The Consort did not know what to say, but she could hardly not answer him at all. “How could I pronounce myself either way? But between them, equal though they are, I will take the evening when the poet felt ‘strangely more,’ because then I feel close to the dew that vanished all too soon.”42
Hanging lantern
Genji found her casual reticence so thoroughly charming that he could not keep himself from answering,
“Why, then, let us share all our most tender feelings, for here in my heart
I, too, know all the sadness of an autumn evening's wind.
There really are times when I can hardly bear it!”
Where was she to find a reply? She pretended not to understand, which no doubt started him on a stream of helpless reproaches. He very nearly went on to do something rather worse, but she was naturally horrified, and he himself thought better of his own detestably juvenile intentions. By now she abhorred even the profound grace of his sighs. He gathered that she was softly, little by little, retreating from him toward the inner room. “You have taken a cruel aversion to me, have you not. I doubt that anyone of genuinely deep sympathy would do so. Very well, but please do not hate me after this. That would be too painful,” he said and went away. She loathed even the tender fragrance that lingered after him.
“It is simply indescribable, the perfume that still clings to his cushion!” her gentlewomen exclaimed as they closed the shutters. “How does he manage to be as though in him blossoms opened on spring willow fronds?43 Frightening, that is what it is!”
Genji went to the west wing, but rather than go straight in he stared moodily before him and then lay down near the veranda. He had lanterns hung a good distance off and called in the gentlewomen to chat. Despite himself he could not help seeing that that old habit of his, to suffer agonies for impossible desires, was with him still. This was beneath him. Not that he had not done far worse, but he reminded himself on the subject of his early escapades that the gods and buddhas must have forgiven errors committed in his thoughtless youth, and that thought reminded him how much better he now understood the perils of this path.
The Consort, covered with shame, rued ever having answered him as though she knew the moving quality of autumn, and she accused herself so bitterly that she even began to feel unwell. Meanwhile, Genji remained perfectly composed and acted more fatherly than ever. He said to his darling, “The Consort's heart touchingly favors autumn, while you, understandably enough, have given your heart to dawn in spring. I would like to give you for your pleasure concerts attuned to the plants and flowers of each season.” He said again, “It does not suit me to be so busy with affairs, whether the government's or my own. I must manage to live more as I please.” And also, “I worry about you—I imagine that you must be so lonely.”
He constantly wondered, too, how she was getting on in that mountain village, but he found it extremely difficult to get there because he was less and less free to move about.44 She seems resigned to the idea that I have no use for her, he said to himself. Why must she be so gloomy? If she is refusing to move here because she fears being humiliated, she just does not understand her situation. He still felt sorry for her, though, and he went to see her under cover of his monthly invocations to Amida.
Life in so lonely a place would in time turn anything into one more dreary burden, and so naturally it was torment for her to see him, because it reminded her how strong the painful bond between them really was. Genji, who saw this well enough, found her impossible to console. The fishermen's cressets,45 seen through the dense trees, mingled beautifully with the fireflies along the garden stream. “You would appreciate this sort of setting a great deal more if you were not already so accustomed to it,” he said.
She replied,
Cressets that recall scenes I can never forget, of lights out at sea,
perhaps only mean my cares have come sailing after me.
My sorrows, at least, are just the same.”
“You do not yet know what flames of true devotion burn deep in my heart:
that may be why your cressets shed so unsteady a light.
Who told you life is so sad?”46 he chided her back. He was feeling at peace these days, so he enjoyed his holy pastimes and stayed on at Ōi longer than usual. That probably made her feel a little better.
20
ASAGAO
The Bluebell
Asagao (“bluebell”) is the flower associated since “The Broom Tree” with Genji's courtship of the Princess who figures in this chapter. As the chapter title it refers particularly to an exchange of poems between her and Genji, after Genji fails to win her.
RELATIONSHIP TO EARLIER CHAPTERS
“The Bluebell” continues “Wisps of Cloud,” covering the autumn and winter of the same year.
PERSONS
His Grace, the Palace Minister, Genji, age 32
Her Highness, the former Kamo Priestess (Asagao)
Her Highness, the Fifth Princess, Asagao's aunt
Senji, Asagao's gentlewoman
The former Dame of Staff, in the household of the Fifth Princess, 70 or 71 (Gen no Naishi)
The lady in Genji's west wing, 24 (Murasaki)
The Kamo Priestess had resigned, because she was in mourning.1 Genji, whose peculiarity it was as usual never to break off a courtship he had once started, sent her frequent notes, but she remembered the trouble she had had with him before, and she kept her answers strictly correct. He was keenly disappointed.
In the ninth month he heard that she had returned to her father's Momozono residence, and since that was where the Fifth Princess lived, he went there under the pretext of calling on her.2 His Late Eminence had thought a great deal of both Their Highnesses, and Genji seems still to have been in touch with several such ladies. They shared the main house, east and west. The place was very quiet and seemed to Genji already to have declined sadly.
The Fifth Princess received him and spoke to him. Thoroughly old-fashioned in manner, she was prone to clearing her throat. His Late Excellency's wife,3 the elder of the two sisters, had always managed admirably to avoid betraying her age, but not so this one, with her thick, gravelly voice; and so each was what her life had made her.
“His Late Eminence's passing was a great blow,” she said, “and now that His Highness, too, has left me, when the years incline me anyway more and more to tears, I linger on, hardly knowing whether or not I am alive; but this kind visit from you may allow me to forget.”
She has aged so! Genji said to himself, maintaining nonetheless a deferential manner. “After His Late Eminence passed away and the world came in so many ways no longer to seem the same, unjust accusations were brought against me, and I wandered unfamiliar lands until by rare good fortune His Majesty was pleased to acknowledge me again, which then left me so little time to myself that I always regretted being prevented from calling on you and talking over the past.”
“Oh, it was dreadful, dreadful, and for many reasons I detest living on and on this way, ever the same, when either misfortune4 shows how little this world is to be trusted; and yet I know very well from the joy of seeing you come into your own again how sorry I would have been to know no more of you after those years.” She began to tremble. “What a splendid-looking man you are now! When I first knew you, as a boy, I wondered that so bright a light should have come into the world, and I feared for you after that whenever I saw you. People tell me His Majesty is very like you, but I cannot believe he really compares with you!”
She talked and talked, and Genji thought with amusement that one really did not praise someone to his face that way. “I am not at all what I used to be, though, after those miserable years as a mountain rustic. No one can ever have been as handsome as His Majesty, and to my eye he is a wonder. No, no, I am afraid you are quite wrong!”
“This interminable life of mine might last even longer if only I could see you now and again. I feel today as though old age were forgotten and all the cares of this s
ad world were gone!” She wept once more. “The Third Princess5 was extremely fortunate to gain so worthy a new tie6 with you, and I envy her being so close to you. His Late Highness often felt a similar regret.”7
This last caught Genji's attention. “How happy I would be now if I had been able to serve him in that manner! But neither of them would have me, you see,” he said with a frown.
Glancing at the garden along the other side of the house, Genji noted especially how handsome the withered plantings were, and he longed sympathetically to know how she got on, and how she looked during the quiet melancholy of her days. He could resist no longer. “I should really call there, too,” he said. “It would be unkind to let the opportunity pass when I am already here to wait upon you.” He went straight to her along the veranda. It was dark by now, but what he glimpsed through gaps between gray blinds and black curtains was thoroughly pleasing, as was the suave fragrance that wafted out toward him from within. He was admitted to the southern aisle, since he could not be left on the veranda. Senji spoke to him and conveyed his messages.
“It makes me feel young again to be outside the blinds,” he said ruefully. “I thought you might give me license to come through, considering my loyalty through all your years of sacred service.”
‘That past is all a dream,” she replied, “and now that it is over, I wonder after all whether I can agree. I hope that I may quietly give your loyalty further consideration.”
Yes, Genji reflected, it is a treacherous world indeed!8
“While I silently waited till at last the god sanction my desire,
how many bitter moments your coldness made me endure!
I wonder what divine prohibition you mean to invoke this time. All sorts of troubles have afflicted me ever since I had to suffer that misfortune. I can hardly begin to tell you…” He was pressing her. His attitude was somewhat kinder and more tactful than in the past, but despite all his years of life since then, it remained unworthy of a man of his rank.
“Had I asked of you in the simplest way a word about your sorrows,
the god might well have charged me with breaking my solemn vow,”
she answered.
“Ah, you are cruel! The winds of heaven have carried off all my misdeeds from those years,” he protested with bewitching charm.
“My lord, how do you think the gods look on your purification?”9 This comment from her gentlewoman greatly upset Her Highness. The passing years had only confirmed her profound reticence, and her incapacity to respond made her women very uncomfortable.
Inkstone
“I am afraid our talk has turned to gallantry.” He arose, sighing deeply. “It is embarrassing at my age. I believe your treatment entitles me to ask that you now see what has become of me.”10 With that he went away, leaving behind as usual a buzz of praise. This was a season of lovely skies. To the rustling of the leaves Her Highness pondered absorbing passages from her past, and she remembered how thoroughly amusing he had been at times, and at others how profoundly moving.
Having left in such ill humor, Genji naturally lay awake, deep in thought. He had the shutters raised early and gazed at the morning mist. Bluebells bloomed forlornly here and there among the dying flowers, and he picked a particularly pretty one and sent it to her. “Your summary treatment of me was humiliating,” he wrote, “and I shudder to imagine with what eyes you watched me leave. And yet,
Could it really be that the bluebell I once knew and cannot forget
no longer displays the bloom that was hers in days gone by?
I believed you would look kindly on my many years, you know…”
It was a judicious letter, well meant, and she saw that failure to answer it might amount to cutting him dead. Meanwhile, her gentlewomen brought her an inkstone.
“Yes, autumn is past, and entangled in a fence swathed by many mists
the bluebell pales and withers as though hardly there at all.
I have tears in my eyes, your image fits me so well,” she wrote. That was all, and there was nothing remarkable about it, but for some reason he found it difficult to put down. Perhaps it was the soft lines of her brush on the blue-gray paper that so pleased him. One matches one's words to the writer's quality and style, and remarks that are innocuous at the time may turn out to be troublesome when one seeks plausibly to convey them, which is why there are many things here that I have patched together and that may easily be wrong.
Genji felt that by now it would ill become him to turn again to writing her youthful letters, but the thought of having wasted so many years while she went on never quite rejecting him decided him not to give up, and he reverted to ardent courtship.
He went off to his east wing and had Senji there for a talk. Some of Her Highness's women—those apparently disposed to give any man his way, even one of no great rank—praised Genji beyond all reason, but their mistress had cooled toward him long ago, and her age and station, like his own, now discouraged liaisons. If she still responded in kind to notes from him on a foolish flower, she nonetheless feared anything that might start gossip, and she gave no sign of yielding. Her long-standing constancy of resolve thus made her seem to Genji unlike anyone else in the world, and at once admirable and maddening.
Word got out anyway. “He is courting the former Kamo Priestess,” people said, “and the Fifth Princess has no objection. Those two would not go at all badly together.” This talk reached the lady in his west wing. No, she told herself at first, he would not conceal that sort of thing from me; but then she began to keep an eye on him and was troubled to find him unusually restless. So, she thought, he has been simply laughing off something about which he is quite serious! I am her equal by birth,11 but she has an outstanding reputation and has always enjoyed the highest esteem. I shall be lost if his feelings shift to her. Am I to be cast aside, then, when I have never had any serious rival? She was secretly in great distress. Perhaps he will not really cut me off entirely, but even so, all these years of keeping me so close to him, when nothing about me required him to do so, could turn only to slights and condescension! It was things she could tolerate that had provoked her tactful reproaches, whereas now, when she was seriously hurt, she showed nothing at all. Genji so often sat daydreaming near the veranda, stayed away at the palace, or spent his time writing letters, that there appeared to be a good deal to the gossip. If only he would say something! she thought, detesting him.
The rites to honor the gods had been canceled.12 One evening, overcome by the empty hours, Genji decided on one of his so-called visits to the Fifth Princess. It was a lovely dusk with lightly falling snow, and he had spent the day dressing with special care in charmingly soft robes, expressly perfumed; one wondered more than ever how any susceptible woman could resist him.
He did say good-bye, though. “I gather that the Fifth Princess is unwell, and I thought I might pay her a call,” he said, going down on one knee, but she did not even look at him. Her profile as she played instead with her little girl suggested that something was wrong. “You are looking strangely unlike yourself these days,” he said. “I have not done anything. I have been staying away a bit because I thought you might find the same old salt-burner's robe rather dull by now.13 Now, what can you possibly have been making of that?”
Broken garden fence
“Familiarity often breeds contempt.” She lay down with her back to him. He did not like to leave her this way, but he set out nonetheless, since he had already let Her Highness know that he was coming.
She lay there thinking how naive she had always been. Even in gray, Genji just looked lovelier than ever in his layering of its shades, and as she watched him go, his exquisitely graceful figure illuminated by the snow, she ached unbearably to think that he might really be leaving her.
His escort consisted only of trusted retainers. “I no longer care to go anywhere except to the palace,” he told them, “but the Fifth Princess is in a sad plight, and although I could trust His Highness of Ceremonial t
o look after her while he was alive, now, alas, she understandably wishes to turn to me.” He said the same thing to his women.
“Oh, come now!” they whispered among themselves. “He is as much of a lover as ever—it seems to be his great flaw. He will be getting himself into trouble.”
It would have been undignified for Genji to enter through the busy north gate, and he therefore sent a man in through the formal west one to announce his arrival. Her Highness, taken by surprise since she no longer expected him that day, ordered it opened. The shivering gatekeeper who rushed out could not immediately move it, and there seemed to be no one to help him. “The lock is all rusted,” he grumbled, rattling away at it, “that's why it won't open.”14 Genji felt sorry for him. It feels like yesterday, he thought, and it was thirty or more years ago. Ah, life! And still I cling to this passing lodging and give my heart to the beauty of plants and trees!15 He hummed to himself,
“All too soon, I see, the house has nearly vanished among wastes of weeds,
and the snows of many years weigh upon the garden fence.”
The gate came open after a good deal of pushing and tugging, and he entered.
He talked over the past with Her Highness, as usual, on her side of the house, and she rambled on and on interminably about the old days, but he became sleepy when nothing he heard caught his interest, and she herself began to yawn. “I am so drowsy this evening, I can hardly speak!” she said, and the curious sound that soon followed might well have been snoring. Pleased, he rose and was on his way out when someone else came in, clearing her throat in a thoroughly antique manner. “I beg your pardon,” she said, “I thought you might have been told I was here, but I see it makes no difference to you. His Late Eminence used to laugh at me and call me Honorable Granny.”