His Excellency insisted on bringing Genji home with him when he withdrew from the palace late that night. His sons, who were looking forward to this imperial excursion, gathered to talk it over and busied themselves every day rehearsing each his own dance. The clamor of instruments was never so loud, for each was keen to excel, nor were theirs the usual ones, for the voice of the greater hichiriki and the sakuhachi now rent the air, and they even rolled a great drum up to the railing and beat it themselves.24 Genji was so absorbed that he managed to steal time only for those ladies who meant the most to him, and he allowed all communication with the Hitachi Prince's residence to lapse. Autumn drew to a close while Her Highness's hopes dwindled away.
Taifu came to see Genji when the imperial excursion was near and the air rang with music under rehearsal.
“How is she?” he asked guiltily.
Taifu told him. “Your complete indifference to her is extremely painful for those who are with her daily.” She was almost in tears.
He understood how he had betrayed Taifu's trust that he would never treat Her Highness with less than the highest consideration, and he shuddered to imagine Taifu's opinion of him. For Her Highness herself he felt only commiseration when he imagined how silent and withdrawn she must be. “I haven't a moment these days,” he said, sighing. “I really cannot help it.” He added with a smile, “She knows so little of the sorrows of love, you see; I want only to make her wiser.” His smiles and his youthful charm made Taifu smile, too. It is hopeless, she thought. He is of just the age to make women suffer, and no wonder he is often thoughtless and does as he pleases.
At any rate, he occasionally renewed his visits once this busy time was over.
He became so caught up in pampering his murasaki's little kinswoman,25 now that he had taken her for his own, that he called even less often at Rokujō; and as for that ruinous mansion, he could not despite his sympathy find the will to go there or, as the days went by, feel any great wish to see more deeply into the extraordinary reticence of its inhabitant. But then his mood changed, and he came to suppose that she might still have virtues to recommend her, that touching her in the dark might have left certain of her mysteries unrevealed, and that he did want to see her properly. However, it would have been rude to throw direct light on her,26 and one evening when he was not expected he therefore stole in and peered through the gap between two lattice shutters.
Alas, he had no view of her at all. The standing curtains, though dismally worn, had remained in place for all these years and had never been moved aside, and to his regret he therefore saw before him only four or five gentlewomen. They had withdrawn from their mistress's presence and were now eating a heartrendingly insipid meal from stands laden with Chinese bowls of more or less the reserved, celadon color,27 but in pathetic condition. Farther off in the corner room28 shivering women sat in unspeakably grubby white, wearing filthy aprons at their waists and looking impossibly ancient. Still, he was amused to note that with those combs in their hair over their foreheads—they were nearly falling out—they had their like elsewhere, after all, in the Women's Music Pavilion or the Hall of the Sacred Mirror.29 To him they bore no resemblance to women charged with waiting on a lady.
“Oh, dear, it is so cold this year!” one cried with tears in her eyes. “This is what you get for living so long!”
“Why did I ever think life was hard when His Late Highness was alive?” This one was shivering so hard that she nearly leaped from the floor. “Look at the miserable way we live now!”
Their pitiful complaints were too painful. Genji drew back and knocked at the shutter as though he had just arrived. With “Good gracious!” and similar cries they trimmed the lamp, swung open the shutter, and admitted him to the room.
Jijū had not been there lately, for she was among the young women who served the Kamo Priestess. This time they all seemed so much stranger, so much more uncouth, that he felt as though he hardly knew the place. The snow that had provoked their sharp complaints was falling more thickly than ever. The sky looked grim, a hard wind was blowing, and no one moved to relight the lamp when it went out. He recalled his moment of danger from a spirit, and he found relief from the equal desolation here in reflecting that the place was at least smaller and some-what better populated; but he knew that during this eerie night he would get little sleep. The scene had its charm, its pathos, and a strange appeal, but he felt cheated when she remained so inaccessible and so unresponsive that he had no pleasure from her at all.
Dawn seemed to have come at last. He raised the shutters himself and looked out over the snow-covered garden. No footprint broke the vast, empty, and chillingly lonely expanse.
“Look at how beautiful the sky is now!” he said, feeling that a prompt departure would be too cruel, and he added with some rancor, “The distance you keep between us is very painful.”
It was not yet quite light, and he looked so wondrously young and handsome by the glimmer of the snow that the sight brought grins to the aged women's faces. “Do go out to him, my lady,”30 they encouraged her, “you must! It makes such a difference to be nice!” She tidied herself up more or less, since despite her timidity she could never say no when told what to do, and slipped out toward him. He pretended not to look at her and gazed into the garden, but he gave her many a sidelong glance. What was she like? How glad he would be (ah, foolish hope!) if their present intimacy had brought out anything at all attractive!
First, her seated height was unusual; she was obviously very long in the back. I knew it! he thought in despair. Next came the real disaster: her nose. He noted it instantly. She resembled the mount of the Bodhisattva Fugen.31 Long and lofty that nose was, slightly drooping toward the end, and with at the tip a blush of red—a real horror. In color she was whiter than snow, in fact slightly bluish, and her fore-head was strikingly broad,32 although below it her face seemed to go on and on for an extraordinarily long way. She was thin to the point of being pitifully bony, and even through her gown he could see the excruciating angularity of her shoulders. Why had he insisted on finding out what all of her looked like? At the same time, though, she made a sight so outlandish that he could not keep his eyes off her. The shape of her head and the sweep of her hair all but equaled those he admired in the greatest ladies he knew, and he noted how her hair trailed a foot or so beyond the hem of her dress gown.
It may be cruel to go through her costume, but the old romances always start out by describing a character's clothes. Over a deplorably faded layering of sanctioned rose33 she wore a dress gown dark with grime and, over that, a richly glossy, scented coat of sable pelts34—no doubt distinguished attire in ages past but a shockingly eccentric getup for a lady who after all was still young. Her face showed how cold she would be without the furs, though, and he felt sorry for her.
He, too, felt bereft of speech when he got nothing in reply, but he tried conversing with her to test her silence. Even the way she put her hand to her mouth in acute embarrassment was so rustic and antiquated that it reminded him of the way officials in procession on ceremonial occasions held their arms, and her accompanying smile was thoroughly disconcerting. At once pained and sympathetic, he hastily made ready to depart.
“I would be much better pleased if you who have no one to care for you were to welcome the man you now have,” he said by way of excuse.35 “Your refusal to yield is too disappointing…
When the morning sun has melted the icicles all along the eaves,
why are the waters within even now frozen so hard?”
But she gave him only an “Mmm” and a smile, and her abject failure to find a reply was so pathetic that he left.
It had been obvious even by night, when darkness hid a thousand other flaws, that the middle gate where his carriage waited was perilously warped and tottery, and now, in this mournful solitude where nothing looked warm but the pines in their thick coats of snow, the house felt remarkably like a mountain village. No doubt this was what those fellows had meant
by an “overgrown old house.” Ah, he thought, how I would love to have someone very dear come here to live, and then miss her and worry about her. She might take my mind off this forbidden longing. What a shame that the one who does live here must spoil a perfect place by having nothing to offer. Who else would ever put up with her? If she and I are now a couple, it must be because her late and doting father remained with her in spirit and led me to her.
Genji had a man of his brush off a heavily burdened orange tree, at which a pine broke free, too, as though in defiance, and with a swish shed tumbling billows of snow.36 How he longed for someone, even if not wholly enthralling, with whom he could at least enjoy the normal give-and-take!
The gate his carriage had to pass through was not yet open, and he sent for the caretaker with the key. Out came a strikingly ancient man, accompanied by a woman who might have been his daughter or his granddaughter—one could not tell which—and whose soiled clothes stood out against the snow. Visibly half frozen, she was clutching, wrapped in her sleeves, a horrid sort of box containing a few live coals. When the old man failed to get the gate open, she went to give him ineffectual help. Genji's men opened it in the end.
“He who sees these snows so cruelly heaped upon so ancient a head
moistens with no fewer tears this morning his own cold sleeves.
‘And the younger one's body is bare,’” he hummed, smiling as the memory of that cold, cold figure with her blushing nose suddenly came to mind.37 What simile would the Secretary Captain find for that nose if he showed it to him? He hated to imagine his friend, who was always after him, actually coming across him here.
The middle gate
He might have dropped Her Highness then and there if she had been quite ordinary and had had nothing remarkable about her one way or the other,38 but now that he had actually seen her, his sympathy for her was keener than ever, and he sent her constant messages together with thoroughly practical gifts: not sable furs but silks and silk twills, cotton wadding, or clothes for the old gentle-women and even (since his thoughtfulness embraced all, high or low) for the old gatekeeper. He was relieved when all this practicality seemed not to offend her, and he decided to look after her in this manner from now on. His most unusual presents included things that no one would normally have dared to give her.
She of the cicada shell, as he had seen her at her ease in profile that evening, had no looks at all, but her deportment had more than made up for it, and she had not displeased him. Could a Prince's daughter be worth less? It was true, these things had nothing to do with rank. Such had been her maddening strength of character that he was the one who had lost in the end. Memories like these ran through his head whenever chance recalled them.
The year came to a close. Genji was in his room at the palace when Taifu turned up. He liked having her dress his hair because she never flirted with him, but he often teased her or asked her for personal favors, and she came without being called whenever she had something to tell him.
“I have something odd to tell you about, but I am afraid I do not quite know how,” she said, lapsing with a grin into silence.
“What kind of thing do you mean? Surely you have nothing to hide from me.”
“Oh, no, my lord, as far as any trouble of my own might be concerned, you would of course in your kindness be the very first… But this matter is so difficult to bring up, you see.” Words failed her.
“You are leading me on again, aren't you,” he said testily.
“You have a letter from Her Highness! she announced and produced it.”
“Then what was the mystery about?”
Taifu's heart sank merely to have him take it. It was on thick Michinokuni paper,39 heavily perfumed. Her Highness's writing had certainly improved. Her poem read,
“Robe from far Cathay! Your heart turns so cruelly, O love, against me:
look upon my sleeves and see how wet they are now with tears!”40
While he pored uncomprehendingly over these words, Taifu placed before him a heavy, old-fashioned clothing box and undid its cloth wrapping. “My lord, it is impossible to view the contents of this box without a shudder, but Her Highness insisted that you must have it to wear on New Year's Day, and I could not very well make her take it back. Perhaps I should simply have put it away, but that would have meant ignoring her express wish, and so after you have had a look…”
“You would have been quite wrong to put it away. Such thoughtfulness brings great joy to one upon whose moistened sleeves no love pillows her dear head.”41 He said no more.
Good heavens, he groaned to himself, what an awful poem! This must be the best she can do on her own—I suppose Jijū is the scholar who usually retouches her poems and guides her brush. He contemplated it with a smile, reflecting that this might well be the time to speak of “awestruck gratitude,” considering the effort it must have cost her. The watching Taifu reddened.
In the box there offered itself most tediously to the gaze a plum red dress cloak, insufferably old and drab, and of the same color inside and out.42 Impossible! he thought, then spread out the letter and casually wrote along one edge these words, which Taifu read from beside him:
“This is not at all a color to which I warm; what then did I mean
by letting myself brush sleeves with a safflower in full blush?43
Yet I had so admired the flower's depth of hue.”44
Taifu pitied the lady when she understood that various moonlit glimpses of her must have given Genji good reason to complain about the safflower, but she enjoyed his poem anyway.
“The robe may be pale, dipped as it has been just once in the scarlet dye,
but oh, do take care at least never to damage her name!”45
she murmured with seasoned wit, and she added, “All this is such a worry!”
Her verse was no masterpiece, but if only (he thought bitterly) Her Highness could manage that much! It hurt to receive such nonsense from anyone so well born, and he trembled lest it disgrace her.
Several gentlewomen arrived. “We had better hide this. Who ever heard of such a thing?”46
Why did I ever show it to him? Taifu lamented. He probably takes me, too, now, for a perfect bore! She stole away, mortified.
The next day he peered into the gentlewomen's sitting room while Taifu was in waiting on His Majesty. “Here!” he called. “Here is my answer from yesterday. What a time it gave me!” He tossed it to her. The others longed to know what it was. “Farewell to the maiden of Mount Mikasa, so like the blushing red of the plum,”47 he sang as he left.
This struck Taifu as very funny, and those not in on the joke demanded to know what she was laughing to herself about. “Oh, nothing!” she answered. “One frosty morning he probably happened to see someone in scarlet silk with a matching nose. I didn't much like that snatch of song.”
“You'll have to do better than that!” they answered, uncomprehending. “None of us has a red nose! He must have caught sight of Sakon no Taifu or Higo no Uneme.”48
The gentlewomen at Her Highness's all gathered around to admire Genji's reply when Taifu delivered it.
“To the lonely nights when a robe comes between us, would you then, you say,
have me add more layers yet to keep us farther apart?”49
It was on white paper and all the more delightful for having been written so casually.
On the evening of the last day of the year Taifu delivered that same clothing box to Her Highness, now filled with a set of gowns originally given to Genji, a grape-colored gown, and a layering in kerria rose or something like that. He obviously disapproved of the color Her Highness had sent him, but the old women declared nonetheless, “Well, the scarlet one was a lot more dignified. It was just as good as these. Furthermore, our mistress's poem was nicely done and made perfect sense, while his is just clever.” As for their mistress, that poem had taken her so much trouble that she wrote it down for safekeeping.
The gentlemen were to go mumming this
year,50 after the first days of the New Year, and as always the air everywhere rang with the songs they were rehearsing, but despite the commotion Genji's sympathy went to the lonely Princess. After the festival on the seventh51 he withdrew from His Majesty's presence, made as though to settle into his room at the palace, and then appeared late that night at her residence. The place had more life to it now, and she herself seemed a little less stiff. He kept wondering whether even she could possibly have turned over a new leaf.
He purposely lingered until the sun rose in the sky. When he opened the double doors to the east, its rays streamed in unimpeded, since the roof of the gallery opposite had fallen in, and the light glancing off a powdering of snow allowed him to see easily into the room. She had come forward a little and was now lying watching him put on his dress cloak. The tilt of her head and the way her hair spilled away from her were lovely. He lifted a lattice shutter, thinking how glad he would be if the turn of the year had brought her out a bit, but he did not put it up all the way, for he had learned his lesson. Instead, he brought over an armrest to prop it on and then set about smoothing his disordered sidelocks. A woman brought him the Chinese comb box and hairdressing chest that went with an impossibly ancient mirror stand. Yes, she even had a few man's accessories, so ornate as to be comical. Today she was dressed more like other ladies, having dressed precisely according to the contents of that box. That he did not register, though; he noted only the oddness of her jauntily patterned dress gown.
“Do let me hear your voice sometimes, at least this year. Never mind the long-awaited warbler;52 what I really look forward to is a change in you.”