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

by Murasaki Shikibu

  It would have been too disappointing to have to start back again before the night was even quite over, and all the women in the house were a worry. For these reasons he had sent Tokikata ahead with instructions to arrange it so that he could take her to another house across the river.

  Tokikata returned very late that night to report that all was ready. What is he going to do with her? The question agitated even Ukon, who, freshly roused from sleep, trembled in a frenzy of apprehension; she shook just the way a page girl does after playing in the snow. His Highness had carried her mistress off before she could get out a word of protest. She sent Jijū with them and stayed behind to look after the house.

  They got into a little boat just like the ones that from the house always looked so frail, and while they rowed across the river, the young woman felt as forlorn as though both banks were receding behind her. There in his arms she clung to him tightly, and he thought her utterly enchanting. The moon rode aloft in the dawn sky,23 and the river's limpid expanse stretched away. “This is the Isle of Orange Trees,” the boatman told them, and drew the boat up a moment to the bank. Shaped like a great rock, it was covered with striking evergreens.24

  “Look at them! They are little enough in themselves, but green like theirs will last a thousand years!” His Highness said, and he added,

  “Many years may pass, yet one thing will never change: that my heart is yours,

  for that I now promise you by the Isle of Orange Trees.”

  She, too, wondered at their journey:

  “The enduring hue of the Isle of Orange Trees may well never change,

  yet there is no knowing now where this drifting boat is bound.”

  Such was the moment and so lovely the woman that her poem, too, struck him as a delight.

  They reached the far bank and disembarked. It seemed too cruel to have one of his men carry her; assisted by his escort, he therefore walked on with her in his arms, to the dismay of those looking on, for they could not think what woman might have stirred him to that degree. The house was a modest one built by Tokikata's uncle, the Governor of Inaba, on one of his estates. It was not quite finished yet, and the basketwork screens—something His Highness had never seen before—hardly slowed the wind. Snow still lay in patches along the fence, and more was falling from a lowering sky.

  The rising sun gleamed from the icicles at the eaves, and by its light she looked even lovelier than before. He had come dressed simply for so risky a journey, and now, after slipping off her outer robe, he could delight in his view of her slender form. She herself was acutely embarrassed to be seen this way, hardly dressed at all—and to think she was here before so dazzling a lord!—but there was nowhere for her to hide. Her gowns, in five comfortably soft layers, looked very pretty at hem and sleeve and set her off to better advantage than layered colors. He was not used to seeing a woman dressed so informally, not even the one with whom he normally spent his time, and he found even that a wonder and a delight.

  Jijū was a very pretty young woman, too. To think that even she is seeing me like this! her mistress lamented. “Who is she?” His Highness asked. “You must not tell her who I am!” Jijū was thoroughly impressed. Meanwhile the resident caretaker honored Tokikata as the senior member of the party, and Tokikata was therefore resplendently installed on the other side of the sliding door from His Highness. In a voice quivering with respect the caretaker asked Tokikata questions that Tokikata was amused to be unable to answer. He claimed to have come because a yin-yang master's terrifying prediction required him not merely to go into seclusion but to do so outside the City. “Do not let any outsider anywhere near this house,” he warned.

  Alone with his love at last, His Highness spent the day in undisturbed intimacy. The idea that she must have received the Commander very similarly when he came to see her threw him into a fit of jealousy, and he described the Commander's profound respect for his wife, the Second Princess. Unfortunately, he did not mention the line of poetry he had overheard that time. Then Tokikata came with washing water and refreshments. “The honored guest had better not let himself be seen doing this!” His Highness jokingly cautioned him. As for Jijū, passionate young thing that she was, she thought it all a great lark and spent the day closeted with Tokikata.

  Snow now blanketed the ground, and His Highness, looking out toward where she lived, saw only treetops through gaps in the mist. The hills glittered in the setting sun as though hung with mirrors. He began to tell her, with many dramatic touches, about the perilous journey he had made the previous night.

  “Snow upon the hills, ice along frozen rivers: these for you I trod,

  yet for all that never lost the way to be lost in you;

  though there was a horse at Kohata village,”25 he wrote with careless ease, after calling for a poor inkstone that happened to be at hand.

  “Quicker than the snow, swirling down at last to lie by the frozen stream,

  I think I shall melt away while aloft yet in mid-sky,”

  she wrote, as though to refute his. He faulted her “while aloft yet in mid-sky,”26 and she was embarrassed to recognize that it had not been nice of her to write it. She tore it up. This touched him even more keenly, delighted with her as he already was, and his eloquence and sweetness of manner rose to new heights of captivating charm.

  They had two quiet days together during which to deepen their tender feelings for each other, for he had arranged that his “seclusion” was to last that long. Ukon went on putting out plausible excuses and meanwhile sent over fresh clothes. Today her mistress had her tangled hair combed and changed into a lovely combination of plum pink over deep red-violet. Jijū gave up the rude apron she had been wearing, whereupon His Highness picked it up and had his darling wear it to bring him his washing water. Ah, he thought, if I were to let my elder sister have her, she would treat her as a real prize! She has a good many very wellborn women, but I doubt that she has any beauty like this! He spent the day with her absorbed in the most trifling of pastimes.

  Over and over again he assured her that he planned to hide her away somewhere, and he tried to extract from her the most solemn promises in case he should turn up in the meantime. This was so painful that she could not answer him at all, and her tears filled him with the bitter conviction that even in his own presence, he was the one who still had her heart. All day he poured out his tears and reproaches, and the night was late when he took her home. He carried her himself, as before. “He would never do this much for you, you know,” he said, “that man who means so much to you.” No, she thought, he probably would not, and she nodded in enchanting agreement. Ukon opened the double doors to let her in. So they parted, and he started back again in an agony of unappeased longing.

  He returned to Nijō as he usually did under such circumstances. Feeling extremely unwell, he ate nothing at all and grew paler and thinner by the day, until at the palace and elsewhere there was only distress over his changed appearance; so much so that amid the mounting commotion he did not even send her a proper letter. At Uji, meanwhile, she could hardly read what he did send in peace, because that officious nurse of hers was now back again from where her daughter had given birth to a child.

  Her mother had taken comfort from knowing that although her daughter's accommodation was hardly inadequate, the Commander would certainly do better by her than that; and now, rejoicing to imagine the advantageous consequences of his plan to move her daughter closer, she began gathering gentlewomen and handsome page girls and sending them down to her. Her daughter herself had always looked forward to the move eagerly, but whenever she thought of that other, most insistent suitor, his accusing manner and his many reproaches rose all too vividly before her, and she had only to drop off to sleep to dream of him. All this left her very troubled indeed.

  It had been raining and raining for days on end, and His Highness had reached the unbearable conclusion that he simply could not cross those hills now. Ah, he was sufficiently ungrateful to reflect, pi
ty the poor silkworm in his parents' cocoon!27 While setting down for her some of his endless thoughts, he wrote,

  “O sadness of days when the very skies grow dark, and I cannot see

  the clouds above where you are through the endless veil of rain.”

  The things he wrote most casually were the ones that afforded the greatest pleasure and delight. Not being especially given to weighty pondering, she felt the tug of his ardent feelings, and yet the gentleman who had claimed her earlier, yes, he was the one with the greater depth and nobility, and also the first whom she had really known; and no doubt that is why she wondered, What would happen if he heard about this unfortunate business and came because of it to reject me? What a blow that would be for my mother, too, when she so longs for him to come for me! And that man with his burning ardor—people keep telling me he is a hopeless gallant, which he may well be, yet he still might hide me somewhere in the City and go on caring enough not to forget me; but then there are Her Highness's feelings to consider, since nothing in this world remains hidden for long—after all, all it took him was that single strange evening, and sure enough, he found me again, so obviously his lordship could not possibly fail to find out what had happened to me either. Her mind ran on in this vein, and she was just reflecting how terrible it would be if her lapse should cause his lordship to turn against her when a messenger arrived with a letter from him.

  The idea of reading both letters together repelled her, but she lay down to read the longer one. Jijū and Ukon exchanged glances. “Yes, he is the one she wants” was the message that passed between them.

  “And I can understand that,” Jijū added. “I myself had thought his lordship as handsome as any man alive, but His Highness is really extraordinary. The charm he has, when he is being amusing! It would be too much for me, if I were she and I knew he cared that much about me. I would go straight to Her Majesty's so as to be with him all the time.”

  “You worry me, you really do. Anyway, I do not see who could possibly be an improvement on his lordship. Looks are all very well, but just think of character and behavior! No, His Highness leaves a great deal to be desired. Oh, what is to become of our mistress!” So the two of them talked. Ukon was glad no longer to be alone devising her lies; it was good to have a confederate.

  His lordship's letter said, “Please forgive my silence, but I have been thinking of you. If you were to write to me from time to time, I could not ask for more. Can you possibly imagine that you do not matter to me?” and so on. In the margin he had added,

  “How is it with her, she of that far-off village where the waters rise,

  while these days the endless rains here shroud the skies in darkness?

  My thoughts are with you more than ever.” It was a straight-folded letter, on white paper. The writing, which had little flair or charm, nonetheless displayed a marked distinction.

  His Highness, very long and khotted very tight, gave equal pleasure. “This is the one you ought to answer first, before anyone sees you,” Jijū suggested.

  “Oh, no, I could not possibly, not today!” she answered bashfully and then wrote for herself,

  “This village's name I know now for my own fate, and Uji to me,

  in this land, Yamashiro, means only more misery.”28

  Now and again she looked at the painting His Highness had left her and wept. The thought of going away somewhere and never seeing him again must have hurt very much, although she often reminded herself of all the reasons why it could not last.

  “A cloud dark with rain, shrouding in melancholy ever-brooding hills:

  that is what I wish to be and drift all my life away.

  O to join the clouds!”29 Such was her answer, and from His Highness it drew helpless sobs. Still, he told himself, she does seem to want me! All he could see now was a vision of her lost in gloom.

  His lordship, that stalwart gentleman, tranquilly read her reply and imagined with great sympathy how downcast she must be. He missed her very much.

  “No break in the rains brings relief from this lonely brooding on my lot,

  and the waters rise and rise, till they flood these sleeves of mine,”30

  she had written. He stared at it and could not put it down.

  He was talking to his wife, the Second Princess. “I have hesitated to mention this for fear that you might take offense,” he said, “but actually, there is someone I have known for many years, someone I left in a dreary, distant place, who is miserable there, and she concerns me so much that I am thinking of bringing her to live nearby. I have always seen things differently from other people, and I had meant not to live my life as everyone else does,31 but I cannot give up everything now that I have you; and so, you see, I feel sympathy and guilt even toward someone whom I have never mentioned to anyone before.”

  “I do not understand why I should be displeased,” Her Highness replied.

  “Someone might give His Majesty the wrong idea, though. People can express themselves very cruelly—not that I think she need command that much interest.”

  He was resolved to move her to the house he had built, but he hated to imagine starting scurrilous rumors and have people saying, “Ah, so that's what that new place of his is for!” For the work of putting up the sliding panels and so on he therefore addressed himself very discreetly to Nakanobu, of all people, that Chief Clerk's father-in-law: a Treasury Commissioner whom he felt he could take into his confidence. Everything he said therefore went straight to His Highness.

  He has chosen only intimates from his Palace Guards escort to do the paintings,32 but even so, he certainly seems keen on the place,” the Chief Clerk explained.

  His Highness, almost beside himself, remembered an old nurse of his, a woman who was about to go down with her husband to a distant province where her husband was to be the new Governor. “I am secretly involved with someone, and I need to hide her for a while,” he pleaded. Her husband wondered who she could possibly be, but he nonetheless decided that His Highnes's wish was his command. “As you please, my lord,” he replied. His consent brought some relief.

  The Governor's party was to leave at the end of the month, and he decided to move his darling there that very day. “That is my plan. Say not a word about it!” So said his repeated messages to Uji. It was quite impossible then for him to go himself, though, and moreover he got back warnings about how difficult that know-it-all nurse of hers might make things.

  His lordship the Commander, meanwhile, had settled on the tenth of the fourth month. “Should a current call, O I would go”33—such was not the mood of the young woman he had in mind, for she was instead stricken with horror and close to panic, wondering what on earth she was to do; until she decided that a stay at her mother's might after all give her some time to think. Unfortunately, the Lieutenant's wife34 was due soon to have a baby, and the house was so perpetually loud with litanies and scripture chanting that a trip to Ishiyama together seemed out of the question. Instead her mother came to her.

  Out came the nurse. “His lordship keeps us all beautifully supplied with clothes! I should like so much to look after us this nicely myself, but I am sure I would only spoil everything if I tried!” she rattled on, but her excitement only made her mistress wonder how everyone would feel if the whole dreadful secret came to light and she were to have the whole world laughing at her. That man who insists he wants me at all costs, she thought, he would find me even if I were to vanish far into the mountains where eightfold clouds rise,35 and both of us would then come to grief. Why, just today he sent word that I should be ready to slip off into hiding! What am I to do? It was all too much for her, and she lay down feeling ill.

  “What is the matter with you?” her worried mother asked. “You are awfully thin and pale.”

  “She has not been at all herself lately,” her nurse added. “She will not eat, and she often feels unwell.”

  What can it be? A spirit perhaps? What is actually the matter with her? they all wondered.
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  “She gave up the trip to Ishiyama, but I now wonder just why she felt she had to,” her mother remarked.

  It was too awful. She stared at the floor.

  The sun set, and a bright moon rose. She remembered the moon that had hung in the sky that dawn, and she could not keep from crying. Oh, she thought, I mustn't, I mustn't!

  Her mother began talking about the old days and called out the nun Ben, who described what His Late Highness's elder daughter had been like, how unfailingly responsible she had been, and how she had simply wasted away before one's eyes. “She would be like His Highness's dear lady, if only she were still alive!” Ben said. “They would be in touch with each other, and they who were once so sad and lonely would now both enjoy all the blessings of good fortune!”

  Is my daughter, then, different from them? her mother reflected. Yes, she will be every bit as worthy, once the destiny she merits is hers! To Ben she went on aloud, “At heart I have always worried so much about my girl, but I feel a little better now that it seems she is to move to the City, although that may mean I will not be able to come here anymore. It is always such a pleasure when we meet to talk quietly with you about the past.”