“You really should enjoy yourself a little more sometimes!” Shōshō remarked. You are so young and pretty, and it is a shame for you to be so gloomy and pensive all the time! Perhaps the jewel has a flaw in it after all.”
As night came on, the sound of the wind stirred many poignant memories.
“To this heart of mine the end of an autumn day speaks of nothing new,
yet, gazing into the dusk, I find dew has soaked my sleeves.”
A lovely moon was up when the Captain, whose note had come during the day, arrived himself. She was horrified and fled into the depths of the house.
“This is really too much!” Shōshō exclaimed. “Particularly at a time like this you should respond to his devoted attentions. You must heed at least a little of what he has to say! You seem to believe that just listening to him will commit you to him forever!”
Nonetheless, the young woman was profoundly alarmed. They told the Captain that she was away, but his daytime messenger must have informed him that she was there alone, because he then proceeded to pour out a long and bitter complaint. “I do not even ask to hear her answer me!” he said. “I just want her to decide for herself whether what I have to say to her, in person, is that painful to listen to!” When every effort at persuasion failed, he added accusingly, “How astonishingly cruel! Surely she should be capable of some sympathy, living in a place like this! It is just too much!
All the sweet sadness depths of night in autumn bring a mountain village:
that anyone ought to feel who has learned to feel at all.
Obviously, her heart should share these things with mine!”
“Your behavior is quite extraordinary, considering that my mistress is away and that you have no one else to keep you amused!” Shōshō insisted.
“I who pass my days never aware of feeling misfortune is mine:
in me you think to have found one who knows what feelings are!”
The young woman had not said the poem for anyone to hear, but Shōshō told it to the Captain anyway, and he was moved. “Do convince her to come for just a moment!” he said, unreasoningly annoyed with the two women.
“She is quite extraordinarily unresponsive, my lord,” Shōshō warned him, going back inside only to find that the young woman had disappeared into the old nun's room, which normally she never entered at all. At her wits' end, she informed the Captain.
“My heart goes out to her for all the sorrows that must weigh on her while she spends her empty days in a place like this,” he said, “and I have the impression that in principle she is not without feeling at all. Behavior like hers goes far beyond that of someone merely unacquainted with life. Has life taught her a bitter lesson? I wonder. Why is her heart so set against the world, and how long do you expect her to stay?” He wanted to know all about her, but what was there that she could tell him?
“She is someone my mistress should have been looking after all along,” she said, “but for some years they had not been on good terms. My mistress met her again on her pilgrimage to Hatsuse, and then she succeeded in having her come here.” That was the best she could do.
The young woman lay facedown, wide awake, near the old nun, who from all she had heard was very difficult indeed. The old lady was sound asleep by now and snoring thunderously, and two nuns just like her were valiantly holding their own in a chorus of snores. The terrified young woman wondered whether tonight was the night when they would eat her; not that she much valued her life, but, as timid as ever, she felt as forlorn as the one who was too afraid to cross the log bridge and had to turn back.36 She had brought Komoki with her, but Komoki, who was beginning to have coquettish thoughts, had been too fascinated by the rare and handsome visitor to stay. If only she would come back! Komoki was hardly likely to be much help, though.
The Captain left, since he hardly knew what else to say, and the women lay down together to sleep. “She is so willfully withdrawn and aloof!” they complained to each other. “To think how she is wasting those looks of hers!”
It must have been the very middle of the night when the old nun sat up with a fit of coughing. Her head in the lamplight was all white, and over it she had something black. Startled to see the young woman lying nearby, she put her hand to her forehead the way a weasel is said to do, glared at her, and demanded in an imperious tone to know who she was and what she was doing there.
Now she is going to eat me! she thought. That time when the demon made off with me, I was unconscious—it was so much easier! What am I to do? She felt trapped. I came back to life in that shocking guise,37 I became human, and now those awful things that happened are tormenting me again! Bewilderment, terror—oh, yes, I have feelings! And if I had died, I would now be surrounded by beings more terrifying still!
She lay there sleepless, and her thoughts meanwhile ranged as never before over the whole course of her life. How cruel it is that I never even saw the man they used to call my father! Back and forth we went for years to the East, and when at last I came across a sister who gave me both joy and hope, I abruptly lost touch with her, only to find the prospect of consolation now held out by a gentleman who had decided to accept me as deserving. What a fool I was then—for now I see my ghastly mistake—to entertain the slightest feeling of love for that Prince! He is the one who ruined my life! Why did I listen so gladly to those promises he made me by the green trees on the islet? She was heartily sick of him, and it was that gentleman, never really passionate yet always so patient, whom she now remembered sometimes with very great pleasure. I would feel most ashamed before him if he were ever to learn what my life is now—but oh, she suddenly thought, will I ever see him again in this world, as he was then, even from afar? No, no, I must not feel that way! I will not have it! So she reproved herself in her heart.
She was very glad indeed at last to hear cocks crowing. How much happier my mother's voice would make me, though! she reflected while dawn came on. She was in very low spirits indeed. The girl with whom she should have returned to her own room did not appear, and she lay there waiting. Meanwhile the snoring old women got up immediately to busy themselves preparing the depressing morning meal of gruel and so on. “Eat up your breakfast, now!” said the one who brought it, but she did not at all appreciate such service, and what she had before her did not even look to her like food. “I do not feel well,” she said to excuse herself from eating, though they went on discourteously pressing her anyway.
A group of religious menials arrived. “His Reverence will be coming down from the Mountain today,” they announced, and she heard someone ask, “But why, so suddenly?”
“A spirit has been afflicting Her Highness the First Princess, and the Abbot of the Mountain has been doing the Great Rite for her, but he says that it can have no effect without His Reverence,” they explained proudly. “Twice yesterday His Reverence received an invitation to go, and then late in the evening the Fourth Rank Lieutenant, the son of His Excellency of the Right, came with an appeal from Her Majesty. That decided him.”
Oh, I know it would be very forward of me, but I hope that I can meet him and ask him to make me a nun! This is the perfect moment, now that there are so few people here to interfere! She sat up and said aloud to the old nun, “Please tell His Reverence that I keep feeling very ill and that if he comes down here today, I should be grateful to receive the full Precepts.” The old nun nodded blankly.
At last she returned to her own room. She only loosened her hair a little, since His Reverence's sister always combed it for her; she hated letting anyone else touch it, and she certainly could not comb it herself. Meanwhile she sadly reflected that her mother would never see her like this again. She assumed that her long illness must have caused some of it to fall out, but no, it was just as lovely as ever: very thick, six feet long, and beautifully even at the ends. Each fine hair seemed to have a luster of its own. “Wishing me to be what I am now,”38 she murmured.
His Reverence came toward evening. The south aisle had
been swept and tidied, and she found all the shaven heads bustling about unusually frightening. His Reverence called on his mother to inquire after her health. “I gather that my sister is on a pilgrimage,” he continued. “Is that young woman still here?”
“Yes, she is,” the old nun replied. “She says that she is ill and that she wishes to receive the full Precepts.”
His Reverence went to talk to her himself. “Are you there?” he asked, seating himself before her standing curtain. She overcame her shyness to slip out toward him and speak to him in person.
“It has always seemed to me, ever since that astonishing moment when I first saw you, that some ancient tie had brought you and me together, and I have been praying for you with all my heart. However, a monk like me may not keep up a profane correspondence without sufficient reason, and that is why you have heard so little from me. I wonder how you have been getting on among these nuns whose company so little suits you.”
“It is a great burden to me, when I had resolved to quit this life, that I should still be inexplicably alive,” she replied, “but however hopeless I may be, I deeply appreciate all your kindness, and since I no longer believe that I can live in the world, I ask you please to make me a nun. Such as I am, I cannot go on as other women do, not even if I remain in lay life.”
“But you have so many years before you! What can possibly have led you to wish this for yourself? For you, such a step would only be a sin. A woman may well feel brave in her resolve when she first conceives an aspiration like yours, but, being what she is, she is all too likely as time goes by to regret it.”
Comb box
“I have suffered misfortune ever since I was a child, and my mother told me that she considered making me a nun even then, so that when I came to understand a little on my own, I longed to live not as others do but ever absorbed in prayer to be granted that better life to come. Now, however, when I feel my end approaching—for that is the reason, I suppose—I feel all my strength draining away from me. Oh, please, I beg you…” She was speaking through her tears.
His Reverence could not understand it. What could have caused her, with all her beauty, so profoundly to detest what she was? The spirit possessing her had talked about that, he remembered. Yes, no doubt she has good reason! Why, it is a wonder that she even survived! She is in fearful danger, now that that evil thing has noticed her.
“At any rate,” he said aloud, “the Three Treasures can only praise your resolve. It is not for me, a monk, to oppose you. Nothing could be easier than to give you the Precepts, but an urgent matter has brought me down from the Mountain in the first place, and I must go to the palace tonight. I am to begin the Great Rite tomorrow. It will take seven days, and when it is over, I shall come back and do as you ask.”
This was a bitter disappointment, because by then his sister might easily be back, and she would certainly object. “My state now is just as bad as it was last time,”39 she said, “and I feel so ill already that if I get much worse, the Precepts will no longer do me any good. I thought that today was such a perfect chance!”
Her sobbing tugged at his saintly heart. “The night must be getting on by now. In the old days I thought nothing of coming down the Mountain, but the older I get, the more of a trial it becomes, and I suppose that I had better rest before I go on to the palace. Very well, since you are in such haste, I shall do it for you now.”
In glad relief she picked up her scissors and slid her comb-box lid out toward him. “Come, worthy monks! Come here!” he called. The two who had first found her were with him now, and he had them enter. “I want you to cut off her hair,” he said. The Adept, who agreed that no one in her apparently grave condition should be required to remain in lay life, hesitated nonetheless to wield the scissors, because he felt that the hair she gave him through the gap in her curtain was really far too beautiful to cut.
Meanwhile Shōshō was in her own room with her elder brother, an Adept who had also come with His Reverence, while Saemon was entertaining another monk whom she happened to know. In such a place any friendly visitor was particularly welcome and elicited at least a modest reception, one with which both were occupied when Komoki, the only one left with her mistress, came to tell Shōshō what was going on.
The dismayed Shōshō rushed to see for herself and found her now wearing, for form's sake, His Reverence's own outer robe and stole, while His Reverence said, “Now, bow toward where your parents are.”40 Alas, she had no idea where that might be, and the thought called forth fresh tears.
A woman becomes a nun
“But this is a calamity! How could you possibly do anything so foolish! What will my mistress say when she gets back?” But His Reverence had gone too far to consider Shōshō's protests anything but misplaced, and he silenced her so effectively that she came no nearer and did not interfere.
“Turning and turning among the Three Realms,”41 His Reverence intoned, and she thought, But I cut off obligation and affection then! Even so, she felt a pang of sadness. The Adept was having trouble actually cutting her hair. “Later on will do,” His Reverence said. “Just leave it to the nuns.” He himself cut the hair at her forehead. “You must not regret looking this way now,” he reminded her, adding many pious admonishments besides.42 To her it was a joy to have done what they all had protested must be long delayed, and she felt as though for this it had been worth living after all.
His Reverence's party left, and all was quiet. Through the sound of the night wind the women chided her, “We were so looking forward to your lonely stay here being quickly followed by a brilliant marriage, but now how will you spend the long life you have ahead of you, after what you have done? Even people decrepit with age are miserable when they see that life as they have known it is over for them!” Nonetheless, she felt only peace and happiness, because to her, who could not imagine living much longer, her new state was something wonderful, and she was filled with joy.
However, the next morning she was ashamed of this appearance for which she had no one else's approval. The ends of her hair all at once felt rough and even sloppily cut, and she longed for someone to come and trim them properly without going on at her. Shy and reserved as always, she stayed in her darkened room. She had never been good at telling other people her feelings, and since in any case she now had no one close to talk to, she could only sit before her inkstone and bravely set down her emotions, when they overflowed, as writing practice.
“This world that to me—myself and all others, too—meant nothing at all
until I cast it from me, I have now renounced again.
It is over at last,” she wrote; but, still and all, she could only reread it with sorrow.
“That world I knew well, a world I had come to feel was mine no longer,
I put sternly from me then, and now have done so again.”
She was setting down such thoughts as these when a letter came from the Captain. They had written to let him know how dismayed and upset they were, and he, acutely disappointed, understood that her resolve to take this step explained her refusal ever to answer him. What a shame, though! Just the other night he had been trying to persuade them to give him a proper look at that lovely hair, and he had been told, Yes, when the moment comes. He wrote back with bitter regret, “There is nothing I can say to you.
How this heart of mine, when the sea maiden's boat rows far off from this shore,
longs to share that same journey, lest I not embark at all!”
Surprisingly, she accepted the note and read it. This was a moving time for her, and despite the relief of feeling that it was over now, for reasons best known to herself she wrote along the edge of a scrap of paper,
“Yes, this heart of mine rides away now from this shore and all the sad world,
yet the sea maiden knows not where her floating craft is bound.”
She treated it simply as writing practice, as before, but Shōshō wrapped it up and prepared to send it to him.
“Yo
u could at least have made a fair copy,” she protested.
“But I would only have got something wrong.” Shōshō sent it anyway. There are no words to describe how sorry the astonished Captain was.
His Reverence's sister returned from her pilgrimage, and she was extremely upset. “I agree that a nun like me should be pleased to approve, but how will you get through all the years you have left? And I who never know whether I will even see tomorrow prayed so hard to Kannon because I worry about you and want so much to see you secure!” She collapsed, weeping and to all appearances completely overcome, and the young woman's stricken thoughts went to her own mother, for she could easily imagine her despair even in the absence of a body to mourn. She sat with her back turned, silent as usual, looking very young and pretty indeed.
“You have been very, very foolish!” the nun said, tearfully arranging for her to have a habit. They made her an outer robe and stole in their customary gray.
“It is too hard,” the women lamented as they clothed her, “when to us in this mountain village you had so unexpectedly brought so glad a light!” They thought it all a terrible waste and blamed His Reverence bitterly.
The First Princess recovered, thanks to an intervention as dramatic and effective as His Reverence's disciples had said it would be, and all praised their master loudly as a mighty healer. His Reverence did not go straight back to the Mountain, however. Instead he stayed on in attendance, since fear of the spirit had prompted Her Majesty to have the Great Rite prolonged, and one quiet, rainy evening she summoned him to remain on duty through the night. The gentlewomen had gone to bed, exhausted as they were after the past few days, and there were very few still nearby in waiting. Her Majesty and her daughter shared the same curtained bed.
The Tale of Genji: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (Junichiro Breakdown of Genji) Page 143
