or looking her way; and the unhappiness was greater than if she had stayed
at home.
Genji seemed indifferent to all the grandly decorated carriages and all
the gay sleeves, such a flood of them that it was as if ladies were stacked
in layers behind the carriage curtains. Now and again, however, he would
have a smile and a glance for a carriage he recognized. His face was solemn
and respectful as he passed his wife's carriage. His men bowed deeply, and
the Rokujo~ lady was in misery. She had been utterly defeated.
She whispered to herself:
"A distant glimpse of the River of Lustration.
His coldness is the measure of my sorrow."
She was ashamed of her tears. Yet she thought how sorry she would
have been if she had not seen that handsome figure set off to such advan-
tage by the crowds.
<N 6>
<P 162>
The high courtiers were, after their several ranks, impeccably dressed
and caparisoned and many of them were very handsome; but Genji's
radiance dimmed the strongest lights. Among his special attendants was
a guards officer of the Sixth Rank, though attendants of such standing were
usually reserved for the most splendid royal processions. His retinue made
such a fine procession itself that every tree and blade of grass along the
way seemed to bend forward in admiration.
It is not on the whole considered good form for veiled ladies of no
mean rank and even nuns who have withdrawn from the world to be
jostling and shoving one another in the struggle to see, but today no one
thought it out of place. Hollow-mouthed women of the lower classes, their
hair tucked under their robes, their hands brought respectfully to their
foreheads, were hopping about in hopes of catching a glimpse. plebeian
faces were wreathed in smiles which their owners might not have enjoyed
seeing in mirrors, and daughters of petty provincial officers of whose
existence Genji would scarcely have been aware had set forth in carriages
decked out with the most exhaustive care and taken up posts which
seemed to offer a chance of seeing him. There were almost as many things
by the wayside as in the procession to attract one's attention.
<P 163>
And there were many ladies whom he had seen in secret and who now
sighed more than ever that their station was so out of keeping with his.
Prince Shikibu viewed the procession from a stand. Genji had matured and
did indeed quite dazzle the eye, and the prince thought with foreboding
that some god might have noticed, and was making plans to spirit the
young man away. His daughter, Princess Asagao, having over the years
found Genji a faithful correspondent, knew how remarkably steady his
feelings were. She was aware that attentions moved ladies even when the
donor was a most ordinary man; yet she had no wish for further intimacy.
As for her women, their sighs of admiration were almost deafening.
<N 7>
No carriages set out from the Sanjo~ mansion on the day of the festival
proper.
Genji presently heard the story of the competing carriages. He was
sorry for the Rokujo~ lady and angry at his wife. It was a sad fact that, so
deliberate and fastidious, she lacked ordinary compassion. There was in-
deed a tart, forbidding quality about her. She refused to see, though it was
probably an unconscious refusal, that ladies who were to each other as she
was to the Rokujo~ lady should behave with charity and forbearance. It was
under her influence that the men in her service flung themselves so vio-
lently about. Genji sometimes felt uncomfortable before the proud dignity
of the Rokujo~ lady, and he could imagine her rage and humiliation now.
He called upon her. The high priestess, her daughter, was still with
her, however, and, making reverence for the sacred _sakaki_ tree her excuse,
she declined to receive him.
<N 8>
She was right, of course. Yet he muttered to himself: "Why must it
be so? Why cannot the two of them be a little less prickly?"
It was from his Nijo~ mansion, away from all this trouble, that he set
forth to view the festival proper. Going over to Murasaki's rooms in the
west wing, he gave Koremitsu instructions for the carriages.
"And are all our little ladies going too?" he asked. He smiled with
pleasure at Murasaki, lovely in her festive dress. "We will watch it
together." He stroked her hair, which seemed more lustrous than ever. "It
hasn't been trimmed in a very long time. I wonder if today would be a good
day for it." He summoned a soothsayer and while the man was investigat-
ing told the "little ladies" to go on ahead. They too were a delight, bright
and fresh, their hair all sprucely trimmed and flowing over embroidered
trousers.
He would trim Murasaki's hair himself, he said. "But see how thick
it is. The scissors get all tangled up in it. Think how it will be when you
grow up. Even ladies with very long hair usually cut it here at the forehead,
and you've not a single lock of short hair. A person might even call it
untidy."
The joy was more than a body deserved, said Sho~nagon, her nurse.
<P 164>
"May it grow to a thousand fathoms," said Genji.
th "Mine it shall be, rich as the grasses beneath
The fathomless sea, the thousand-fathomed sea."
Murasaki took out brush and paper and set down her answer:
"It may indeed be a thousand fathoms deep.
How can I know, when it restlessly comes and goes?"
She wrote well, but a pleasant girlishness remained.
<N 9>
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 herea-
bouts."
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 relin-
quish 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
<P 165>
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 Rokujo~ 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 discard-
ing 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 in-
creased. 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 Sanjo~, 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 Nijo~ 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 Sanjo~ 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 Sanjo~ people went
over the list of Genji's ladies one by one. Among them all, it came to be
whispered, only the Rokujo~ lady and the lady at Nijo~ 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 informa-
tive 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 Rokujo~ mansion, to
<P 166>
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-
<P 167>
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 Rokujo~ 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 ap-
pointed 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 com-
mon 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.
<P 168>
The high priestess, her daughter, was to have been presented at court
the year before, but complications had required postponement. It was
finally decided that in the Ninth Month she would go from court to her
temporary shrine. The Rokujo~ house was thus busy preparing for two
lustrations, but its lady, lost in thought, seemed strangely indifferent. A
most serious state of affairs--the priestess's attendants ordered prayers.
