All His Excellency's sons had enjoyed the world's esteem and lived free of care, but now they were brought low, and the future promised the Captain86 only gloom. Now and again he still visited the Minister of the Right's fourth daughter, but his poor treatment of her led her father to exclude him from among his favored sons-in-law. His omission from the recent promotions list, perhaps in warning, did not upset him unduly. With Genji himself idle and life so obviously treacherous in any case, his situation hardly surprised him; and in this spirit he visited Genji often, sharing with him both study and the pleasures of music.
Remembering how madly he had once set himself to challenge Genji, he now vied again with his friend in all things, however small. Genji commissioned the most imposing rites for the spring and autumn scripture readings, of course, but also for lesser, irregular occasions of a similar kind,87 and he convened those Doctors who seemed otherwise to be idle, so as to pass the time composing Chinese poems, guessing rhymes, and so on.88 In short, he took his ease, and instead of presenting himself for service at court, he amused himself exactly as he pleased, so much so that some must have begun talking very unpleasantly about him.
One lazy day of quiet summer rain, the Captain turned up with a bearer carrying a suitable choice of poetry collections. Genji, too, had his library opened. After ordering a few rare and curious old volumes from cases never examined before, he discreetly called together those whose interests inclined them that way. The many present from the Academy and from among the privy gentlemen were divided at Genji's order into a company of the Left and one of the Right.89 The superb prizes on offer aroused intense competition. Difficult rhymes predominated as the guessing went on, and Genji's way now and again of proposing the right one when even renowned scholars were stumped made his exceptional learning plain. “How is it possible that he should have every talent?” everyone murmured in praise. “It must simply have been his destiny to be far better at everything than anyone else!” In the end the Right lost.
Two days later the Captain gave the loser's banquet. It was modest enough, but the cypress boxes were handsome and the prizes varied, and he invited the same gathering as before to compose Chinese verses and so on. The roses below the steps were then just coming into bloom,90 and in so mild a season, more peaceful than those of the spring and autumn flowers, all joined happily in music making.
Playing the shō
One of the Captain's sons, a boy of eight or nine who had only this year begun to frequent the privy chamber, sang and played the shō prettily enough to attract Genji's delighted attention. He was the second son born to the Minister of the Right's fourth daughter. All the world had high hopes for him and treated him fondly, since he had his wits about him and was also pleasing in looks. When the music picked up a little, he gave full voice to a very fine rendition of “Takasago.”91 Genji took a layer from his costume and placed the garment over the boy's shoulders.92 His face, flushed with unaccustomed excitement, gave forth a beauty beyond any in the world, and his skin glowed wondrously through the silk gauze dress cloak and shift, until the ancient scholars watching him from their distance wept.
“How I long for you, my lily flower!” the boy's song ended, and the Captain gave Genji a cup of wine.
“All have longed to see those first blossoms this morning burst into full bloom,
yet I contemplate in you beauty just as great as theirs!”93
he said.
Genji took it, smiling.
“Those flowers in bloom this morning out of season, in the summer rain
seem to have drooped and wilted before their beauty could show.
I am not what I used to be, you know,” he bantered, resolutely taking this tribute for tipsy civility, but the Captain only reproved him and urged more wine upon him. As Tsurayuki warns,94 there is no point in recording all the faulty poems spoken at such times, and I have therefore obediently and conveniently left them out.
In both Chinese and Japanese verse the guests pursued no theme but Genji's praise, and Genji, swept up in visions of his own glory, went so far as to declaim on his own behalf the line “The son of King Bun I am, King Bu's younger brother.” It was a great moment, but what might he have said about King Sei? Perhaps that still gave him pause.95
His Highness of War, too, often called on Genji, and he played so beautifully that he made Genji a perfect partner in music.
The Mistress of Staff now withdrew from court. Having long suffered from a recurrent fever, she wanted the freedom to commission healing rites. Her whole family rejoiced to find her better once the rites had begun, and meanwhile, in concert with Genji, she managed by hook or crook to receive him every night.
A stylishly engaging young woman in full flower, she was slimmer now because of her slight illness, and extremely attractive. Genji feared discovery because the Empress Mother was then at home as well, but as usual, danger only spurred him to pursue his visits in deep secrecy. Some gentlewomen must have noticed these goings-on, but they neglected to inform the Empress Mother lest they cause trouble.
His Excellency of course knew nothing about all this when one night, just before dawn, rain suddenly came pelting down and thunder roared, alarming his sons and the Empress Mother's staff. People were everywhere, the gentlewomen gathered nearby in terror, and the desperate Genji found no escape before daylight was upon him. There were enough women even around their mistress's curtained bed to set his heart pounding. The two who knew were frantic.
When the thunder stopped and the rain let up, His Excellency went first to call on the Empress Mother. Then, while a sudden shower drowned out the sound of his arrival, he stepped abruptly up to his younger daughter's room and lifted the blinds.96
“Are you all right? It was an awful night, and I kept thinking of you—I should really have come round before. Has the Captain or the Empress Mother's Deputy97 looked in on you?” he rattled on breathlessly, and even in this crisis Genji could only smile at the difference when the image of His Excellency of the Left sprang to mind. At least the man could have saved his remarks until he was all the way into the room!
In panic the Mistress of Staff slipped out through her curtains, blushing so profusely that her father assumed she was still ill.
“What is wrong with you? These spirits are a menace! We should have kept those rites going longer,” he went on, until he was surprised to see a violet sash, which had emerged with her, entangled in her skirts. There was also a piece of folding paper with some sort of writing on it lying by her standing curtain. “Whose are these?” he said, startled to contemplate what they suggested. “What are they doing here? Give me that. Here, pick it up, and I'll see whose it is.”
Only then did she glance behind her and see the paper, too. What could she answer, when there was no hiding the truth? A man of his standing should have seen her embarrassment and restrained himself in consideration of her acute discomfort, even if she was his own daughter; but no, he was too hotheaded and irascible for that. Paper in hand, he peered past the curtain and saw, sprawled shamelessly within it, a young man who only now stealthily covered his face and moved to hide. For all his shock and outrage he could not very well bluntly require the young man to identify himself. In a blind fury he strode off with the paper toward the main house. The Mistress of Staff, all but fainting, thought she would die. Genji regretted a series of pointless escapades that now was certain to burden him with widespread condemnation, but he did what he could to console her in her all too obvious distress.
Ever a willful man, incapable of discretion, her father had gained nothing from the passing years but the testiness of age, and he was not one to waver now. He laid his whole complaint before the Empress Mother.
“This is what has been going on, you see. The writing on this paper belongs to the Commander of the Right. All this began long ago and without my leave, but I forgave him, considering who he was, and told him I would accept him after all,98 but he turned up his nose at the proposal and behaved so bad
ly that I was extremely displeased. Still, I dismissed it as fate and offered her to His Majesty after all, trusting him not to consider her tainted. In the end, however, the cloud she is under has kept her from being appointed a Consort, which is a very great shame, and this latest incident disgusts me more thoroughly than ever. This is what men are like, I know, but it just shows how despicable the Commander really is. They say he has the audacity even now to pursue the Kamo Priestess, and that he corresponds secretly with her and encourages certain suspicions, which is so obviously a risk not only for the realm99 but for himself that no one can believe such lunacy of him; he seems to have the world in awe as though he were the paragon of our time.”
The Empress Mother was even more vehement on the subject than he. “My son may be the Emperor,” she said, “but no one has ever granted him any respect. That Minister of the Left did not offer his precious only daughter to him, the elder brother and the Heir Apparent; no, he gave her to the younger, a commoner and a stripling not yet even of age. And when we were so hoping to send our girl into palace service, did anyone object to the ridiculous position this Genji had left her in? It seems everyone admired him so much that she is in service there anyway, even though our first plan for her failed, but I have still felt obliged to ensure that the poor thing could hold up her head properly, if only to show that miserable man who is who; except that now she has taken it on herself to follow her own secret inclination. What they say about the Kamo Priestess is undoubtedly quite true. Yes, there is every reason to fear for His Majesty, considering the way this man counts on the Heir Apparent reigning!”
Her father found this merciless tirade so painful that he wondered why he had brought up the matter at all. “At any rate,” he said in an effort to calm the waters, “for the time being I would like knowledge of this to go no further. Do not tell His Majesty. Yes, she is guilty, but I suppose she is counting on his indulgence to escape rejection. Warn her in private, and I shall have to take the blame myself if she will not listen.”
The Empress Mother's countenance nevertheless failed to lighten. She could not have Genji pointedly mocking and belittling her by brazenly invading her house while she herself was at home, so nearby, and this gave her a fine reason to set in train the measures to accomplish his downfall.
11
HANACHIRUSATO
Falling Flowers
Hanachirusato means “village where flowers fall.” Genji visits a lady there and gives her this poem:
“Many fond yearnings for an orange tree's sweet scent draw the cuckoo on
to come seeking the village where such fragrant flowers fall.”
RELATIONSHIP TO EARLIER CHAPTERS
“Falling Flowers” takes place late in the period covered by “The Green Branch,” in the fifth month of the year after Fujitsubo's entry into religion.
PERSONS
Genji, age 25
Koremitsu, Genji's confidant
A woman, in a house near Nakagawa
The Reikeiden Consort
Her younger sister (Hanachirusato)
Genji's secret consuming sorrow seems always to have been with him, but now that the world itself meant only a gathering host of griefs and disappointments, he rejected it all in despair, even though in fact so much still called to him.
The lady known as Reikeiden1 had given His Late Eminence no children, and after his death she had sunk into an increasingly straitened existence, from which Genji's thoughtful generosity seemed to provide her only relief. At the palace Genji had briefly known her younger sister, and being who he was, he had not forgotten her, although he had never much cultivated her either; so that now, when troubles beset him on all sides, he remembered what misery her own life must be, and during a rare break in the summer rains he could not resist calling on her.
He set out very modestly, with no escort to clear his path, and as he passed the Nakagawa, he heard from a little house set among handsome trees a full-voiced koto played brightly in the azuma mode. The sound pleased him, and since the house was quite close to its gate, he leaned out a little to look. From a great laurel tree the wind brought him a fragrance reminiscent of the Kamo Festival,2 and with a rush of feeling he recognized in this strangely engaging place one where he had called once before.
He stopped himself, for it had been so long that she might not recognize him, but he was nonetheless reluctant to leave. Just then a passing cuckoo called. This was encouragement enough; he had his carriage turned round and sent in Koremitsu, as always, with,
“He has come again in thrall to unquenched longing, the cuckoo of yore,
to the fence where once he sang a moment of passing song.”3
The women were on the west side of what Genji took to be the main house. Koremitsu, who already knew their voices, cleared his throat in warning and spoke his message. They seemed young, and they must have wondered who had sent it.
“Cuckoo, I know well the song that your visit brings, yet that memory
leaves as clouded as before the will of these rainy skies,”
the lady replied, purposely (in Koremitsu's opinion) feigning uncertainty.
“Very well, then,” he said, “‘One mistakes the hedge’”;4 and off he went again, to the lady's secret pique and disappointment. Still, she may have had reason enough to be cautious,5 and so Genji did not insist; instead, he thought how attractive, among ladies of this degree, the Gosechi Dancer from Tsukushi had been.6 He seems to have cared forever for each one of his loves. The passing years never effaced his feeling for any lady he had known, although this only aroused in many the sorrows of the lovelorn.
He felt a pang of sympathy when he found his destination as silent and deserted as he had expected. He called first on the Reikeiden Consort and kept her company until late in the evening, talking over old times. Moonrise on this twentieth night further darkened the shadows beneath the looming trees, and the scent of orange blossoms nearby called up many a fond memory. The Consort's manner betrayed her years, but she retained all her great kindness and the dignity of her charm. He thought of how His Late Eminence, for whom she had never been the greatest of favorites, had nonetheless esteemed her gentle sweetness, and visions of those days passed before him till he wept.
A cuckoo, perhaps the one he had heard earlier, gave the same call. He supposed it rather charmingly to have followed him. “How did it know?”7 he murmured to himself; and to the lady,
“Many fond yearnings for an orange tree's sweet scent draw the cuckoo on
to come to find the village where such fragrant flowers fall”;8
and he went on, “I should have come long ago in search of comfort for all the memories that are still with me. It would have been consoling in many ways to do so, although it might have saddened me, too. People change so with the times that by now there are very few with whom I can share the past, and you must have even less to distract you from your daily cares.”
She showed every sign of having long resigned herself to melancholy, as well she might, and perhaps it was the very quality of her person that for Genji gave her plight a particular sadness. She replied only,
“No one ever visits this shabby home of mine, and the flowers alone
that grace the tree at my eaves inspire your longing to come.”
Even so she remained to him unlike anyone else.
Casually and most discreetly Genji looked in at the western room,9 where the wonder of his visit and his still-rarer beauty must have made her forget anything she may have had against him. He spoke as always so kindly that he must have meant it.
No lady Genji had known, however briefly, lacked a distinction of her own, nor did any give him reason to regret courting her; and perhaps that is why nothing came between them and him, and why they always got on so well. That those who wished for more should lose interest in him was something he accepted as the way of the world. She to whose house the cuckoo had called him was one who for just that reason had turned elsewhere.
1
2
SUMA
Suma
Suma, a stretch of shore backed by hills, is now within the city limits of Kobe. Ama (“seafolk”) lived there, and in poetry the typical ama was a young woman, a saltmaker, whose burning love was betrayed by the smoke from her salt fire. Suma was also famous as the place where Ariwara no Yukihira (818–93) was sent into exile. It comes to Genji's mind for this reason when he thinks of leaving the City.
The chapter is exceptionally rich in allusions to literature in Chinese, especially the poetry of two other famous literary exiles: Bai Juyi and the Japanese scholar-statesman Sugawara no Michizane (846–903).
RELATIONSHIP TO EARLIER CHAPTERS
There is a gap between the summer with which “The Green Branch” and “Falling Flowers” end and the beginning of “Suma” in the third month of the following year. “Suma” ends a year later, when Genji is twenty-seven.
PERSONS
Genji, age 26 to 27
The mistress of Genji's west wing, 18 to 19 (Murasaki)