“You must tell me who you are,” he said. “How can I write to you if you do not? You surely don’t think I mean to let matters stand as they are?”
“Were the lonely one to vanish quite away,
Would you go to the grassy moors to ask her name?”
Her voice had a softly plaintive quality.
“I did not express myself well.
“I wish to know whose dewy lodge it is
Ere winds blow past the bamboo-tangled moor.
“Only one thing, a cold welcome, could destroy my eagerness to visit. Do you perhaps have some diversionary tactic in mind?”
They exchanged fans and he was on his way. Even as he spoke a stream of women was moving in and out of Kokiden’s rooms. There were women in his own rooms too, some of them still awake. Pretending to be asleep, they poked one another and exchanged whispered remarks about the diligence with which he pursued these night adventures.
He was unable to sleep. What a beautiful girl! One of Kokiden’s younger sisters, no doubt. Perhaps the fifth or sixth daughter of the family, since she had seemed to know so little about men? He had heard that both thy fourth daughter, to whom Tō no Chūjō was uncomfortably married, and Prince Hotaru’s wife were great beauties, and thought that the encounter might have been more interesting had the lady been one of the older sisters. He rather hoped she was not the sixth daughter, whom the minister had thoughts of marrying to the crown prince. The trouble was that he had no way of being sure. It had not seemed that she wanted the affair to end with but the one meeting. Why then had she not told him how he might write to her? These thoughts and others suggest that he was much interested. He thought too of Fujitsubo’s pavilion, and how much more mysterious and inaccessible it was, indeed how uniquely so.
He had a lesser spring banquet with which to amuse himself that day. He played the thirteen-stringed koto, his performance if anything subtler and richer than that of the day before. Fujitsubo went to the emperor’s apartments at dawn.
Genji was on tenterhooks, wondering whether the lady he had seen in the dawn moonlight would be leaving the palace. He sent Yoshikiyo and Koremitsu, who let nothing escape them, to keep watch; and when, as he was leaving the royal presence, he had their report, his agitation increased.
“Some carriages that had been kept out of sight left just now by the north gate. Two of Kokiden’s brothers and several other members of the family saw them off; so we gathered that the ladies must be part of the family too. They were ladies of some importance, in any case — that much was clear. There were three carriages in all.”
How might he learn which of the sisters he had become friends with? Supposing her father were to learn of the affair and welcome him gladly into the family — he had not seen enough of the lady to be sure that the prospect delighted him. Yet he did want very much to know who she was. He sat looking out at the garden.
Murasaki would be gloomy and bored, he feared, for he had not visited her in some days. He looked at the fan he had received in the dawn moonlight. It was a “three-ply cherry.” The painting on the more richly colored side, a misty moon reflected on water, was not remarkable, but the fan, well used, was a memento to stir longing. He remembered with especial tenderness the poem about the grassy moors.
He jotted down a poem beside the misty moon:
“I had not known the sudden loneliness
Of having it vanish, the moon in the sky of dawn.”
He had been neglecting the Sanjō mansion of his father-in-law for rather a long time, but Murasaki was more on his mind. He must go comfort her. She pleased him more, she seemed prettier and cleverer and more amiable, each time he saw her. He was congratulating himself that his hopes of shaping her into his ideal might not prove entirely unrealistic. Yet he had misgivings — very unsettling ones, it must be said — lest by training her himself he put her too much at ease with men. He told her the latest court gossip and they had a music lesson. So he was going out again — she was sorry, as always, to see him go, but she no longer clung to him as she once had.
At Sanjō it was the usual thing: his wife kept him waiting. In his boredom he thought of this and that. pulling a koto to him, he casually plucked out a tune. “No nights of soft sleep,” he sang, to his own accompaniment.
The minister came for a talk about the recent pleasurable events.
“I am very old, and I have served through four illustrious reigns, but never have I known an occasion that has added so many years to my life. Such clever, witty poems, such fine music and dancing — you are on good terms with the great performers who so abound in our day, and you arrange things with such marvelous skill. Even we aged ones felt like cutting a caper or two.”
“The marvelous skill of which you speak, sir, amounts to nothing at all, only a word here and there. It is a matter of knowing where to ask. ‘Garden of Willows and Flowers’ was much the best thing, I thought, a performance to go down as a model for all the ages. And what a memorable day it would have been, what an honor for our age, if in the advancing spring of your life you had followed your impulse and danced for us.”
Soon Tō no Chūjō and his brothers, leaning casually against the veranda railings, were in fine concert on their favorite instruments.
The lady of that dawn encounter, remembering the evanescent dream, was sunk in sad thoughts. Her father’s plans to give her to the crown prince in the Fourth Month were a source of great distress. As for Genji, he was not without devices for searching her out, but he did not know which of Kokiden’s sisters she was, and he did not wish to become involved with that unfriendly family.
Late in the Fourth Month the princes and high courtiers gathered at the mansion of the Minister of the Right, Kokiden’s father, for an archery meet. It was as followed immediately by a wisteria banquet. Though the cherry blossoms had for the most part fallen, two trees, perhaps having learned that mountain cherries do well to bloom 1ate, were at their belated best. The minister’s mansion had been rebuilt and beautifully refurnished for the initiation ceremonies of the princesses his granddaughters. It was in the ornate style its owner preferred, everything in the latest fashion.
Seeing Genji in the palace one day, the minister had invited him to the festivities. Genji would have preferred to stay away, but the affair seemed certain to languish without him. The minister sent one of his sons, a guards officer, with a message:
“If these blossoms of mine were of the common sort,
Would I press you so to come and look upon them?”
Genji showed the poem to his father.
“He seems very pleased with his flowers,” laughed the emperor. “But you must go immediately. He has, after all, sent a special invitation. It is use that the princesses your sisters are being reared. You are scarcely a stranger.”
Genji dressed with great care. It was almost dark when he finally presented himself. He wore a robe of a thin white Chinese damask with a red lining and under it a very long train of magenta. Altogether the dashing young prince, he added something new to the assembly that so cordially received him, for the other guests were more formally clad. He quite overwhelmed the blossoms, in a sense spoiling the party, and played beautifully on several instruments. Late in the evening he got up, pretending to be drunk. The first and third
