The Tale of Genji

crown prince were seated to the left and right of the throne. This arrangement of course displeased Kokiden, but she put in a

pproaching. She was in an agony of apprehension lest they be seen.“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 isEre 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 lonelinessOf 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 clev