10. A reference to the misery of sleeping alone on a winter's night.
11. A literal reading (required by the snow in the poem) of a usually figurative idiom that means “be out of oneself” or “beside oneself.”
12. Probably in an orally transmitted message.
13. Because the scene resembles the aftermath of a death.
14. She means to become a nun.
15. “You, whose bond with our lord is slight, are staying, while our lady…” The “stream” is at once Moku and the garden brook. The poem plays on sumi, “run clear” and “live,” and on other words associated with water.
16. Shūishū 351, by the exiled Sugawara no Michizane: “On and on I go, looking back again and again until the branches above the house where my love lives are lost to view.”
17. Clearly provided by Tamakazura, that is, by Genji. It is probably a hō (a formal cloak), and it would have been black, the color of Higekuro's third rank.
18. Murasaki.
19. Yūgiri.
20. A relatively long and narrow (east-west) pavilion near the center of the inner palace compound, north of the Shishinden. A passageway (medō, north-south) divided it into two apartments, each of which consisted of a chamber and of aisle spaces on three sides.
21. The daughter of Higekuro's irate father-in-law.
22. “Mischievous” (midarigawashi) because of their intense rivalry, consequent upon their relatively low rank, for the Emperor's favor.
23. The last three gentlemen mentioned do not figure otherwise in the tale.
24. Spilling forth from beneath the blinds through which they watched the mumming.
25. Higekuro's sister, who had been a Consort of Emperor Suzaku (Genji's brother).
26. The traditional gift on this occasion.
27. Tonoi-dokoro, the lodging assigned to him for use when on duty in the palace. As Commander of the Right, Higekuro would have had quarters near the Inmei Gate, on the west side of the inner palace compound.
28. The tree is an unflattering image for Higekuro.
29. The Emperor has recently promoted Tamakazura to the third rank.
30. “Why have I become so fond of you…?” Light murasaki (purple) is associated with the third rank, and the color in general is associated with the affections of the heart. Since the dye is difficult to manage, the poem plays on hai aigataki (“does not take the ash” [the mordant, lye]) and aigataki (“difficult to meet”).
31. “Could we not have become closer?”
32. “From now on I shall know it is you I have to thank for my promotion, and I shall serve you as well as I may.”
33. “That you understand now will do me no good, since you still will not give yourself to me.”
34. Taira no Sadafun (also known as Heichū, died 923) had a woman he was visiting stolen from him by the leading courtier of the time, Fujiwara no Tokihira (871–909).
35. Man'yōshū 1428, by Akahito: “I who came to pick violets in the fields of spring love these meadows so much that I lay here through the night.”
36. “Do keep at least in touch with me, although I am nothing compared to your other, greater ladies.”
37. Tamakazura should have returned to Rokujō before moving to Higekuro's.
38. “By the direction her marriage was taking.” From Kokinshū 708: “The smoke from the sea girl's salt fire at Suma, in this high wind, has taken a direction she had never imagined.”
39. Oborozukiyo, in “The Green Branch.”
40. A passage from a folk song (fūzoku uta) known as “Mandarin Ducks” (“Oshidori”).
41. Kokin rokujō 3333: “Standing I yearn, and sitting, too, for the one I saw leave me, red skirts asweep.”
42. Kokin rokujō 3508: “Of love and longing I shall never speak, but the color I shall wear remains always mute.” The color is the yellow dye from gardenia (kuchinashi, which also means “mouthless”) seeds—the same color as kerria rose (yamabuki) flowers. Genji is trying to put Tamakazura out of his mind.
43. Ide, a place-name established in poetry, was associated with yamabuki flowers. Kokin rokujō 4488: “At evening in the fields, they say, the cuckoo [“face bird”] calls, and my face betrays that I will not forget you.”
44. All three items mentioned were standard gifts.
45. The poem also contains the meaning, “There is no point [kai, a homophone of the poetic word for “egg”], then, in my having looked after you here.”
46. Kashiwagi.
47. Yūgiri.
48. Kumoi no Kari. Kokinshū 732: “The little boat that rows across Hori Inlet rows back and back, and, it seems, always to the same person.”
32: UMEGAE
1. For his daughter to take to the palace. The process involved mixing powdered incense wood and a binder like honey or the sweet, boiled-down sap of the amachazuru vine into incense balls.
2. Higonki, red brocade with gold thread.
3. Incense wood was pounded to powder with an iron mortar and pestle.
4. The two recipes (for types of kurobō and jijū incense) taught by Emperor Ninmyō in the Sōwa (also Shōwa or Jōwa) period (834–48). In principle they were to be passed on only to women.
5. Prince Motoyasu, the seventh son of Emperor Ninmyō.
6. Shūishū 1063, by Nyokaku Hōshi: “Spring is past and they are gone, the flowers of the plum; this is all that is left of them.”
7. Jin, incense wood from the particularly fragrant heartwood of the tree; it was called jin (“sinking”) because it sank in water.
8. The blue presumably contains kurobō incense (based on aloeswood, musk, sandalwood, cloves, and other ingredients, and particularly associated with winter) and the white one baika (cloves, sandalwood, plum blossoms, associated with spring).
9. “The flower fragrance of this incense is no use to me, for my time is past, but I hope that it will suit the young lady.”
10. To be the sponsor who “ties on” (koshiyui) the train.
11. Damp air (it has been raining) enhances the fragrance of incense.
12. Kokinshū 38, by Ki no Tomonori, which the Prince half quotes also in his reply: “If not to you, to whom else would I show them, these plum blossoms with their scent, for only he who knows them knows.”
13. Despite Asagao's self-deprecating poem.
14. The jijū range, associated with autumn, included fine aloeswood and cloves among other ingredients.
15. A summer incense felt to resemble the scent of a lotus flower.
16. The historical Emperor Uda (lived 867–931).
17. Minamoto no Kintada, a distinguished courtier and poet (889–948).
18. A saibara song: “To the plum tree branch the warbler comes, to sing all spring long, all spring long, yet snow is still falling. Look, how lovely! snow is falling.”
19. Kokinsbū 44, by Sosei: “How long will my heart wander the meadows? Perhaps a thousand years, as long as the blossoms do not fall.”
20. Because he will mistake the light of the moon for dawn.
21. Roughly 8:00 P.M.
22. Roughly 1:00 A.M.
23. The Akashi Daughter came dressed as the child she remains until she has actually put on her train, and in this guise is still, in principle, unworthy to be seen by so great a lady.
24. No Empress has ever before played this role at a donning of the train, and Genji hopes that Empresses will now continue at times to confer this honor on such distinguished fathers as himself.
25. Sōshi, bound volumes as distinguished from scrolls (makimono).
26. Onnade, so called because it was in principle women who wrote in kana.
27. Fujitsubo's.
28. Oborozukiyo.
29. A half brother of Tō no Chūjō.
30. Ashide, which involved painting a waterside scene (with reeds, water swirls, rocks, and so on) in such a way that the lines of the painting formed the kana letters of a poem.
31. Utae, in which a poem inspired by a painting was written over t
he painting in fainter ink.
32. The “running script” (sō) consists of cursively written Chinese characters used for their phonetic value, and the “plain” (tada) script is ordinary kana, that is to say, purely phonetic signs without ideographic value. The difference between “plain” and “woman's style” (onnade) is unclear.
33. Tsugigami: papers of different colors torn along irregular lines and pasted together into a scroll.
34. Reigned 809–23.
35. Emperor Daigo (reigned 897–930). The Kokin wakashū Kokinshū) has twenty scrolls.
36. Kokinshū 713: “Though I believe you lie, by now, whom else have I to believe?”
33: FUJI NO URABA
1. For Genji's daughter to enter the palace.
2. Kumoi no Kari.
3. “I hear her father is by now willing to permit the marriage.” Kokinsbū 632 (also Ise monogatari 6, section 5), by Ariwara no Narihira: “May the barrier guard stationed on the path I take secretly fall asleep night after night!” The guard has been placed there by the father of the young woman Narihira has been visiting.
4. The precocious sexual intimacy, years ago, between Yūgiri and Kumoi no Kari.
5. A funerary temple for the senior Fujiwara nobility.
6. Tō no Chūjō hints at giving Yūgiri his daughter, Kumoi no Kari. His poem may allude to lines by Bai Juyi (Wakan rei shū 52, Hakushi monjū 0631).
7. Kashiwagi is a Guards officer, and the sort of escort in question would have been provided by the Guards to someone of very high rank; hence Yūgiri's mild joke.
8. His violation of Kumoi no Kari, which was unfilial toward Ōmiya, his grandmother and hers.
9. Yūgiri is wearing futaai, that is, a dress cloak dyed with both indigo (blue) and safflower (scarlet). Perhaps Genji gives him instead a blue one more suited to a young man with a bright future.
10. That of Confucius.
11. Gosenshū 100, the speaker being a woman who has just received assurances of devotion from her lover: “Illumined by the springtime sun, the new wisteria leaves yield, and if you love me, I will trust in you.” To no Chūjō is offering Yūgiri his daughter.
12. “I shall then blame my daughter after all, though I deplore that it should have taken you so long to declare yourself that I had to come forward further toward you than I wished.”
13. A saibara song about a lover who comes to steal his bride from her father's house and gets caught. The singer, Kōbai, apparently alludes—rather wickedly—to the old sexual intimacy between Yūgiri and Kumoi no Kari.
14. Toshi henikeru kono ie instead of the song's original phrase, todorokeru kono ie (“this celebrated house”)— the house of the bride's father.
15. From drink.
16. Yūgiri reacts sharply to Kashiwagi's teasing. “A traveler's night beneath the blossoms” (hana no kage no tabine) suggests a passing encounter with a woman of pleasure, and Kashiwagi jokingly feigns embarrassment. Yūgiri is not amused.
17. Gosenshū 1036, by Mibu no Tadamine: “No one has ever yet died of the pain of love, but I might well have gone down for that in song and story!” Kokin rokujō 1986, by Ise, is very similar.
18. Another saibara song in the voice of a girl who boasts of having escaped through “the rough fence of the Kawaguchi Barrier,” despite her father's watchful eye, to lie with her lover.
19. Kumoi no Kari's poem continues the Kawaguchi Barrier motif with a wordplay on the barrier's “crude fence” (aragaki) that let the truth escape.
20. “Do not blame me: your father is the one who spread it about.” The Kawaguchi Barrier (in present Mie Prefecture) and the Kukida Barrier appear to be one and the same, but the Kawaguchi Barrier is rare in poetry, and the Kukida Barrier appears nowhere else.
21. At this stage he should have left Kumoi no Kari well before dawn, to return the following night. Instead, he behaves as though they have already been married for years.
22. Presumably hanada (medium blue) in color.
23. A darker hanada than his father's, because he is younger.
24. Chōjizome, generally a light brown, but here, apparently, somewhat darker.
25. A statue of the Buddha as a baby for the Buddha Lustration Rite (Kanbutsu-e) on the eighth day of the fourth month, to honor the Buddha's birthday. The rite involved lustrating (pouring water over) the statue.
26. Kumoi no Kari's mother. Tō no Chūjō's wife is unhappy that as a Consort her own daughter has not done as well.
27. For the Akashi Daughter's entry into the palace.
28. Miare, a nighttime rite that reenacted the appearance on earth of Wakeikazuchi, the deity of the Upper Kamo Shrine. It took place on the middle saru (“Monkey”) day in the fourth month and was followed the next day by the Kamo Festival, or Aoi Festival.
29. Aoi.
30. Yügiri.
31. The daughter of Koremitsu, Genji's old confidant. The organs of government that sent a formal representative to the Kamo Festival included the Office of Staff.
32. “We have not been together for so long that I have even forgotten what this leaf is called.” The leaf is aoi, “heart-to-heart.”
33. Laurel, (katsura), too, was worn at the Kamo Festival, and to “pluck the laurel” meant to pass the official examinations, as Yūgiri had done.
34. Genji reflects that, strictly speaking, Murasaki does not quite qualify as his wife (kita no kata); she is merely his closest equivalent to one. She will take her adopted daughter to the palace and stay with her there briefly, but she will then have to return to Rokujō. Genji will replace her with the lady from Akashi, the girl's natural mother.
35. Gosenshū 1188 suggests that tears, whether of joy or of sorrow, are all one and the same.
36. Rivalry in matters of dashing elegance and romantic success—one addressed not directly to the little girl but to her court, so to speak.
37. To enter religion.
38. To Chancellor.
39. A chrysanthemum that has turned dark when touched by frost.
40. A Counselor wore purple. For the leaves the poem specifies asamidori, the color both of chrysanthemum leaves and of the sixth rank. However, while the rank color was light blue, chrysanthemum leaves are green; asamidori covers both.
41. Yūgiri and Kumoi no Kari have been living in the residence of Kumoi no Kari's father, Tō no Chūjō. Now that Yūgiri and Tō no Chūjō have both been promoted, this arrangement (one perfectly normal for a young couple) is no longer adequate. Sanjō is the former residence of Yūgiri's grandmother.
42. Must refrain from pursuing the subject for fear of shedding more tears. It was ill omened to weep in the presence of a newly married couple.
43. The ancient pine is presumably Ōmiya and the tree grown from its seed Tō no Chūjō.
44. About 10:00 A.M.
45. After 2:00 P.M. or so.
46. Funa, a small fish related to carp.
47. Akikonomu's, with its autumn garden.
48. Those leading down to the garden, on the south side of the main house.
49. “Gaōon,” a bugaku piece associated with “Tang music” (tōgaku).
50. The darker color of the flowers alludes also to the darker robes now worn by Tō no Chūjō in his new and more exalted office.
51. Kokinshū 279, by Taira no Sadafun: “Beyond autumn they have their own time, chrysanthemums that gather color even as they pass.” The “purple clouds” praise the happy character of this imperial reign, and the rest of the poem congratulates Genji in particular for his extraordinary rise.
52. Uda no Hōshi, the name of a wagon favored by Emperor Uda.
53. Suzaku's “village” (sato) is the residence (the Suzaku Palace) to which he moved after abdicating. He seems to be complaining that nothing as wonderful as this took place during his reign.
34: WAKANA 1
1. His mother, the Kokiden Consort of the early chapters.
2. Does not figure otherwise in the tale; she had lived in the same pavilion as Genji's Fujits
ubo.
3. Sendai, who preceded the Kiritsubo Emperor (His Late Eminence), Genji's father.
4. Traditionally identified with Ninnaji, built in 888 by Emperor Uda in the hills just west of the City as it was then.
5. The Shōkyōden Consort, a sister of Higekuro.
6. From Higekuro and from Genji.
7. The love that clouds a parent's judgment could tempt Suzaku to make some such inappropriate gesture as explicitly thanking Genji.
8. The tale does not mention this appointment
9. “Acting Counselor” (Gon Chūnagon) in the original and sporadically hereafter. The number of Chūnagon was fixed, but a young man of high birth like Yūgiri could be given the office even when there was no regular vacancy.
10. Asagao.
11. Genji's women.
12. All Genji's women are commoners (tadabito) compared to Onna San no Miya.
13. Her father above all.
14. Because of action taken by one of her gentlewomen, acting on behalf of the suitor.
15. He is a half brother of both Suzaku and Genji.
16. Not otherwise mentioned in the tale. His wish to administer her household (iezukasa) amounts to wishing to marry her.
17. Kashiwagi. He has not been referred to by this title before.
18. Oborozukiyo.
19. Tamakazura, married to Higekuro.
20. Her half sister, by an Intimate.
21. “Oak Pavilion,” a separate residence at the northeast corner of the historical Suzaku Palace.
The Tale of Genji: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (Junichiro Breakdown of Genji) Page 158
