The Tale of Genji . Murasaki Shikibu
thousand fathoms deep.
How can I know, when it restlessly comes and goes?”
She wrote well, but a pleasant girlishness remained.
Again the streets were lined in solid ranks. Genji’s party pulled up near the cavalry grounds, unable to find a place.
“Very difficult,” said Genji. “Too many of the great ones hereabouts.”
A fan was thrust from beneath the blinds of an elegant ladies’ carriage that was filled to overflowing.
“Suppose you pull in here,” said a lady. “I would be happy to relinquish my place.”
What sort of adventuress might she be? The place was indeed a good one. He had his carriage pulled in.
“How did you find it? I am consumed with envy.”
She wrote her reply on a rib of a tastefully decorated fan:
“Ah, the fickleness! It summoned me
To a meeting, the heartvine now worn by another.
“The gods themselves seemed to summon me, though of course I am not admitted to the sacred precincts.”
He recognized the hand: that of old Naishi, still youthfully resisting the years.
Frowning, he sent back:
“Yes, fickleness, this vine of the day of meeting,
Available to all the eighty clans.”
It was her turn to reply, this time in much chagrin:
“Vine of meeting indeed! A useless weed,
A mouthing, its name, of empty promises.”
Many ladies along the way bemoaned the fact that, apparently in feminine company, he did not even raise the blinds of his carriage. Such a stately figure on the day of the lustration — today it should have been his duty to show himself at his ease. The lady with him must surely be a beauty.
A tasteless exchange, thought Genji. A more proper lady would have kept the strictest silence, out of deference to the lady with him.
For the Rokujō lady the pain was unrelieved. She knew that she could expect no lessening of his coldness, and yet to steel herself and go off to Ise with her daughter — she would be lonely, she knew, and people would laugh at her. They would laugh just as heartily if she stayed in the city. Her thoughts were as the fisherman’s bob at 1se. Her very soul seemed to jump wildly about, and at last she fell physically ill.
Genji discounted the possibility of her going to Ise. “It is natural that you should have little use for a reprobate like myself and think of discarding me. But to stay with me would be to show admirable depths of feeling.”
These remarks did not seem very helpful. Her anger and sorrow increased. A hope of relief from this agony of indecision had sent her to the river of lustration, and there she had been subjected to violence.
At Sanjō, Genji’s wife seemed to be in the grip of a malign spirit. It was no time for nocturnal wanderings. Genji paid only an occasional visit to his own Nijō mansion. His marriage had not been happy, but his wife was important to him and now she was carrying his child. He had prayers read in his Sanjō rooms. Several malign spirits were transferred to the medium and identified themselves, but there was one which quite refused to move. Though it did not cause great pain, it refused to leave her for so much as an instant There was something very sinister about a spirit that eluded the powers of the most skilled exorcists The Sanjō people went over the list of Genji’s ladies one by one. Among them all, it came to be whispered, only the Rokujō lady and the lady at Nijō seemed to have been singled out for special attentions, and no doubt they were jealous. The exorcists were asked about the possibility, but they gave no very informative answers. Of the spirits that did announce themselves, none seemed to feel any deep enmity toward the lady. Their behavior seemed random and purposeless. There was the spirit of her dead nurse, for instance, and there were spirits that had been with the family for generations and had taken advantage of her weakness.
The confusion and worry continued. The lady would sometimes weep in loud wailing sobs, and sometimes be tormented by nausea and shortness of breath.
The old emperor sent repeated inquiries and ordered religious services. That the lady should be worthy of these august attentions made the possibility of her death seem even more lamentable. Reports that they quite monopolized the attention of court reached the Rokujō mansion, to further embitter its lady. No one can have guessed that the trivial incident of the carriages had so angered a lady whose sense of rivalry had not until then been strong.
Not at all herself, she left her house to her daughter and moved to one where Buddhist rites would not be out of p1ace. Sorry to hear of the move, Genji bestirred himself to call on her. The neighborhood was a strange one and he was in careful disguise. He explained his negligence in terms likely to make it seem involuntary and to bring her forgiveness, and he told her of Aoi’s illness and the worry it was causing him.
“I have not been so very worried myself, but her parents are beside themselves. It has seemed best to stay with her. It would relieve me enormously if I thought you might take a generous view of it all.” He knew why she was unwell, and pitied her.
They passed a tense night. As she saw him off in the dawn she found that her plans for quitting the city were not as firm as on the day before. Her rival was of the highest rank and there was this important new consid- eration; no doubt his affections would finally settle on her. She herself would be left in solitude, wondering when he might call. The visit had only made her unhappier. In upon her gloom, in the evening, came a letter.
“Though she had seemed to be improving, she has taken a sudden and drastic turn for the worse. I cannot leave her.”
The usual excuses, she thought. Yet she answered:
“I go down the way of love and dampen my sleeves,
And go yet further, into the muddy fields.
A pity the well is so shallow.”
The hand was the very best he knew. It was a difficult world, which refused to give satisfaction. Among his ladies there was none who could be dismissed as completely beneath consideration and none to whom he could give his whole love.
Despite the lateness of the hour, he got off an answer: “You only wet your sleeves — what can this mean? That your feelings are not of the deepest, I should think.
“You only dip into the shallow waters,
And I quite disappear into the slough?
“Do you think I would answer by letter and not in person if she were merely indisposed?”
The malign spirit was more insistent, and Aoi was in great distress. Unpleasant rumors reached the Rokujō lady, to the effect that it might be her spirit or that of her father, the late minister. Though she had felt sorry enough for herself, she had not wished ill to anyone; and might it be that the soul of one so lost in sad thoughts went wandering off by itself? She had, over the years, known the full range of sorrows, but never before had she felt so utterly miserable. There had been no release from the anger since the other lady had so insulted her, indeed behaved as if she did not exist. More than once she had the same dream: in the beautifully appointed apartments of a lady who seemed to be a rival she would push and shake the lady, and flail at her blindly and savagely. It was too terrible. Sometimes in a daze she would ask herself if her soul had indeed gone wandering off. The world was not given to speaking well of people whose transgressions had been far slighter. She would be notorious. It was common enough for the spirits of the angry dead to linger on in this world. She had thought them hateful, and it was her own lot to set a hateful example while she still lived. She must think no more about the man who had been so cruel to her. But so to think was, after all, to think.
The high priestess, her daughter, was to have been presented at court the year before, but complications had required postponement. It was finally decided