he remembered the cloak, a bright and intricate damask.
“Perhaps this year I will be privileged to have words from you. More than the new warbler, we await the new you.”
“With the spring come the calls —” she replied, in a tense, faltering voice.
“There, now. That’s the style. You have indeed turned over a new leaf.” He went out smiling and softly intoning Narihira’s poem about the dream and the snows.
She was leaning on an armrest. The bright safflower emerged in profile from over the sleeve with which she covered her mouth. It was not a pretty sight.
Back at Nijō, his Murasaki, now on the eve of womanhood, was very pretty indeed. So red could after all be a pleasing color, he thought. She was delightful, at artless play in a soft cloak of white lined with red. Because of her grandmother’s conservative preferences, her teeth had not yet been blackened or her eyebrows plucked. Genji had put one of the women to blackening her eyebrows, which drew fresh, graceful arcs. Why, he continued asking himself, should he go seeking trouble outside the house when he had a treasure at home? He helped arrange her dollhouses. She drew amusing little sketches, coloring them as the fancy took her. He drew a lady with very long hair and gave her a very red nose, and though it was only a picture it produced a shudder. He looked at his own handsome face in a mirror and daubed his nose red, and even he was immediately grotesque. The girl laughed happily.
“And if I were to be permanently disfigured?”
“I wouldn’t like that at all.” She seemed genuinely worried.
He pretended to wipe vigorously at his nose. “Dear me. I fear it will not be white again. I have played a very stupid trick upon myself. And what,” he said with great solemnity, “will my august father say when he sees it?”
Looking anxiously up at him, Murasaki too commenced rubbing at his nose.
“Don’t, if you please, paint me a Heichū black. I think I can endure the red.” They were a charming pair.
The sun was warm and spring-like, to make one impatient for blossoms on branches now shrouded in a spring haze. The swelling of the plum buds was far enough advanced that the rose plum beside the roofed stairs, the earliest to bloom, was already showing traces of color.
“The red of the florid nose fails somehow to please,
Though one longs for red on these soaring branches of plum.
“A pity that it should be so.”
And what might have happened thereafter to our friends?
The Tale of Genji, by Murasaki Shikibu
Chapter 7
An Autumn Exersion
The royal excursion to the Suzaku palace took place toward the middle of the Tenth Month. The emperor’s ladies lamented that they would not be present at what was certain to be a most remarkable concert. Distressed especially at the thought that Fujitsubo should be deprived of the pleasure, the emperor ordered a full rehearsal at the main palace. Genji and Tō no Chūjō danced “Waves of the Blue Ocean.” Tō no Chūjō was a handsome youth who carried himself well, but beside Genji he was like a nondescript mountain shrub beside a blossoming cherry. In the bright evening light the music echoed yet more grandly through the palace and the excitement grew; and though the dance was a familiar one, Genji scarcely seemed of this world. As he intoned the lyrics his auditors could have believed they were listening to the Kalavinka bird of paradise. The emperor brushed away tears of delight, and there were tears in the eyes of all the princes and high courtiers as well. As Genji rearranged his dress at the end of his song and the orchestra took up again, he seemed to shine with an ever brighter light.
“Surely the gods above are struck dumb with admiration,” Lady Kokiden, the mother of the crown prince, was heard to observe. “One is overpowered by such company.”
Some of the young women thought her rather horrid.
To Fujitsubo it was all like a dream. How she wished that those unspeakable occurrences had not taken place. Then she might be as happy as the others.
She spent the night with the emperor.
“There was only one thing worth seeing,” he said.’” Waves of the Blue Ocean.’ Do you not agree?
“Nor is Tō no Chūjō a mean dancer. There is something about the smallest gesture that tells of breeding. The professionals are very good in their way — one would certainly not wish to suggest otherwise — but they somehow lack freshness and spontaneity. When the rehearsals have been so fine one fears that the excursion itself will be a disappointment. But I would not for anything have wished you to miss it.”
The next morning she had a letter from Genji. “And how did it all seem to you? I was in indescribable confusion. You will not welcome the question, I fear, but
“Through the waving, dancing sleeves could you see a heart
So stormy that it wished but to be still?”
The image of the dancer was so vivid, it would seem, that she could not refuse to answer.
“Of waving Chinese sleeves I cannot speak.
Each step, each motion, touched me to the heart.
“You may be sure that my thoughts were far from ordinary.”
A rare treasure indeed. He smiled. With her knowledge of music and the dance and even it would seem things Chinese she already spoke like an empress. He kept the letter spread before him as if it were a favorite sutra.
On the day of the excursion the emperor was attended by his whole court, the princes and the rest. The crown prince too was present. Music came from boats rowed out over the lake, and there was an infinite variety of Chinese and Korean dancing. Reed and string and drum echoed through the grounds. Because Genji’s good looks had on the evening of the rehearsal filled him with foreboding, the emperor ordered sutras read in several temples. Most of the court understood and sympathized, but Kokiden thought it all rather ridiculous. The most renowned virtuosos from the high and middle court ranks were chosen for the flutists’ circle. The director of the Chinese dances and the director of the Korean dances were both guards officers who held seats on the council of state. The dancers had for weeks been in monastic seclusion studying each motion under the direction of the most revered masters of the art.
The forty men in the flutists’ circle played most marvelously. The sound of their flutes, mingled with the sighing of the pines, was like a wind coming down from deep mountains. “Waves of the Blue Ocean,” among falling leaves of countless hues, had about it an almost frightening beauty. The maple branch in Genji’s cap was somewhat bare and forlorn, most of the leaves having fallen, and seemed at odds with his handsome face. The General of the Left replaced it with several chrysanthemums which he brought from below the royal seat. The sun was about to set and a suspicion of an autumn shower rustled past as if the skies too were moved to tears. The chrysanthemums in Genji’s cap, delicately touched by the frosts, gave new beauty to his form and his motions, no less remarkable today than on the day of the rehearsal. Then his dance was over, and a chill as if from another world passed over the assembly. Even unlettered menials, lost among deep branches and rocks, or those of them,
