the mountain cherries were at their best. The deepening mist as the party
entered the hills delighted him. He did not often go on such expeditions,
for he was of such rank that freedom of movement was not permitted him.
The temple itself was a sad place. The old man's cave was surrounded
by rocks, high in the hills behind. Making his way up to it, Genji did not
at first reveal his identity. He was in rough disguise, but the holy man
immediately saw that he was someone of importance.
"This is a very great honor. You will be the gentleman who sent for
me? My mind has left the world, and I have so neglected the ritual that
it has quite gone out of my head. I fear that your journey has been in vain."
Yet he got busily to work, and he smiled his pleasure at the visit.
He prepared medicines and had Genji drink them, and as he went
through his spells and incantations the sun rose higher.<N 2> Genji walked a fewsteps from the cave and surveyed the scene. The temple was on a height
with other temples spread out below it. Down a winding path he saw a
wattled fence of better workmanship than similar fences nearby. The halls
and galleries within were nicely disposed and there were fine trees in the
garden.
"Whose house might that be?"
"A certain bishop, I am told, has been living there in seclusion for the
last two years or so."
"Someone who calls for ceremony--and ceremony is hardly possible
in these clothes. He must not know that I am here."
Several pretty little girls had come out to draw water and cut flowers
for the altar.
"And I have been told that a lady is in residence too. The bishop can
hardly be keeping a mistress. I wonder who she might be."
Several of his men went down to investigate, and reported upon what
they had seen. "Some very pretty young ladies and some older women too,
and some little girls."
<N 3>
Despite the sage's ministrations, which still continued, Genji feared
a new seizure as the sun rose higher.
"It is too much on your mind," said the sage. "You must try to think
of something else."
Genji climbed the hill behind the temple and looked off toward the
city. The forests receded into a spring haze.
"Like a painting," he said. "People who live in such a place can hardly
want to be anywhere else."
"Oh, these are not mountains at all," said one of his men. "The moun-
tains and seas off in the far provinces, now--they would make a real
picture. Fuji and those other mountains."
Another of his men set about diverting him with a description of the
mountains and shores of the West Country. "In the nearer provinces the
Akashi coast in Harima is the most beautiful. There is nothing especially
grand about it, but the view out over the sea has a quiet all its own. The
house of the former governor--he took his vows not long ago, and he
worries a great deal about his only daughter--the house is rather splendid.
He is the son or grandson of a minister and should have made his mark
in the world, but he is an odd sort of man who does not get along well with
people. He resigned his guards commission and asked for the Harima post.
But unfortunately the people of the province do not seem to have taken
him quite seriously. Not wanting to go back to the city a failure, he became
a monk. You may ask why he should have chosen then to live by the sea
and not in a mountain temple. The provinces are full of quiet retreats, but
the mountains are really too remote, and the isolation would have been
difficult for his wife and young daughter. He seems to have concluded that
life by the sea might help him to forget his frustrations.
"I was in the province not long ago and I looked in on him. He may
not have done well in the city, but he could hardly have done better in
Akashi. The grounds and the buildings are really very splendid. He was,
after all, the governor, and he did what he could to make sure that his last
years would be comfortable. He does not neglect his prayers, and they
would seem to have given him a certain mellowness."
"And the daughter?" asked Genji.
"pretty and pleasant enough. Each successive governor has asked for
her hand but the old man has turned them all away. He may have ended
up an insignificant provincial governor himself, he says, but he has other
plans for her. He is always giving her list instructions. If he dies with his
grand ambitions unrealized she is to leap into the sea."
Genji smiled.
"A cloistered maiden, reserved for the king of the sea," laughed one
of his men. "A very extravagant ambition."
The man who had told the story was the son of the present governor
of Harima. He had this year been raised to the Fifth Rank for his services
in the imperial secretariat.
"I know why you lurk around the premises," said another. "You're
a lady's man, and you want to spoil the old governor's plans."
And another: "You haven't convinced me. She's a plain country girl,
no more. She's lived in the country most of her life with an old father who
knows nothing of the times and the fashions."
"The mother is the one. She has used her connections in the city to
find girls and women from the best families and bring them to Akashi. It
makes your head spin to watch her."
"If the wrong sort of governor were to take over, the old man would
have his worries."
Genji was amused. "Ambition wide ad deep as the sea. But alas, we
would not see her for the seaweed."
Knowing his fondness for oddities, his men had hoped that the story
would interest him.
"It is rather late, sir, and seeing as you have not had another attack,
suppose we start for home."
But the sage objected. "He has been possessed by a hostile power. We
must continue our services quietly through the night."
Genji's men were persuaded, and for Genji it was a novel and amusing
excursion.
"We will start back at daybreak."
<N 4>
The evening was long. He took advantage of a dense haze to have a
look at the house behind the wattled fence. Sending back everyone except
Koremitsu, he took up a position at the fence. In the west room sat a nun
who had a holy image before her. The blinds were slightly raised and she
seemed to be offering flowers. She was leaning against a pillar and had a
text spread out on an armrest. The effort to read seemed to take all her
strength. perhaps in her forties, she had a fair, delicate skin and a pleas-
antly full face, though the effects of illness were apparent. The features
suggested breeding and cultivation. Cut cleanly at the shoulders, her hair
seemed to him far more pleasing than if it had been permitted to trail the
usual length. Beside her were two attractive women, and little girls scam-
pered in and out. Much the prettiest was a girl of perhaps ten in a soft
white singlet and a russet robe. She would one day be a real beauty. Rich
hair spread over her shoulders like a fan. Her face was flushed from
weeping.
"What is it?" The nun looked up. "Another fight?" He thought he saw
a resemblance. Perhaps they were mother and daughter.
"Inuki let my baby sparrows loose." The child was very angry. "I had
them in a basket."
"That stupid child," said a rather handsome woman with rich hair
who seemed to be called Sho~nagon and was apparently the girl's nurse.
"She always manages to do the wrong thing, and we are forever scolding
her. Where will they have flown off to? They were getting to be such sweet
little things too! How awful if the crows find them." She went out.
"What a silly child you are, really too silly," said the nun. "I can't be
sure I will last out the day, and here you are worrying about sparrows. I've
told you so many times that it's a sin to put birds in a cage. Come here."
The child knelt down beside her. She was charming, with rich, un-
plucked eyebrows and hair pushed childishly back from the forehead.
How he would like to see her in a few years! And a sudden realization
brought him close to tears: the resemblance to Fujitsubo, for whom he so
yearned, was astonishing.
The nun stroked the girl's hair. "You will not comb it and still it's so
pretty. I worry about you, you do seem so very young. Others are much
more grown up at your age. Your poor dead mother: she was only ten when
her father died, and she understood everything. What will become of you
when I am gone?"
She was weeping, and a vague sadness had come over Genji too. The
girl gazed attentively at her and then looked down. The hair that fel over
her forehead was thick and lustrous.
"Are these tender grasses to grow without the dew
Which holds itself back from the heavens that would receive it?"
There were tears in the nun's voice, and the other woman seemed also
to be speaking through tears:
"It cannot be that the dew will vanish away
Ere summer comes to these early grasses of spring."
The bishop came in. "What is this? Your blinds up? And today of all
days you are out at the veranda? I have just been told that General Genji
is up at the hermitage being treated for malaria. He came in disguise and
I was not told in time to pay a call."
"And what a sight we are. You don't suppose he saw us?" She lowered
the blinds.
"The shining one of whom the whole world talks. Wouldn't you like
to see him? Enough to make a saint throw off the last traces of the vulgar
world, they say, and feel as if new years had been added to his life. I will
get off a note."
He hurried away, and Genji too withdrew. What a discovery! It was
for such unforeseen rewards that his amorous followers were so constantly
on the prowl. Such a rare outing for him, and it had brought such a find!
She was a perfectly beautiful child. Who might she be? He was beginning
to make plans: the child must stand in the place of the one whom she so
resembled.
<N 5>
As he lay down to sleep, an acolyte came asking for Koremitsu. The
cell was a narrow one and Genji could hear everything that was said.
"Though somewhat startled to learn that your lord had passed us by,
we should have come immediately. The fact is that his secrecy rather upset
us. We might, you know, have been able to offer shabby accommoda-
tions."
Genji sent back that he had been suffering from malaria since about
the middle of the month and had been persuaded to seek the services of
the sage, of whom he had only recently heard. "Such is his reputation that
I hated to risk marring it by failing to recover. That is the reason for my
secrecy. We shall come down immediately."
The bishop himself appeared. He was a man of the cloth, to be sure,
but an unusual one, of great courtliness and considerable fame. Genji was
ashamed of his own rough disguise.
The bishop spoke of his secluded life in the hills. Again and again he
urged Genji to honor his house. "It is a log hut, no better than this, but
you may find the stream cool and pleasant."
Genji went with him, though somewhat embarrassed at the extrava-
gant terms in which he had been described to women who had not seen
him. He wanted to know more about the little girl. The flowers and grasses
in the bishop's garden, though of the familiar varieties, had a charm all
their own. The night being dark, flares had been set out along the brook,
and there re lanterns at the eaves. A delicate fragrance drifted through
the air, mixing with the stronger incense from the altar and the very special
scent which had been burnt into Genji's robes. The ladies within must
have found the blend unsettling.
<N 6>
The bishop talked of this ephemeral world and of the world to come.
His own burden of sin was heavy, thought Genji, that he had been lured
into an illicit and profitless affair. He would regret it all his life and suffer
even more terribly in the life to come. What joy to withdraw to such a
place as this! But with the thought came thoughts of the young face he had
seen earlier in the evening.
"Do you have someone with you here? I had a dream that suddenly
begins to make sense."
"How quick you are with your dreams, sir! I fear my answer will
disappoint you. It has been a very long time since the Lord Inspector died.
I don't suppose you will even have heard of him. He was my brother-in-
law. His widow turned her back on the world and recently she has been
ill, and since I do not go down to the city she has come to stay with me
here. It was her thought that I might be able to help her."
"I have heard that your sister had a daughter. I ask from no more than
idle curiosity, you must believe me."
"There was an only daughter. She too has been dead these ten years
and wore. He took very great pains with her education and hoped to send
her to court; but he died before that ambition could be realized, and the
nun, my sister, was left to look after her. I do not know through whose
offices it was that prince Hyo~bu began visiting the daughter in secret. His
wife is from a very proud family, you know, sir, and there were unpleasant
incidents, which finally drove the poor thing into a fatal decline. I saw
before my own eyes how worry can destroy a person."
So the child he had seen would be the daughter of prince Hyo~bu and
the unfortunate lady; and it was Fujitsubo, the prince's sister, whom she
so resembled. He wanted more than ever to meet her. She was an elegant
child, and she did not seem at all spoiled. What a delight if he could take
