The Tale of Genji: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (Junichiro Breakdown of Genji)

by Murasaki Shikibu

  Without a word to the other women she wrote to her mistress's mother: “Last evening my lady got her defilement, to her great disappointment, and during the night she had such frightening dreams that I advised great caution all day today. She is therefore in seclusion. I am extremely sorry to say that something appears to be causing her trouble.” After writing this, she gave the party something to eat. She also let the nun know that her mistress would be in seclusion today and so would not go.

  For the young woman so prized by His Highness most days dragged by in vacant gazing at the misty hills, but not this one, which passed quickly, sped on by an ardor that could not abide the sinking of the sun. It was a serene and perfectly peaceful spring day. He could not get his fill of looking at her,13 for she struck him as flawless, and she had a deliciously warm and winning appeal. Not that she equaled the lady in his wing at Nijō. The daughter of His Excellency of the Right, as lovely as at her age she could possibly be, could certainly claim also to be distinctly superior, but to His Highness just now the one before him was incomparable, and his eyes saw charms that he had never known before. As for herself, she had thought the Commander so handsome that there could surely be no one else like him, but she found His Highness far more intensely beautiful and fascinating.

  Attendants

  His Highness drew up an inkstone and tried some writing practice. The things he dashed off were so pretty and the pictures he painted were all so delightful that he undoubtedly won her girlish heart. “You must look at this whenever, alas, I am unable to be with you,” he said; and he did a very amusing picture of a man and woman lying side by side. “This is how I wish we could always be,” he added, and tears spilled from his eyes.

  “What I promise you might be my love forever, yet it is so sad

  that life keeps from you and me whether we have tomorrow.

  But no, it is very wrong of me to have such thoughts. I can so seldom do as I please, and all the plotting and scheming just makes me want to die. How did I ever manage to find you, after you were so cruel to me that time?”

  She picked up the brush he had wetted and wrote,

  “Never would my heart give me any wish to mourn, could I just believe

  life in this world we two share to be all that may soon change.”

  She was obviously reproaching him for future infidelities. He thought her very sweet. “Whose fickle ways could have prompted that?” he said with a smile and then, to her great embarrassment, went on to press her for an account of how the Commander had first come to bring her here.

  “I do wish you would not ask me questions that I may not answer!” she protested girlishly.

  Oh, well, it will al come out in the end, he said to himself but it was not very nice of him to want so much to hear it from her.

  Night came, and Tokikata returned from his mission to the City. He sought out Ukon. “There was a messenger from Her Majesty, you know,” he reported, “and His Excellency of the Right complained bitterly that for His Highness to go off like that without a word to anyone was extremely improper and could result in a serious affront to his dignity, and that, furthermore, the consequences could be disastrous for himself as well if His Majesty were to hear of it. I managed to insist that His Highness had gone to see a holy man in the Eastern Hills. It is all her fault, though!” he added. “Women have a lot to answer for! Look what trouble she got even a simple retainer into, making him tell lies and everything!”

  “That was a fine idea, to call my mistress a holy man! For that I am sure your lie will be forgiven. Seriously, though, I wonder where His Highness got these strange ways of his. We could certainly have managed something for him, considering who he is, if only we had known beforehand that he was coming. What an extraordinary way to arrive!” Such were Ukon's remarks on the subject.

  She went to His Highness and reported what she had heard. He could well imagine what was going on. “It is such a nuisance, never being able to do anything!” he complained to the young woman beside him. “How I wish I could be one of those footloose and fancy-free privy gentlemen for a while! What am I to do? I cannot always satisfy those people I am supposed to please! And how will the Commander take it? He and I are likely to be on decent terms anyway,14 but actually, we have always been remarkably close, and I will hardly be able to look him in the eye if he ever finds out what I have done to him. Another thing that worries me is that I can indeed imagine him forgetting that he has neglected you and blaming you for this! I must take you away somewhere else to make sure no one ever finds out.” He prepared to go, since he could not possibly spend yet another such day with her, but even so, he seemed to have lost his soul among her sleeves.15

  His men cleared their throats to warn him that he must be on his way before daybreak. They came together out to the double doors, but he could go no farther.

  “I shall lose my way as no one has ever done, for before me goes,

  all along the endless road, the blinding veil of my tears.”

  She herself was profoundly moved.

  “When these sleeves of mine can never be broad enough to contain my tears,

  how can I, such as I am, ever hope to keep you here?”

  He mounted his horse while the wind whistled in the frosty dawn, feeling as though his clothes and hers had been taken by the cold,16 and such was the pain of parting that he might have turned back if his escort, in no mood to dawdle, had not set off in very great haste, and he therefore with them, although he hardly knew what he was doing. The two gentlemen of the fifth rank, the Chief Clerk and Tokikata, took his bridle, and neither mounted his own horse until after the steep passage through the hills. The very crackle of ice beneath the horses’ hooves along the river evoked solitude and desolation. He had never followed any other mountain road like this, not even in years past. How strange it is, he thought, to have such a tie to that one village!

  When he reached Nijō, he went to bed in his own room, where he felt at home; the cruel way the lady in his wing had kept the girl hidden from him made him too angry to do otherwise. He could not sleep, however, and in time he yielded to loneliness and misery and went over to the wing after all. There she was, unsuspecting and very beautiful, but while he granted her a rare quality beyond anything in the girl who had so entranced him, he saw also a striking resemblance, and it was with a heavy heart and a thoroughly downcast air that he went into the curtained bed to lie down. She followed him.

  “I am not at all well,” he said. “I feel apprehensive, as though something is going to happen to me. Your life would change very quickly then, no matter how much I may love you. He would have his desire in the end, I know he would.”

  He is talking the worst nonsense, and quite seriously, too, she thought. “If he ever heard the awful things you say, he would wonder what on earth I have been telling you. It is too painful. The most casual joke can be very hard to bear for one as familiar with misfortune as I am.” She turned away.

  His Highness began to speak in earnest. “How would you feel if I really did have reason to be angry with you? Have I not treated you well? Some people even complain that few would have done as much for you as I have, and yet you seem to think nothing of me, compared with him. It is destiny, no doubt, I understand that, but even so, it is very hard to have you hide things from me the way you do.” And what a remarkable destiny it was that led me to find her at last at Uji! he reflected meanwhile, the memory bringing tears to his eyes.

  His obvious emotion left her at a loss. What sort of talk can he have been hearing? She was dismayed and found no reply. First he took me on a whim of his own, and now he seems to misinterpret unflatteringly everything I do. That is what has earned me his contempt: the mistake I made when I relied too greatly on someone whom nothing obliged to assist me, and when I began to feel grateful for everything he had done. The sadness attending these melancholy reflections made her look very dear indeed. He did not wish to let her know quite yet what he had discovered and had therefore disg
uised the cause of his annoyance, so that she took him seriously as referring to the Commander and assumed that he believed some nonsense or other that someone had told him. She felt too ashamed to face him until she had found out for certain whether or not this was so.

  He was surprised by the arrival of a note from Her Majesty and returned to the main house with his frown intact. “Yesterday you were absent, and now it appears that you are unwell. Please come if you are feeling at all better. It has been too long,” she had written. He did not wish to upset her further, but it was quite true, he was not feeling himself, and he did not go to the palace that day. Many senior nobles came to call on him, but he spent the day behind his blinds.

  The Commander came toward evening. His Highness invited him in and received him in a very casual state of dress.

  “Her Majesty has been extremely worried to learn that you are ill,” the Commander began. “What is the matter?”

  With the Commander there before him, His Highness felt more agitated than ever and had little to say. Talk about acting the holy man, he said to himself, you make a fine mountain ascetic, leaving a lovely girl like that down there, sweetly expecting you for days and months on end! He could never stand the way the Commander missed no opportunity great or small to show himself off as a pillar of virtue, and he regularly did his best to cut him down to size; but what might he have said this time, after being found out on such a matter! He ventured no taunts on the subject, however, and instead looked genuinely ill.

  “This will not do!” the Commander expostulated gravely as he left. “A quite mild indisposition may still be very serious when it continues for days on end. Please look after yourself!”

  He makes one feel so small! I wonder how I looked to her in comparison. Such were His Highness's thoughts, since she was so constantly on his mind that everything reminded him of her.

  Life at Uji was very dull now that the trip to Ishiyama was off. He wrote her a letter full of the most earnest assurances, but it was a worry just to send it. He had it delivered by a retainer of Tokikata, one who did not know what the issue was. “A gentleman I used to know came here among his lordship's escort and rediscovered me, and now he is courting me again,” Ukon explained to the other women. Yes, by now she had a lie for every occasion.

  The next month came.17 His Highness simply could not go, despite his intense longing to do so. I doubt I will live much longer if I go on like this, he groaned miserably to himself.

  The Commander went there discreetly, as usual, after the busiest time at court was over. At the temple he worshipped the Buddha, and then, after distributing largesse to the monks he had chanting the scriptures, he went on quietly toward evening to call at the house. He did not go in heavy disguise, and in his hat and dress cloak he looked dauntingly splendid from the moment he walked in.

  She could hardly imagine being with him—the very idea filled her with terror and shame—and moreover the memory of that most impetuous lord made the thought of receiving this one cruelly distasteful. “I can feel myself losing interest in every one of the women I have been with all this time,” His Highness had assured her, and it was true: she gathered that he had been quite ill ever since, so that he was no longer going to any of the places he commonly frequented and loud prayers were being said for him. What would he think of her if he heard? It was an appalling idea. In contrast, this visitor had marvelous distinction, grace, and depth of heart, and when he apologized for his long absence, he did so not in glowing speeches about longing and regret but in a few words more eloquent than any burning soliloquy, for he had the gift of appealing directly to anyone's deepest sympathy. Languid elegance he had, of course, but also, and to extraordinary degree, a quality that inspired trust in his enduring loyalty. How absolutely awful it would be if anyone were to breathe a word to him about how different I feel now, she said to herself. It would be such a shock! How wrong it is of me, and how giddy, to prefer instead the one who insists on pursuing me with such mad abandon! The misery of contemplating the possibility that the Commander might condemn and then forget her had given her such a troubled, melancholy air that he noted a far greater maturity and understanding in her since his last visit. He reflected with a pang that she must feel the burden of every sort of care, living here like this with so little to do, and he devoted himself to her more attentively than usual.

  Hat and dress cloak

  “The house I am having built is finally taking shape,” he said. “I had a look at it the other day. The brook there is much less forbidding than this river, and you will have lots of flowers to look at. Also, Sanjō, where I live, is not far away. We will no longer be so far apart that I must always worry about you. If all goes well, I shall move you there this spring.”

  His talk of his plan reminded her that just the day before he, too, had written about finding somewhere for them to meet comfortably. I suppose he does not know about this new house, she thought sadly; oh, but no, I must not give myself to him! Yet remembering him as he had been then obliged her despite herself to mourn her cruel fate, and she wept.

  “I was much happier before, when you seemed so much more at peace,” he said. “Has anyone been filling your ears with worthless insinuations? Considering who I am, I would hardly come all the way here to see you if I had the slightest intention of neglecting you, and certainly not over that road!” It was the first day of the month, and they lay near the veranda looking out at the evening moon. He dwelled silently on old and moving memories, while she sighed over the fresh cares that had come to afflict her. Both were absorbed in their troubles.

  The hills were veiled in mist, and crested herons stood on a sandspit, giving the scene a perfect touch, while the full span of the Uji Bridge stretched away into the distance and boats passed up and down laden with brushwood: a scene so picturesque that it always made the past very vivid for him. The presence of this young woman beside him would have had a rich and marvelous poignancy even if she had not been who she was, and her extraordinary resemblance to the lady he had loved, as well as her new awareness in intimate matters and her increasingly courtly ways, made it all the more plain how greatly the pleasure of her company had grown since he had first come to know her. Just the same, the many cares gathered in her heart now and again started tears from her eyes. When he saw that he had failed to console her, he said,

  “No, it will not fail, that enduring promise made by the Uji Bridge:

  never fear, for you may cross, sure it will uphold your trust.

  Just wait and see!”

  She replied,

  “When the Uji Bridge seems so perilous to cross, with its many gaps,18

  do you mean me to believe it will never, never fail?”

  He considered staying longer, since it was now so much more difficult to leave her, but then he thought better of it. Rumors started all too readily, and besides, there was no need to, since things would soon be so much easier. He returned to the City at dawn. She certainly is a woman now! he reflected as he left, more fondly than ever before.

  On the tenth of the second month His Majesty convened a Chinese poetry gathering at the palace. His Highness and the Commander were both there. His Highness's voice sounded quite lovely, singing “The Plum Tree Branch” in the mode proper to the moment. Considering how far he stood above all his contemporaries, it was very wrong of him to burn for anyone so unworthy.

  All at once a snowstorm set in, with a high wind, and the music ceased immediately. Everyone repaired to His Highness's palace apartments, where they rested and enjoyed refreshments. The Commander, who had a message to send, moved a little closer to the veranda, where by dim starlight he glimpsed the deepening snow and hummed “Lonely sleeves spread on her narrow mat, tonight again,”19 as though “Darkness covers all”20 had come to life; for it was his profound genius to give the most extraordinary charm to the least passage of verse that he might wish to voice.

  Of all the poems he might have chosen! His Highness lay there with a beati
ng heart, pretending to be asleep. He seems to feel strongly about her, too, he complained to himself. I thought I was the only one who cared about her lonely sleeves, but the poor fellow feels the same way. It is a bit hard! With a first lover like that, how could she possibly come to prefer me?

  The next morning, with snow deep on the ground, His Highness, glowing with all the beauty of youth, came before His Majesty to present his poem. The Commander was close to him in age, but his two or three more years21 seemed to give him such added maturity and poise that he might have been expressly devised as a model for every courtier. All the world agreed that he was perfect as an imperial son-in-law. In learning and in ability at public affairs he certainly was second to none. Once the poems had been read out, everyone withdrew, humming His Highness's, which they agreed was the best of the lot; but this meant nothing to His Highness himself, since he could not even recall what he had had in mind when he composed it.

  What he gathered of the Commander's feelings enjoined still greater vigilance than before, and it was therefore with infinite caution that he set out for Uji once more. The snow, which in the City seemed to linger only to await a friend,22 became much deeper once he entered the hills. The deserted track was now nearly impossible to follow, and his companions all but wept with fear of the disasters they might suffer. The Chief Clerk, his guide, was concurrently Deputy Commissioner of Ceremonial, both of which were thoroughly dignified posts, and it was therefore amusing to see him dressed for yet another role, with his trousers hitched up high.

  At Uji they had had notice that His Highness was coming, but it never occurred to them that he would brave this snow, and they were wholly unprepared when, late in the night, a message reached Ukon. Ukon's mistress was as surprised and touched as Ukon herself. Ukon had been wondering what was to become of her young lady, and she certainly was also disturbed, but tonight she must have thrown caution to the winds. It was out of the question to send him back, and she therefore had a talk with Jijū, another young woman with whom her mistress was friendly and who did not lack sense. “This is a very tricky business,” she said. “I want you to help me keep him out of sight.” Together they admitted him to the house. His perfume was especially penetrating, since he was wet from his journey, and that could easily have caused trouble, but they successfully passed him off as the Commander, whom he so closely resembled in build.