On the day, he sought refuge at Nijō, from where he went to watch the Festival. He crossed to the west wing17 and had Koremitsu order the carriage. “Are you gentlewomen going, too?”18 he asked and watched, all smiles, while the young lady got herself ready very prettily indeed. “Come along, then,” he said, “let us see it together.”
Her hair was lovelier than ever. “You seem not to have had it trimmed for ages,” he observed while he stroked it. “I imagine today is a good day for that.”19 He called for a Doctor of the Almanac and had him questioned about the proper hour. “Out you come now, gentlewomen!” he said and surveyed the delightful picture the children presented. The line of their bewitching hair, boldly cut straight across, stood out sharply against their damask-patterned outer trousers.
“I shall trim your hair myself. But oh, dear, how thick it is! I wonder how long it will grow!” He hardly knew what to do next. “People with very long hair still seem to have it shorter at the sides, but you have no stray locks at all! I am afraid you are not going to look very nice!”20 When he was done, he made the “thousand fathom” wish, while Shōnagon looked on with pleasure and deep gratitude.
He said,
“Rich seaweed tresses of the unplumbed ocean depths, a thousand fathoms long,
you are mine and mine alone to watch daily as you grow.”21
Riding ground pavilion
“How am I to know whether a thousand fathoms measure your love, too,
when the ever shifting tides so restlessly ebb and flow?”
she wrote on a bit of paper, looking so grown-up yet at the same time so fresh and young that she was a joy to behold.
Today again there was no room for one carriage more. Genji's found nowhere to go, and it waited by the riding ground pavilion.22 “It is awfully crowded here, with all these senior nobles' carriages,” he remarked, and he was wondering whether to pass on when from a very fine one overflowing with a bright profusion of sleeves there emerged a fan that beckoned to one of his men.
“Would you not like to put your carriage here?” the occupant inquired. “I cede you my place.”
Genji wondered what sort of coquette she could be, but since the spot was indeed a good one, he had his carriage brought up to it. “I envy you having managed to find it,” he replied.
At this she broke a bit off a prettily decorated fan23 and wrote upon it,
“Ah, it is too hard! Today when our heart-to-heart told me that the god
blessed our meeting, I perceive that another sports those leaves.
I should not presume…”24
He knew the handwriting: it was the Dame of Staff's. How she will play the gay young thing, despite her years! He was sufficiently irritated to retort,
“Yours, so I would say, was a very naughty wish to sport heart-to-heart,
when this meeting place today gathers men from countless clans!”
She answered, deeply wounded,
“How I rue the day I wished to sport heart-to-heart, those perfidious leaves
that with no more than a name stir such foolish pangs of hope!”
Many ladies were disappointed to see that he had someone with him and did not even raise his blinds. The other day he was so correct, they said to themselves, but he certainly is making a casual outing of it today. Who can she be? She must be worth looking at, if she is with him.
What a dismal skirmish that was, over heart-to-heart! Genji was annoyed. Certainly, anyone less shameless than that woman would have deferred to the lady beside him and refrained from tossing off rash repartee.
The Rokujō Haven had never through all the years known such misery and turmoil. As to her cruel lover, she had given him up, but she knew how badly she would miss him if she were actually to break with him and go down to Ise, and she also feared ridicule for doing so; yet the thought of staying after all left her afraid of encountering once more the hideous contempt that she had already suffered. “Am I the float on the fisherman's line?”25 she asked herself in anguish day and night, and perhaps this was why she lived like an invalid, her mind seeming to her to have come adrift.
Genji never insisted that it would be madness for her to go; he only argued, “I quite understand that you should wish to see the last of me, worthless as I am, but even if you are fed up with me by now, it would still be much kinder of you to continue receiving me.” This made the storm of that day of Purification,26 which she had attended only for relief from her indecision, more hateful to her than before.
At His Excellency's a spirit, it seemed, was making the lady extremely unwell, and her family was alarmed. This was therefore no time for Genji to pursue adventures elsewhere, and it was only at odd moments that he managed even to visit Nijō. It pained him deeply that someone who so commanded his consideration should suffer this way, especially in her already delicate condition, and he had many prayers and rites done for her in his own apartment within the residence.
Many spirits and living phantoms27 came forth and identified themselves in one way or another, but one refused to move into the medium and clung instead to the lady herself; and although it did her no great violence, it never left her. Its resistance even to the most potent healers was extraordinarily stubborn.
After considering all the ladies with whom Genji had a liaison, people began to whisper that only the Rokujō Haven and the lady at Nijō engaged his deeper feelings, so that either might be intensely jealous; but divination performed at His Excellency's insistence still yielded nothing clear. None of the other spirits was especially hostile. One appeared to be a deceased nurse, while others were entities that had haunted her parents' families for generations, but these were not serious, and they were manifesting themselves only at random because of her weakened condition. She herself just cried and cried, and sometimes retched, suffering such unbearable agony that her parents wondered in fear and sorrow what was to become of her.
There were constant inquiries from His Eminence, whose most gracious solicitude, expressed in the prayers that he was kindly having offered on her behalf, made it seem still more urgent that she be saved. The Haven was shaken to learn that all the world feared for the lady's life. No one at His Excellency's guessed that that little quarrel over placement of the carriages had inflamed in her heart a rivalry hitherto dormant for many years.
Her troubled mood convinced her that she was simply not herself, and she moved elsewhere to have healing rites done. The news made Genji wonder with uneasy sympathy what state of mind had prompted her to do this, and he resolved to go and see her. He went very discreetly, since for once she was not at her own home. He begged forgiveness at length for his recent, quite unintentional neglect, and he appealed to her with an account of the afflicted lady's condition.
“I myself am not all that worried,” he earnestly explained, “but I feel for her parents, who are desperately anxious, and so, you see, I thought I should stay with her for the time being. I would be grateful if you were to view my behavior more indulgently.” He understood that she was suffering more than usual, and was pained to see it.
His departing figure, at dawn after a night of distances, was so enchanting that again she could not bear to leave him, but now that he had reason to devote himself more than ever to the one who commanded his first allegiance, he would doubtless settle his affections upon her, and this endless waiting would mean nothing but misery; his occasional visit would arouse only fresh despair. These thoughts were running through her mind when she had a letter from him—only a letter, and toward sunset: “She had seemed a little better lately, but all at once she took such a turn for the worse that I could not get away.”
To her this was just another of his excuses, and she replied,
“I knew all too well that no sleeve goes unmoistened by the mire of love,
yet in the slough of that field I labor in helpless pain.
How true it is, that line about the mountain spring!”28
To Genji her writing stood out easily in any com
pany. Ah, he thought, why must it be like this? He was caught agonizingly between his reluctance to give up both her spirit and her looks and his incapacity to commit himself to her. His reply reached her well after dark: “Only your sleeves are wet? So your feelings have no depth…
It is shallow, then, the field of your hard labors, not at all like mine,
for I am wholly immersed in the deep slough of love's mire.
Have I failed to answer you in person only because you mean so little to me?”
At His Excellency's the spirit was very active, and the lady was in agony. The Haven heard that some were calling it her own living phantom or the ghost of His Late Excellency her father, but on reflection she found in herself only her own misery and no desire at all to see the lady harmed, though she conceded that a soul wandering in distress, as souls were said to do, might well act in this manner. Despite years plumbing the depths of despair, she had never before felt, as now, utterly destroyed, and after the Purification, when in that foolish incident she had been as though singled out for contempt and treated as naught, she knew that her mind, which had then drifted briefly from her, was now indeed beyond her control; and perhaps this was why she dreamed repeatedly, on dozing off, that she went to where that lady (as she supposed) lay in her finery, pushed and tugged her about, and flailed at her with a baneful violence strange to her waking self. Time after time she felt that she was not herself and that to her horror she had wandered away from her own body, until she saw that even if she were wrong, the world so unwillingly speaks well of anyone that the rumor of it would be embroidered upon everywhere with glee. She would, she knew, be talked of far and wide. No doubt it was common enough to leave a still-active malevolence behind after death, and this alone, when told of another, would arouse repulsion and fear; but that it should be her tragic destiny to have anything so horrible said of herself while she was still alive! No, she could not remain attached to so cruel a lover. Such were her thoughts, but hers was a case of “trying too hard to forget.”29
The High Priestess was to have gone to the palace the year before,30 but various difficulties had prevented her from doing so until this autumn. She was then to move in the ninth month directly to the Shrine on the Moor,31 which meant that preparations for the Second Purification had to go forward urgently at the same time; but the Haven was overcome by a strange lassitude and spent her time in despondent brooding, to the intense anxiety of the High Priestess's staff, who offered prayers of every kind.32 Still, her condition was not actually dire, and she got through the days and months without displaying any clear symptoms. Genji called on her often, but the lady to whom he owed his allegiance was so ill that he remained deeply preoccupied.
It was still early, and the family were unprepared, when all at once she began to show obvious signs and to suffer pain. Ever more potent prayers were commissioned in great numbers, but that single most obstinate spirit refused to move, until the mightiest healers were surprised to find their efforts frustrated. Their assault was nonetheless fierce enough that the spirit wept in misery and cried, “Oh, please be a little more gentle with me! I have something to say to the Commander!”
“What did I tell you?” the women whispered among themselves. “Now we shall know!”
They led Genji in to the curtain that stood near where she lay. She was so clearly dying that His Excellency and Her Highness withdrew a little, understanding that she might have some last word for him. The priests chanting the Lotus Sutra lowered their voices, to awesome effect. He lifted the curtain and looked in. Anyone, not only her husband, would have been moved to see her lying there, so beautiful and with so vast a belly, and since she was indeed his wife, he was of course overcome by pity and regret. Her long, abundant hair, bound at the end, lay beside her, contrasting vividly with her white gown. He thought her dearer and more beautiful than ever before.
He took her hand. “This is dreadful! What a thing to do to me!” When weeping silenced him, she lifted to his face her expiring gaze, so filled in the past with reproach and disapproval, and tears spilled from her eyes. How could he not have been profoundly moved?
She wept so piteously that he assumed her thoughts were on her sorrowing parents, as well as on the pain of leaving him. “You must not make too much of all this,” he said soothingly. “You are going to be well after all. At any rate, whatever happens, you and I will meet again. People do. Remember what a strong bond you have with His Excellency and Her Highness, because it will remain unbroken in lives to come, and you will be with them again.”
“No, no, you do not understand,” a gentle voice answered. “I only wished you to have them release me a little because I am in such pain. I did not want to come at all, but you see, it really is true that the soul of someone in anguish may wander away.
This spirit of mine that, sighing and suffering, wanders the heavens,
oh, stop it now, tie a knot where in front the two hems meet.”33
The voice, the manner, were not hers but those of someone else. After a moment of shock he understood that he was in the presence of the Rokujō Haven. Alas, what he had dismissed so far as malicious rumor put about by the ignorant now proved to be patently true, and he saw with revulsion that such things really did happen. “I hear your voice, but I do not know you. Please make it clear to me who you are.” To his understandable horror, the answer was not in doubt. He shuddered to imagine the gentlewomen coming to their mistress now.
Bowl of water for the toilette, on a stand
When her cries died down a little, her mother brought the hot medicinal water in case she might be in reprieve; then she was lifted upright and quickly gave birth.34 Her parents' joy knew no bounds, but the spirits expelled by the healers35 now raised a wild clamor of jealous rage, and what remained to come36 was still a great worry. When all finally ended well, no doubt thanks to urgent prayers renewed in numbers beyond counting the Abbot of the Mountain and the other most holy prelates wiped away their perspiration in triumph and hurried away.
Days of acute and widespread anxiety now gave way to a welcome lull, and at last her parents breathed easily. His Excellency commissioned a new round of protective rites, but happiness reigned, and exceptional delight in the child put everyone off guard. His Eminence, Their Highnesses the Princes, and the senior nobles all attended the splendid birth celebrations that enlivened the succeeding evenings.37 These events were especially bright and gay because in the bargain the child was a boy.
This news shook the Rokujō Haven. She was supposed to be near death, she silently exclaimed, and now she has actually given birth without a hitch! Curiously, she still felt unlike herself, and her clothing reeked of poppy seeds.38 To allay her misgivings she tried washing her hair and changing, but the smell lingered until she came to look on herself with horror and of course to mourn inwardly (for the matter was hardly one she could discuss) what others must be saying about her. As she did so, she sank into ever more disturbed states of mind.
Genji, who was now a little less anxious than before, shuddered to recall that dreadful moment when the spirit had so startlingly addressed him. He knew he had been wrong to neglect her for so long, but he had grave doubts about how he would feel in her presence, and after careful reflection (for he did not wish to be unkind) he only sent her a letter.
Her parents were still apprehensive, since they feared the effects of so serious an illness, and Genji tactfully abstained from his private excursions. She was not yet well enough to receive him as she usually did. The little boy was so handsome, in fact disturbingly so, that Genji was soon captivated, while His Excellency rejoiced that things had turned out well after all, if it were not for the worry that his daughter had yet to recover; but this he attributed to the difficulty of getting over everything she had suffered, and in truth he had little reason to fear.
Seeing how closely the little boy's engaging looks resembled the Heir Apparent's, Genji gave in to fond memories and went to call at the palace. “I feel guilty not t
o have seen His Majesty for so long,” he said reproachfully, “and now I am going at last, I hope that I may come a little nearer to talk to you. It is too unkind of you to keep yourself from me as you do.”39
“Indeed, my lord,” a gentlewoman replied, “you and my lady need no longer present yourselves flatteringly to each other, and although my lady is very reduced, there is no reason why a curtain should stand between you.”
They arranged a seat for him near where she lay, and he went in to talk to her. She was very weak even now, as her few answers showed. Still, the memory of thinking her well and truly lost seemed a dream, and as he told her of his fears for her then, he was assailed by the grim recollection of how, while she lay all but lifeless, that flood of speech had suddenly burst from her. “Ah,” he said, “I have so much more to tell you, but they tell me you are not up to it, you see. Do take your medicine,” he went on, and in other ways, too, he made himself so useful that her gentlewomen were touched and wondered when he could have learned all this. The sight of her lying there, so beautiful yet so thin and weak that she hardly seemed among the living, aroused his love and his keenest sympathy. The hair streaming across her pillow, not a strand out of place, struck him as a wonder, and as he gazed at her, he found himself unable to understand how for all these years he could have seen any flaw in her.
“I shall call upon His Eminence, too, and then I shall be back very soon. I would gladly stay with you like this all the time, but Her Highness is always beside you, and I am afraid that I have held back so far for fear of being indiscreet. In your usual room, though, once you have gradually recovered your strength… One reason why you do not get better is that you treat yourself too much like a child.” When he had finished, he set out in his magnificent robes, while she lay there and watched him go for longer than ever before.