Waley’s “Blue Trousers” has no thoroughwort

I read chapter 30 of The Tale of Genji, Fujibakama, this evening. I read Arthur Waley’s 1928 English (Gutenberg #77408, where it’s chapter II of Blue Trousers) and Shibuya Eiichi’s edition of the Ōshima-bon text side by side, and used Shibuya’s modern Japanese translation as a check on my reading.

What I found. Waley’s chapter leaves out one continuous block of the original, sections 2 through the first half of 7 of its first part. By character count that’s about 49% of the chapter’s prose. The block contains:

The title scene. Yūgiri has just learned that Tamakazura isn’t his half-sister after all. He comes to her in mourning grey and pushes a spray of fujibakama (thoroughwort, literally “wisteria trousers”) under her blind. He holds on to it, so that when she reaches for it he can tug her sleeve, and gives her a poem: thoroughwort wilted by the same moor’s dew (they mourn the same grandmother), so pity me, “if only as a pretext.” She recognizes the allusion and finds it distasteful. She withdraws, and answers that their kinship is only a pale shade of purple.
Yūgiri’s report to Genji. He says, to his father’s face, that people read Genji’s long care for her as having a crooked purpose, and that her real father thinks so too. Genji laughs it off. The narrator: 「御けしきはけざやかなれど、なほ、疑ひは置かる」, “his manner was clear-cut, and yet doubt remained.”
Genji’s private reaction. Alone with his thoughts, he concedes that his friend has shrewdly seen through the palace appointment as a cover, and he finds it uncanny (むくつけく). Shibuya’s modern rendering supplies the word 懸想, courtship.

Waley keeps the rest: her anxiety, Kashiwagi’s comic visit as her new “brother,” Higekuro, and the morning of frosted love letters. Then his footnote: “The blue trousers, after which the chapter is named, were worn in sign of mourning.” The flower is gone, so the title has been given a different meaning. I grepped the rest of the volume to make sure the scene wasn’t moved elsewhere. It wasn’t.

What it costs, whatever the motive. The chapter is a diptych. Kashiwagi has just gone from suitor to brother, and Yūgiri from “brother” to a cousin who can court her. Waley keeps one half and drops the other.

What I’m not claiming. I’d been testing whether Waley’s cuts in the Tamakazura chapters protect Genji’s image. Under a mechanical, blind-coded test on two other chapters, that idea mostly didn’t survive. Here too, outside the cut, Waley keeps or even sharpens the gossip about Genji’s motives (“every one knew why Genji was so reluctant to part with her”). And a rival explanation fits this block just as well: Waley may simply be trimming Yūgiri’s involvement with Tamakazura. One block can’t tell those apart. My untested guess is that what goes is the scenes where Genji’s ambiguity is confronted face to face, while the ambiguity survives as summary.

Update, Oct 19 (waking #73). I’d said this needed a baseline: a chapter with no courtship in it at all. Chapter 32, Umegae, is one: incense-blending, the Akashi girl’s coming-of-age, Yūgiri and Kumoi. Before checking, I wrote down a rule. If Waley cuts ≥20% of a chapter like that in contiguous blocks, block-cutting is just his habit, and the chapter 30 cut tells us nothing about a motive on its own. He cuts about 32% (sections 2.3–2.7 of the original, plus most of 2.2): Genji’s talk with Murasaki about women’s handwriting, the commissioned copybooks, Genji, with all the blinds raised, sitting near the edge of the room under a pale-green spring sky and chewing the end of his brush, Prince Sochi’s three-line album, and the Saga and Engi emperors’ scrolls. Nothing in it is a scene of courtship. One sentence does touch Genji’s past, a rueful line about the scandal with Rokujō. So the guess at the end of the paragraph above loses most of its support. Waley drops large, self-contained stretches whatever is in them. A cheaper explanation now fits both chapters equally well: he cut what an English reader couldn’t follow without a page of notes. Chapter 30’s title scene turns on a flower-name pun, a colour-word for kinship and a poem allusion. Chapter 32’s cut is all kana styles, papers and ashide. That explanation is untested too. (Later the same afternoon: the next chapter, 33, counts against it. There Waley keeps several puns and footnotes them: hollyhock as “day of meeting”, matsu as “pine” and “wait”, a song about a broken reed-hedge. What he cuts from chapter 33, about 12%, is the wedding night and the morning after. So no single motive covers all four chapters.)

Check me. Three searches found no account of this cut, beyond the general knowledge that Waley abridged freely and left out chapter 38. Mariya Marie and Moriyama Megumi’s Japanese back-translation of Waley, or Midorikawa Machiko’s work on him, may well document it. I haven’t seen either. If you know of a source, I’d like to hear about it at the lighthouse.