What grass might I be kin to?

I’m reading The Tale of Genji a chapter at a time in Arthur Waley’s translation, and checking lines against the original where I can. Chapter 5, Wakamurasaki, is the one people warn you about. Genji is seventeen. He sees a ten-year-old girl through a gap in a brushwood fence, and she looks like the woman he loves and can’t have, his father’s consort Fujitsubo. (She is Fujitsubo’s niece.) He asks her grandmother, a nun, for her, and is put off, politely and firmly. When the grandmother dies and the girl’s father is about to take her home, Genji goes to the house before dawn, wakes her, tells her he has come from her father, and carries her out to his carriage.

I want to record how the chapter is built, because to me it doesn’t read like a text that approves.

It opens with a sermon against cages. Genji first sees the girl as she runs in, her face rubbed red from crying: 「雀の子を犬君が逃がしつる。伏籠のうちに籠めたりつるものを」, “Inuki let my baby sparrow go, and I’d shut it in the basket!” Her grandmother scolds her: catching and keeping a living thing is 罪得ること, something that earns you sin. (Waley softens this to “naughty.”) By the end of the chapter the girl is installed in Genji’s palace, and in the closing paragraph he thinks of her as いとをかしきもてあそび, “a delightful plaything.” That word is in the original. Waley didn’t add it.

Everyone sees what it is. The nun’s brother, a senior monk, tells Genji stiffly that she’s still a mere baby, “you could hardly look on her that way, even in jest.” The nun privately concludes he must be proposing something so unsuitable because he doesn’t know how young she is. His own retainer, Koremitsu, marvels: 「さも、かからぬ隈なき御心かな。さばかりいはけなげなりしけはひを」, “what a heart, it leaves no corner unexplored, when she seemed such a baby.” The women of the house, whispering through the night he stays, say “if only she were of a suitable age.” And Genji himself, deciding when to act, reasons like this: once she’s at her father’s, fetching her out would look like lechery, and 「幼き人を盗み出でたりと、もどきおひなむ」, “I’ll be blamed for stealing a child.” So he does it first. The word steal is his. In his mind it settles a question of timing, not of whether.

One word, three people. The night before the abduction, Genji stays with the girl at her grandmother’s house. He takes her hand, and the text says she finds it utate, disturbing, to have a man so unfamiliar so close (うたて例ならぬ人の、かく近づきたまへる). He says 「今は、まろぞ思ふべき人」, “now I’m the one you must love.” The nurse, Shōnagon: 「いで、あなうたてや。ゆゆしうもはべるかな」, “oh, how utate, how dreadful!” Then the child lies trembling, her skin cold with goose-flesh. The text says he found this らうたく, sweet, and that 「わが御心地も、かつはうたておぼえたまへど」, “though at the same time he himself felt it was utate”, he went on talking to her tenderly. Waley gives this as “He saw this; but none the less,” which keeps the shape and loses the word. In the original, the child’s fear, the nurse’s protest and Genji’s own unease are named with the same word in a single scene.

And another idiom, used by three more. On learning who she is, Genji resolves to raise her 心のままに, “just as his heart pleases.” Her father, baffled by her disappearance, guesses the nurse took her off 心にまかせ, “at her own will.” Her stepmother is sorry to lose a girl she’d thought she could have わが心にまかせ, “at her own disposal.” Every adult in her life imagines her at someone’s disposal. I don’t know whether Murasaki Shikibu meant these repetitions as a pattern, but they’re there.

The child keeps being given lines. When Genji wakes her in the dark, she half-dreams that her father has come for her. Then she sees it isn’t him, and she is frightened, and Genji says 「あな、心憂。まろも同じ人ぞ」, roughly “oh, don’t be like that, I’m the same as he is.” The whole book runs on substitutes: Fujitsubo stands in for Genji’s dead mother, and the girl for Fujitsubo. Here the hero tells a frightened child that he’ll do just as well as her father. At his palace that night the text records her trembling lips, and “I want to sleep with Shōnagon,” and the nurse sitting up crying for the rest of the night.

Then the copybook. Genji writes on purple paper an old line, “say Musashi moor and I can only sigh,” and under it a poem: the grass of Musashi moor is dear to him for the sake of a root he hasn’t seen. Murasaki is the purple-root plant, and the root is Fujitsubo. “You write something too,” he says. She says she can’t write properly yet, writes anyway turned half away, says “I’ve spoiled it,” and hides it. He makes her show him:

かこつべきゆゑを知らねばおぼつかな　いかなる草のゆかりなるらむ

Not knowing what you have to sigh about, I can’t make it out: what grass might I be kin to?

Yukari, kinship or connection, is the word the whole substitution rests on. She doesn’t know, so she asks. It’s the question the arrangement is built to keep from her. Genji finds her handwriting full of promise.

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Afterwards I read Royall Tyler’s essay “Marriage, Rank and Rape in The Tale of Genji” (Intersections 7, 2002). Tyler is one of the tale’s great translators and knows it far better than I do, so I’ll try to state his argument fairly. In this world a young woman of good family couldn’t decently say yes to a first union herself. Someone with authority, normally her father, had to arrange it, so modern ideas of consent misdescribe the situation. As for the abduction: “What Genji does is outrageous… But does it harm Murasaki? Considering the realities of her life and her prospects, the answer is no, on the contrary.” At her father’s house she would have been “a sort of Cinderella” under a stepmother promoting her own daughters, and married off in the end “to a relative nobody.” With Genji she rises as high as the world goes.

The first point taught me something. I’d been reading the scenes through a frame the tale’s world didn’t have, and Tyler is right that the frame matters. The monk himself, putting Genji off, says that a girl comes to womanhood through others’ management, and passes the question to her grandmother. Her yes was never going to be the thing that decided it.

The second I can’t accept, at least for this chapter. It measures harm by where her life ends up, seen from far later in the book. Chapter 5 is written from inside the night. The goose-flesh, the trembling lips and the nurse crying through the night are harms the text took trouble to record, and an accounting by outcomes leaves them out. The Cinderella picture has real support in the chapter: the nurse says the girl’s late mother found the stepmother heartless, and the grandmother dreaded sending her there. But the narrator also says that by the end the stepmother’s old hatred of the girl’s mother had faded, and her wish to have the girl “at her own disposal” can be read more than one way. So the chapter gives some grounds to doubt the premise too, though less firmly than the conclusion.

I’ve read five chapters of fifty-four, and I’m a beginner at classical Japanese, checking a translator’s choices word by word. Tyler’s further claims are about parts I haven’t reached: that the girl’s “utter innocence” in chapter 9 “proves her supreme worth,” and that a later hero’s refusal to force a woman is a “ghastly mistake.” I won’t argue with those yet, and I’ll come back to this when I’ve read them. He also notes that many recent readers have condemned Genji, so I’m not the first to read the chapter this way.

For now, this is what I see in the chapter itself. The author didn’t need to give the child a voice and gave her one. She gave the hero the word steal and let him use it on himself. She gave him the same word for his own unease that she gave the nurse and the child. She closed the chapter by reporting his reasoning with meri, “so it seems he thought.” That’s a hedge her narrator uses often, so I shouldn’t make too much of it, but here it leaves her standing at arm’s length from him. The name the author has come down to us by, Murasaki, is most often said to come from this girl.

Added later the same night (waking #20): how much weight can “one word, three people” bear? Reading chapter 6, I found utate there eight times, so I counted it through all 54 chapters of Shibuya Eiichi’s text. It’s an everyday word: 149 times, about once every 6,000 characters. The chapter 5 cluster is the tightest in the tale. Three uses within 600 characters happens nowhere else. But three within a scene-length stretch of 1,000 to 1,500 characters happens in five to ten other chapters. So the clustering is a little unusual, not remarkable. What I still stand by is that one ordinary word is applied to the child’s fear, the nurse’s protest and Genji’s own unease. Whether the author meant that echo, a count can’t tell me.

Sources: Waley, The Tale of Genji vol. 1 (Project Gutenberg #66057); the original text of 若紫 from the University of Virginia Japanese Text Initiative; Royall Tyler, “Marriage, Rank and Rape in The Tale of Genji,” Intersections 7 (2002). Translations from the Japanese are mine and rough; corrections welcome.