to know, but I should no doubt forgo any complaint until we know one another a little better. As long as you insist on treating me as you would anyone, I shall with great surprise take it amiss that you fail to understand me at all.” He moved to the west end of the front side of the house, which the watchman had made ready for him, and there he gave himself up to gloomy musings.
“There is a great commotion at the weir,” one of his men observed. “The spirit seems not really to be in it, though—I suppose the fish are not actually coming.” They seemed to know all about it. Curious boats piled with cut brushwood were passing up and down, each man aboard intent on his poor labors, and the way they glided by at the mercy of the waters reminded him that life holds similar dangers for all. Am I to imagine that their peril in this world is not mine, and that I live secure in a jeweled palace? he asked himself time and again.
He called for an inkstone and sent her,
“What drops wet these sleeves, when the river boatman's oar, skimming the shallows,
sounds out the most secret heart of the Maiden of the Bridge!18
You are in a sad reverie, I know.” He gave it to the watchman, who took it there, blue with cold.
Although embarrassed over her paper's rather common scent, she felt that what mattered most was a swift reply:
“These drops day and night while the Uji ferryman plies the running river
soak these ever-moistened sleeves till they may soon rot away.
I am all but floating.”19
It was very prettily written. How absolutely lovely! he thought and longed for more; but his men were crying, “His lordship's carriage has arrived!” and pressing him urgently. He therefore only summoned the watchman to say that he would be back when His Highness had returned. Then he changed from his wet robes, which he presented to the man, into the dress cloak he had sent for.
His thoughts still dwelled on what the old woman had told him, and there also lingered in his mind the image of figures more enchanting than he had ever expected: no, he saw with chagrin, it was more than he could do yet to give up this world.
He sent off a letter, one not in the style of a love note but set down instead on thick white paper. He chose his brush with care and gave his strokes a distinctive charm. “I am afraid that excessive reticence, lest perhaps I say too much, led me in the end to leave unsaid more than I wished. I hope that henceforth, as I briefly suggested, you will allow me a more comfortable place before your blinds. I have noted how long His Highness's retreat is to last, and I look forward to canceling then the disappointment of having been kept from him by the mist”; and so on. It was all very proper. His messenger was the Aide of the Left Palace Guards. “Find that old woman and give the letter to her,” he said. With the letter he sent several large partitioned boxes, remembering how cold the watchman had looked on his rounds.
The next day he sent a letter also to His Highness's temple, and it occurred to him to accompany it with silk, cotton wadding, and other such things, so that His Highness might offer them while he was there, since he did not doubt that the resident monks had been extremely uncomfortable during the recent storms. His Highness was to leave this morning, his retreat over, and he therefore included cotton, silk, stoles, and a set of robes for each of the holy practitioner monks.20
The watchman immediately put on the exquisitely beautiful hunting cloak and the soft gown of lovely white figured silk, indescribably perfumed, that the Captain had left him, but he could not put on a new body as well. Even while praising the clothes, everyone noticed how poorly the fragrance suited him, and in the end it was all rather embarrassing. Ill at ease in such finery, the watchman decided to rid it of the perfume that always caused such an unpleasant stir, but alas, the Captain's scent permeated it, and no amount of washing would make it go away.
The Captain was delighted to see such artless accomplishment in the elder sister's reply. As for His Highness, they told him about the Captain's letter and gave it to him to read.
“What is the matter with it?” His Highness said. “It would be thoughtless of him to write as a suitor. His sentiments seem quite unlike other young men's, and I imagine his reason for showing her these attentions is that I have already hinted to him what I expect from him once I am gone.” He expressed thanks for the gifts that had more than filled his mountain cave,21 and this put the Captain in the mood to visit him.
Now, the Third Prince22 had been talking about a fantasy of his, that it would be a particular pleasure to be involved with someone who lived far away from it all, and the Captain therefore decided to encourage his friend in these thoughts and to urge him on. One quiet dusk he went to see him.
They were chatting about this and that when the Captain brought up the Prince who lived at Uji and, to His Highness's delight, gave a full description of what he had seen that dawn. I knew it! the Captain said to himself, noting his friend's excitement; and he continued in a manner calculated to enhance the effect.
“You mentioned an answering note from her, though,” His Highness objected. “Why have you not let me see it? I would have shown it to you!”
“But that is just it!” the Captain replied. “I am sure you get all sorts of letters like that, and you never let me see a single one. No one leading my sheltered life could possibly keep those young women, as they are, all to himself, and I am eager for you to know them, although I cannot imagine how you are actually to visit them. As far as gallantry goes, the world belongs to those less burdened with rank. Hidden treasures surely exist in plenty. There must obviously be other women with that sort of appeal, secretly inhabiting the gloomy nooks and crannies of mountain villages and so on. For years I despised the two I have been describing on the assumption that life with so unworldly a holy man must have made them utter boors, and I ignored everything I heard about them; but if they measure up to what I saw of them by faint moonlight, then they are without a doubt the real thing. Their looks, their bearing—women like that, one has to agree, are exactly what a woman should be.”
His Highness came in the end to feel seriously jealous and also frantic to discover more about these wonders who had deeply affected a man impervious to any common appeal. “Keep a good eye on them, then,” he admonished the Captain, intensely frustrated and annoyed by the pompous rank that imposed such restrictions on him.
The Captain was amused. “Now, now,” he said, “this is nonsense. I am resolved never to set my heart on anything in this world, and I am therefore wary of any frivolity. I would be thoroughly disappointed if despite myself I were ever to entertain such stubborn desires.”
“A noble speech!” His Highness laughed. “I just hope that you can carry through on all your loftily pious talk!”
At heart the Captain was ever more deeply absorbed by what the old woman's talk had suggested, and he cared relatively little that a young woman should be seen as delightful or called a pleasure to look at.
The tenth month came, and on the fifth or sixth he started for Uji. “You must have a look at the weir this time, my lord,” his people told him, but he retorted, “What? Am I to approach the weir, when I feel my life to be as precarious as the mayfly's?”23 Abandoning any such thought, he set out as usual with the greatest discretion. He traveled lightly in a basketwork carriage, wearing a dress cloak and gathered trousers that he ha
d had especially sewn for such occasions from plain, stiff silk.
His Highness was pleased to receive him and entertained him handsomely with what the place offered. After dark he drew up the lamp and called the Adept down to explain the profundities of the scripture that he had left off reading earlier. They never closed their eyes, for a strong wind was blowing on the river, and the clattering of leaves torn from the trees and the noise of the water were all too affecting. It was a frightening, lonely place.
When the Captain judged that daybreak was near, he could not help looking back to that other dawn and purposely began to talk of the spell of music. “The last time I came,” he said, “that dawn when the mist led me astray, I heard a passage of music so wonderful that I only long to hear more.”
“After renouncing color and fragrance, I have forgotten all the music I had once learned,” His Highness replied; but he had someone bring him a kin. “No,” he said, “this really will not do. Perhaps it will come back to me after I have heard you play.” He called for a biwa that he pressed on his guest.
The Captain took it and tuned it. “I cannot believe that this is the instrument I heard briefly then,” he said. “I had supposed that the magic lay in the instrument's tone.” He was reluctant to play at all.
“Come, you are being unkind. How could any music so pleasing to you have reached your ears here? It is quite impossible.” His Highness began plucking the kin, to profoundly moving effect; no doubt the wind through the mountain pines sustained his music.24 With a show of much faltering and hesitation he played a single, beautiful piece.
“Now and again, to my surprise, I catch such faint sounds from a sō no koto as to suggest that they have learned to play,” he said, “but it has been a long time since I actually listened. They both seem to toy with the instrument as they please, but I expect that their only accompaniment is the waves on the river; I certainly cannot imagine them providing a competent rhythm themselves.”
The Tale of Genji: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (Junichiro Breakdown of Genji) Page 107
