one did not often see her like. Her voice too seemed congealed.
He was concerned. "Who is in charge of your wardrobe? You live a
rather informal life here, and I should think that informal dress might be
called for. Quilted garments, for instance, have much to recommend them.
You worry too much about appearances."
She managed a short laugh. "I have my brother to look after, the priest
at Daigo, and I have no time to think about my own clothes. I do get a little
chilly. I let him have my sable."
Yes, she had a sable. And a brother, also the possessor of a safflower
nose. She was an honest lady but not a very practical one. He felt very
<P 415>
honest himself when he was with her, away from the niceties and decep-
tions of the elegant life.
"I think you did well to let him have your sable. It rains a great deal
off in the mountains, and I am sure he needs a raincoat. But what of
yourself? You need some underclothing, really you do. Pile it on, seven and
eight layers of it. I am sometimes forgetful in these matters, and you must
keep reminding me. You must not put up with my obtuseness."
He sent to the Nijo~ warehouses for plain and figured silks. The Nijo~
mansion could not have been called neglected or run-down, but a silence
had settled over it with his removal to Rokujo~. Yet the plantings were fine.
It seemed a pity that there was no one to appreciate the rose plum, just
coming into bloom.
"I stop to look at the groves of my old village,
And the blossom I see reminds me of a safflower."
He spoke very softly. It is unlikely that the princess caught the full
implications.
He next looked in upon the lady of the locust shell. She was living
very modestly, the larger part of her rooms given over to sacred images.
He found the evidences of the religious life very moving. The scrolls and
the decorations and utensils down to the least of the fonts showed very
good taste indeed. She was a refined and cultivated lady. Only her sleeves
showed modest and ladylike through the ingenious arrangement of gray
curtains behind which she had hidden herself.
"I should perhaps have been satisfied," he said, almost in tears, "with
seeing Urashima from a distance. Things have never been easy between
us, and I should hope that we might go on having as much as we have
now."
She too seemed deeply moved. "It can have been no weak bond that
has made me put my trust in you."
"Considerable wrongs, I should think, call for considerable acts of
contrition. Am I not right? Perhaps you see now that not everyone would
have been as honest with you as I have been."
She could not look at him. He was obviously referring to her stepson's
lamentable behavior. "My contrition is in showing myself to you as I am,
and in having you see me thus to the end."
She seemed ever calmer and more serene, and the fact that she had
become a nun made him feel more strongly that he must keep her with
him. But it was not the time to say so. The talk might be of the present
or of the past, but it must be in generalities. How good, he thought,
glancing in the direction of the safflower princess's rooms, to be with
someone who could talk at all.
He was seeing to the needs of others in this same matter-of-fact way.
He looked in on all of them.
<P 416>
"I may seem negligent at times, but I have not forgotten. Nor will I
forget, though life is uncertain, and final goodbyes must presently come."
He addressed each of them most gently and courteously, and indeed
he was fond of them all, after their several stations. They could not have
complained whatever he chose to do with them, but he was moderation
itself, allowing no suggestion of the haughty or arbitrary. His attentions
were for them the chief comfort in life.
<N 6>
The carolers were out this year. They went from the main palace to
the Suzaku Palace of the retired emperor and thence to Rokujo~. The way
being a long one, it was dawn when they arrived. A moon hung in a
cloudless sky and a light fall of snow set the garden off to weirdly delicate
effect. Everyone wanted to be his best when he came to Rokujo~. It was an
age well provided with fine musicians, and the sound of flute rang high
through the grounds. Genji had invited all his ladies to watch, and there
they all were along the east and west wings and galleries. Tamakazura had
been invited to the south front of the main hall, where she was introduced
to Genji's daughter. Murasaki watched from behind a curtain.
Dawn was already coming on as the carolers did honor to Kokiden,
the mother of the Suzaku emperor. There should have been only light
refreshments at Rokujo~, but Genji had in fact had an elaborate banquet set
out. The moon was almost too bright in the dawn sky and there were snow
flurries. A wind came down through the tall pines. The soft yellow-greens
and whites of the carolers did nothing to break the cold, white calm, and
the cloth posies in their caps, far from seeming to intrude with too much
color, moved over the scene with a light grace such as to make the onlook-
ers feel that years were being added to their lives. Yu~giri and To~ no Chu~jo~'s
sons were the handsomest and proudest of the carolers. Day broke amid
new flurries of snow, "Bamboo River" fell on freezing air, and the dancing
and the singing--I longed to paint the scene, though certain that my efforts
must fall short of the actuality.
The sleeves emerging from the blinds as each of the ladies sought to
outdo all the others made one think of a tapestry spread out in a spring
haze. It was all quite magical, if in a very slightly unsettling way, the high
caps so far from the ordinary and the noisy congratulations and all the
trappings and appurtenances. The carolers went off in full daylight, bear-
ing as always the evidences of Genji's munificence. The ladies dispersed.
Genji lay down to rest, and arose when the sun was high.
"Yu~giri may have sung a little less well than Ko~bai," he said to
Murasaki, "but only a very little. Ours is a good day for music. The
<P 417>
ancients may have been better at scholarship and learning, but I think we
more than hold our own in the gentler pursuits. I wanted to make a sober
public servant of him and to keep him from wasting his time on the
frivolities that took up so much of my own. But it is right that he should
find time for them too. Unrelieved sobriety is itself an excess."
In obvious pleasure at his son's performance, he interrupted himself
to hum "The Delight of Ten Thousand Springs."
"We must arrange a day of music for ourselves. Our own private
recessional."
He carefully undid the fine cloths in which the instruments had been
stored away, and dusted and tuned them; and it would seem that the ladies
were already hard at practice.
<W Murasaki Shikibu>{Translated by Edward G.Seidensticker}
<T The Tale of Genji>
<K 3>
<C 24>{Butterflies}
<N 1>
<P 418>
It was late in the Third Month. Murasaki's spring garden was coming ever
more to life with blossoms and singing birds. Elsewhere spring had de-
parted, said the other ladies, and why did it remain here? Genji thought
it a pity that the young women should have only distant glimpses of the
moss on the island, a deeper green each day. He had carpenters at work
on Chinese pleasure boats, and on the day they were launched he sum-
moned palace musicians for water music. Princes and high courtiers came
crowding to hear.
Akikonomu was in residence at Rokujo~. Now was the time, thought
Murasaki, for a proper answer to the poem about the garden that "awaits
the spring." Genji agreed. It would have been good to show these spring
blossoms to the empress herself, but casual visits were out of the question
for one in her position. Numbers of her young women who were thought
likely to enjoy such an outing were therefore rowed out over the south
lake, which ran from her southwest quarter to Murasaki's southeast, with
a hillock separating the two. The boats left from the hillock. Murasaki's
women were stationed in the angling pavilion at the boundary between the
two quarters.
The dragon and phoenix boats were brilliantly decorated in the Chi-
nese fashion. The little pages and helmsmen, their hair still bound up in
the page-boy manner, wore lively Chinese dress, and everything about the
<P 419>
arrangements was deliciously exotic, to add to the novelty, for the em-
press,s women, of this southeast quarter. The boats pulled up below a cliff
at an island cove, where the smallest of the hanging rocks was like a detail
of a painting. The branches caught in mists from either side were like a
tapestry, and far away in Murasaki's private gardens a willow trailed its
branches in a deepening green and the cherry blossoms were rich and
sensuous. In other places they had fallen, but here they were still at their
smiling best, and along the galleries wisteria was beginning to send forth
its lavender. Yellow yamabuki reflected on the lake as if about to join its own
image. Waterfowl swam past in amiable pairs, and flew in and out with
twigs in their bills, and one longed to paint the mandarin ducks as they
coursed about on the water. Had that Chinese woodcutter been present,
he might well have gazed on until his ax handle rotted away. Presently it
was evening.
"The breezes blow, the wave flowers brightly blossom.
Will it be the Cape of Yamabuki?"
"Is this the lake where flows the River of Ide,
That yamabuki should plunge into its depths?"
"There is no need to visit Turtle Mountain.
'Ageless' shall be the name of our pleasure boats."
"Our boats row out into the bright spring sun,
And water drops from the oars like scattering petals."
Poem followed poem. The young women seemed to forget that the
day must end and they must go home.
In the gathering twilight, to the sonorous strains of "The Royal
Deer," the boats were pulled up once more at the angling pavilion and
the women reluctantly disembarked. It was a building of simple but very
great elegance. The lengths to which the competitive young women had
gone with their dress and grooming made one think of a tapestry upon
which blossoms had fallen. The music, all very novel, went on and on, for
Genji had chosen musicians whose repertory did not permit of monotony.
It was night, and they seemed indefatigable. Flares having been put
out in the garden, they were invited to the moss carpet below the verandas,
and the princes and high courtiers had places above with the kotos and
flutes in which they took such pride. The most accomplished of the profes-
sional flutists struck up a melody in the so~jo~ mode, in which the courtiers
joined most brilliantly with their kotos, and as they moved on to "How
<P 420>
Grand the Day" even the most ignorant of the footmen off among the
horses and carriages seemed to respond. The sky and the music, the spring
modes and echoes, all seemed better here--no one could fail to see the
difference. The night was passed in music. With "Joy of Spring" the
mode shifted to an intimate minor. Prince Hotaru twice sang "Green
Willow," in very good voice. Genji occasionally
Morning came. From behind her fences Akikonomu listened to the
morning birds and feared that her autumn garden had lost the contest.
Though a perpetual spring radiance seemed to hang over this Rokujo~
mansion, there were those who had complained of a want of interesting
young ladies. Now the rumors were of a new lady in the northeast quarter,
and how pretty she was and how attentive Genji seemed to be. The
anticipated stream of letters had commenced. Several of those whose sta-
<P 421>
tion in life made them confident that their candidacy was acceptable al-
ready had their intermediaries at work. Others seemed to be keeping their
ardor rather more to themselves. It is to be imagined that several of the
suitors, To~ no Chu~jo~'s son, for instance, would have dropped their suits
if they had known who she really was.
Prince Hotaru, Genji's brother, had lost his wife of some years and for
three years had been living a lonely bachelor's life. He was now quite open
with his suit. Pretending to be hopelessly drunk, he was very amusing
indeed as he gamboled about all willow-like with a spray of wisteria in his
cap. Quite as expected, thought Genji, though he gave no sign that he
noticed.
The wine flagon came around once more and the prince pretended to
be in great discomfort. "If there were not something rather special to keep
me here, I think I would be trying to escape. It is too much, oh, really too
much." He refused to drink any more.
"Lavender holds me and puts me in mind of things.
I mean, let them say what they will, to throw myself in."
<P 422>
He generously divided his wisteria and put a sprig in Genji's cap.
Genji smiled broadly.
"Please hold yourself in abeyance beneath these flowers,
To judge if the plunge would have the proper effect."
The prince accepted this suggestion, it seemed, and stayed on. The
morning concert was if anything livelier than the evening concert had
been.
<N 2>
Today there was to be a reading of the $$ Prajnapa~ramita~ Sutra commis-
sioned by Empress Akikonomu. Many of the guests had been given rooms
in which to change to formal dress. Though some had previous engage-
ments and excused themselves, Genji's prestige had removed any doubt
that it would be a grand and solemn occasion. He led the assembly to
Akikonomu's quarter at noon.
Murasaki had prepared the floral offerings. She chose eight of her
