60. Murasaki, later the girl's name, refers to Fujitsubo. A common meadow plant, murasaki was associated with love because of the purple dye extracted from its roots. The fuji (“wisteria”) in Fujitsubo's name links her to the same color. Kokinshū 867: “Because of a single stem of murasaki, I love all the plants and grasses on Musashi Plain.”
61. A residence built by Emperor Saga (reigned 809–23) and occupied by Retired Emperors.
62. Imi, probably thirty days, though perhaps twenty (starting in this case on the twentieth of the ninth month), during which the mourner remained at home. Mourning gray was worn much longer.
63. “You may not wish me [the wave] to see her, but I do not mean to make it easy for you by giving up.” The main motif of this and the next poem, with all their wordplay, is that of an impetuous wave surging in toward an object of desire on the shore.
64. From Gosenshū 731, by Koremasa: “Secretly I am impatient, but why, for years and years, does that day never come when I meet her at last?”
65. Genji seems to be seated in the aisle, with a blind between him and the women in the chamber. The only light, an oil lamp, is on the women's side.
66. He seems to carry her in with him, though the text does not say so.
67. Genji's poem weaves in expressions from a saibara song known as “My Darling's Gate” (“Imo ga yado”).
68. For her mistress.
69. The shut “flimsy portal” (kusa no tozashi) is from Gosensh 899 and 900, an analogous exchange between Fujiwara no Kanesuke and an unnamed woman.
70. The letter (kinuginu no fumi) that a lover sent his mistress after returning home from her house in the early morning.
71. Spoken to the gentlewomen. Hereafter he addresses his daughter directly.
72. They lack the starched look of new ones, which the household presumably cannot afford.
73. His wife did not want to see his mistress's daughter.
74. She is incensed that Genji, having slept once (though chastely) with the girl, will not do so again on the two following nights so as to seal their relationship in the manner of a marriage. Genji recognizes this obligation, but the girl is so young that, despite his future intentions, he seems not to take it very seriously for the present.
75. She is probably making new clothes for the girl to wear at her father's.
76. Azuma (goto), that is, the wagon, the six-stringed “Japanese koto.”
77. A folk song in which a peasant woman rejects her lover: “In Hitachi here I've my field to hoe—who have you come for this rainy night, all the way over moor and mountain?” He is thinking of Aoi.
78. The moment when her charge begins a new life with Genji.
79. Ōnkayu, cooked rice.
80. Mourning for her grandmother. The mourning period in this case was three months.
81. Through blinds.
82. The fourth rank wore black, the fifth red.
83. As calligraphy models.
84. Kokin rokujō 3507, which Genji had written out: “I have never been there, but speak of Musashi Plain, and I will complain; yet ah, there is no remedy—the fault is the murasaki's.” The poem alludes to Kokinshū 867 and many others about murasaki on the great plain of Musashi. The murasaki refers to the woman whom the poet desires: in Genji's case, Fujitsubo, whose name (because fuji means “wisteria”) also recalls the color of the murasaki dye.
85. The start of the poem can also be read to suggest “She is too young to sleep with.” It comments on the poem just mentioned and alludes to another, earlier in this chapter: “How glad I would be to pick and soon to make mine that little wild plant sprung up from the very root shared by the murasaki.” The inaccessible plant is Fujitsubo.
86. Her lines are broad (fukuyoka ni), in a manner said in old commentaries to be characteristic of a child's writing.
87. Her playmates are warawabe (page girls of her age or older) and chigo (smaller girls who perform no services yet).
88. She is called kimi (“the young lady”) for the first time, rather than wakagimi (“the little miss”); while Genji is called otokogimi (“the young gentleman”). This pairing of kimi and otokogimi acknowledges the two as a couple.
6: SUETSUMUHANA
1. Particularly Aoi and Rokujō.
2. Utsusemi (“cicada shell”) and Nokiba no Ogi (“reed”). “Reed” (ogi) and “breeze” (kaze) were conventionally linked; a breeze stirring the reeds might announce a lover's visit.
3. The old lady, now a nun, whom Genji visited at the beginning of “The Twilight Beauty.”
4. Taifu no Myōbu, “the Myōbu who is a Taifu's (Commissioner's) daughter.”
5. A Prince who had held the title of Governor of the province of Hitachi. As in the case of Kazusa and Shimōsa, the titular Governor of Hitachi was a Prince, but the post was a sinecure, and only the Deputy Governor actually went to the province.
6. Bai Juyi celebrated in one of his poems (Hakushi monjū 2565) his “three friends”: the kin, wine, and poetry. Friendship with wine would not suit a lady.
7. A poetically perfect spring night with a mist-veiled moon.
8. Taifu's father apparently used to live at Suetsumuhana's, which suggests that he may be an elder brother.
9. A moon one night past the full.
10. Genji is dressed below his station so as to pass unrecognized.
11. The irusa of the place-name Irusa Yama can be read to mean “moment of setting” and also plays on “enter” (a house).
12. His daughter by Yūgao.
13. Komabue, a flute shorter and thinner than the yokobue being played by the two young men.
14. A gentlewoman.
15. Ōmiya, the Minister of the Left's wife, the mother of Aoi and Tō no Chūjō. She is also Genji's aunt (his father's sister).
16. An expression from a saibara love song.
17. The shutters between the aisle and the veranda.
18. Futama, a smaller space divided off from the aisle.
19. A paraphrase for narrative meaning of tamadasuki kurushi, a highly ornamental expression from Kokinshū 1037: “Will you not just tell me that you do not love me? Why should love be so vacillating?”
20. Rung to close a doctrinal debate during the Rite of the Eight Discourses (Mi-hakō).
21. Required after a man had spent the night with a woman, although in this case to send a mere letter was to treat the relationship wrongly as an affair. Her rank was such that Genji should have returned for another two nights, to confirm a marriage.
22. Genji.
23. The paper has reverted to the color of the ashes (lye) used as a mordant. The definiteness of the characters is unfeminine, and their even balance lacks personality.
24. This huge drum was normally kept outside and beaten by servants.
25. Murasaki, Fujitsubo's niece.
26. By turning the lamp full on her.
27. Celadon (a light gray-green glaze) was called the “reserved color” (hisoku) in accordance with Chinese custom and was used by the highest nobility.
28. A corner of the aisle.
29. By the author's time, and perhaps earlier, gentlewomen no longer put their hair up with a comb. The Women's Music Pavilion (Naikyōbō) was for training the women musicians and dancers of the palace, while the Hall of the Sacred Mirror (Naishidokoro), in the Unmeiden, was where the sacred mirror (one of the three imperial regalia) was kept. Both were inhabited by ancient gentlewomen whose ways belonged more or less to the past.
30. Out of the curtained bed.
31. Who rides a white elephant.
32. Or “bulged.” The two verbs are homophones.
33. Usu (“light”) kurenai, a light, cool reddish pink in the kurenai range, the darker end of which was “forbidden” (kinjiki) to all but the Emperor and the imperial family. Kurenai comes from the safflower (suetsumuhana) dye.
34. Sable from Siberia was favored by noblemen early in the Heian period but had gone out of fashion by the time of the tale.
/> 35. “The man who has begun seeing you”: “your man” or “your husband.”
36. More literally, “the spilling snow looked like the famous Sue.” Gosenshū 683, by Tosa: “Are my sleeves the famous pine mountain of Sue, that waves should come down on them from the sky every day?”
37. Genji derives his poem from one by Bai Juyi (Hakushi monjū 0076) on the sufferings of the peasants, then hums a line of the original, in which “the younger one” is a boy rather than the woman before him. The nose comes to mind because the succeeding lines in Bai Juyi's work speak of how the peasants' noses smart in the cold.
38. Since another man would turn up to look after her.
39. A white paper made especially in northern Japan (Michinokuni, or Michinoku) from tree bark—and an odd choice for a love letter.
40. “Robe from far Cathay” (karakoromo) is a decorative “pillow word” unrelated in meaning to the rest of the poem. It should have a conventional association with the syllable that follows it, but her effort to bring this off did not work. The rest of the poem is extremely trite.
41. His ironically elaborate speech quotes from Man'yōshū 2325 and refers to Suetsumuhana's poem as well.
42. The underlayer and the outside of a dress cloak were supposed to be different.
43. Suetsumuhana (“safflower”) means, literally, “flower picked by the tip,” referring to the way the flowers are harvested; and hana (“flower”) is a homophone of “nose.”
44. Genji monogatari kochūshakusho in'yō waka 448: “I had thought the safflower a flower deep of hue, yet it has faded so much that it is very dreary!” Depth of hue may refer to the lady's imperial lineage, from which one might expect better; and the dye color from the safflower soon fades.
45. “Though you care little for her, make sure never to soil the reputation of one so highborn by abandoning her.” A robe dipped just once in the safflower dye (hitobana goromo) is therefore very pale, like Genji's tenuous affection. The poem plays on hana, “flower” and “nose.”
46. Of a woman sending the man who supports her formal clothing.
47. This snatch of song (apparently taken from two different songs) may possibly be read in the following way: Tada ume no hana (“the blushing red of the plum”) is a copyist's error for tadarame no hana, which could mean not only “the [red] tadarame flower” but “the red nose of the [sacred] maiden who protects the forge.” This “red nose” could then suggest the maiden's hoto (“hearth” but also “sex“). A “maiden of Mount Mikasa” would serve the Kasuga Shrine, and since this shrine's main deity came originally from Hitachi province, this expression, too, may allude to the daughter of the Hitachi Prince. In fact, since the Kasuga deity may have been associated in the eleventh century, as later, with the work of the forge, both expressions may allude to the red nose—i.e., sex—of the maiden of the forge: Suetsumuhana.
48. Presumably fellow gentlewomen.
49. “When so many nights go by without our meeting, are you asking me to stay away for still more nights?”
50. Otoko tōka. On the fourteenth, a song leader, dancers, and musicians chosen from among the privy gentlemen and the lower courtier ranks (jige) went round the palace grounds, dancing and singing saibara songs. Women did this every year (onna dōka), but to have men doing it was exceptional. The practice lapsed in 983.
51. The Festival of the Blue Roans (Aouma no Sechie), originally a Chinese event. Twenty-one horses, the sight of which brought good luck, were paraded before the Emperor and the court. Up to the reign of Murakami (reigned 946–67), who corresponds in the tale to the present Emperor's successor, the horses really were blue roans, but after that they were white.
52. The uguisu, whose return from the mountains in spring was awaited by such poets as Sosei, in Shūishū 5: “After the dawn of the new year, what one waits to hear is the warbler's voice.”
53. Kokinshū 28: “Though all things are renewed amid the birds' spring carolings, I only grow old.” She is making a trite complaint that Genji neglects her.
54. Kokinshū 970, in which the poet expresses surprise and delight at an unexpected visit.
55. Murasaki no kimi: the first use of murasaki as a quasi name for the girl herself rather than as an allusion to Fujitsubo.
56. White over kurenai red (yielding a pale pink effect).
57. In principle, a young woman's teeth were blackened only at marriage with a mixture of substances known as hagurome.
58. By this time her natural eyebrows would have been plucked out and new ones drawn on higher up.
59. Beni, the makeup color from the safflower dye.
60. A bronze mirror on a stand.
61. Heichū, the comic lover of Heian folklore, took a bottle of water with him when he went courting so that he could feign sensitive tears as needed, until his wife found the bottle and put ink in it. When Heichū came home the next morning, he saw a black-faced monster in the mirror.
7: MOMIJI NO GA
1. The “verse” (ei) of the dance is a poem in Chinese attributed to Ono no Takamura (802–52); the music stopped while the lead dancer sang it. The Buddha's voice was often compared to that of the kalavinka, the bird that sings in paradise.
2. The dancer had marked the climactic moment of the “verse” by flipping his sleeves so they wrapped themselves around his arms.
3. Dancers from hereditary lineages specialized in bugaku dancing.
4. “Blue Sea Waves” came from Tang China. The poem alludes to a story about a magic moment in a Chinese dancer's performance.
5. Ancient Korea and China. There was an elaborately decorated barge for the “Korean” music and another for the “Chinese.”
6. Kaishiro. The dancers emerged after donning their costumes inside the circle.
7. Chinese music was “music of the Left”; Korean, of the “Right.” Such high-ranking officials seldom assumed responsibility for the music.
8. The Shōkyōden Consort to Genji's father is mentioned nowhere else.
9. Tō no Chūjō's new rank is high for a Captain in the Palace Guards, and Genji's is very unusual.
10. Over his promotion.
11. Fujitsubo's elder brother and the father of Murasaki.
12. Also the last of the year. Mourning for a maternal grandparent lasted three months, for a paternal one five. Murasaki's grandmother had died about the twentieth of the ninth month.
13. Chōhai, when the assembled courtiers saluted the Emperor on the morning of the first day of the year. Genji looks in on Murasaki the day after she has stopped wearing mourning.
14. Because she is a year older than she was yesterday.
15. During the devil-expelling rite (tsuina no gi) held on the last night of the year.
16. “Today we must practice kotoimi”: abstention from ill-omened language, including the sound of weeping.
17. Sekitai, worn with the full-dress cloak (hō): a black leather belt with a double row of squares or circles made of stone, jade, or horn set in it so as to show at the wearer's back. (A fold of the hō covered the front.) The color and material varied with rank. Genji's new rank required white jade.
18. Naien, a banquet given by the Emperor on the day of the Rat that fell on the twenty-first, twenty-second, or twenty-third of the first month. The guests composed poetry in Chinese.
19. The birth of Fujitsubo's child.
20. Or perhaps “that she might die [in childbirth].”
21. To ensure safe childbirth.
22. Entreaties addressed through her to Fujitsubo.
23. “Beside him” means beside the newborn child. Ōmyōbu alludes to Gosenshū 1102, by Fujiwara no Kanesuke, about the darkness in the heart of a parent troubled about a child.
24. Shinkokinsh 1494, by Keishi Jo: “I see the resemblance yet am not a whit consoled–what am I to do with this little pink?”
25. “Gillyflower” (tokonatsu) and “pink” (nadeshiko) are the same flower, but the two words have different associations. “I had so wi
shed the flower to bloom” is from Gosenshū 199, which Genji quotes also in his own verse. The poem is about planting nadeshiko so as to have them stand consolingly for someone much loved—in this case, the little boy.
26. Kokinshū 167, a romantic poem about nadeshiko by Ōshikōchi no Mitsune: “I shall let no speck of dust [translated here as “a word or two”] settle on these pinks where my love and I have lain.”
27. The “gillyflower” or “little pink” of his exchange with Fujitsubo.
28. Shūishū 967 (also Man'yōshū 1398), by Sakanoue no Iratsume: “Is he seaweed on the shore, covered when the tide is high? I see him so little and miss him so much!” Murasaki's gesture is one of embarrassment.
29. Thanks to double meanings from Kokinshū 683, Genji's words prolong the seashore imagery of the poem quoted by Murasaki: “Would that I might have enough of the seaweed [mirume, also “meeting” with a lover] for which the seafolk dive, they say, morning and evening at Ise.”
30. The left hand depresses and relaxes the string plucked by the right, to make the pitch undulate.
31. Aoi.
32. Unebe and nyokurōdo, two types of junior servants on the Emperor's staff. Unebe (or uneme) assisted with his meals, nyokurōdo with his wardrobe.
33. So that she could still hide her face from him, as manners required.
34. Kokinshū 892: “Old is the grass beneath the trees at Ōaraki; no steed grazes there, no one comes to mow it.” Genji recognizes the poem as a declaration that she is hungry for a man.
35. Saneakira shū 28, by Fujiwara no Saneakira: “I hear the cuckoo calling, for the wood of Oaraki must be its summer lodging.”
The Tale of Genji: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (Junichiro Breakdown of Genji) Page 149
