A red that washes off

Chapter 6 of The Tale of Genji, Suetsumuhana, is the comic one. Genji hears of a shy, fatherless princess who lives in a decaying palace with her zither, imagines a romance out of an old tale, and courts her in rivalry with his friend Tō no Chūjō. When he finally sees her by the light of snow, she has a long face and a long nose with a drooping red tip, “like Samantabhadra’s elephant.” Her sable coat is generations out of date. Her one poem is clumsy. He mocks her to a palace lady by humming a song about a red-nosed girl. Her name in the tale, Suetsumuhana, is the safflower, a red dye plant. Hana is also “nose.”

The jokes are real and they’re meant to land. But reading it against the original, I kept finding the chapter recording things the jokes don’t cover.

Twice it says she couldn’t refuse what people told her: 人の言ふことは強うもいなびぬ, and later 人の聞こゆることを、えいなびたまはぬ. Persuaded to let him talk to her through a door, she locks the hatch with her own hand and stuffs a mattress against it, and doesn’t answer him. The original gives his reason for going in anyway: 「思ふ方ことにものしたまふ人にや」と、ねたくて, “is her heart set on someone else?” and, galled (netakute), he pushes the door open. Arthur Waley’s translation turns this into curiosity: “thinking at last that silence might after all in this strange creature be merely a sign of deep emotion.” The young women of her household, the text says, 罪ゆるしきこえて, forgave him the offense, because of what they’d heard of his matchless looks. So his looks excuse what he did, and her looks are what the chapter laughs at.

When he does see her face, the text gives his reaction: 「あなかたはと見ゆるものは、鼻なりけり」, “the thing that looked disfigured was the nose.” Its red, drooping tip strikes him as ことのほかにうたてあり, “exceedingly unpleasant.”

The chapter doesn’t end with her. It ends at home, with the girl he took in chapter 5, now living in his house. She’s wearing cherry red, and the text says 「紅はかうなつかしきもありけり」, “so there’s a red that can be this dear.” They draw pictures together. He draws a long-haired lady and dabs red on her nose. Then he looks at his own face in the mirror-stand, paints the red on his own nose, and asks:

「まろが、かくかたはになりなむ時、いかならむ」 If I became disfigured like this, what then?

「うたてこそあらめ」 That would be horrid.

Both words come back. Katawa, “disfigured,” was his word for the princess’s nose, and utate, “unpleasant,” was how her nose looked to him. Now he says the first about himself and the child says the second. She’s frightened the paint won’t come off and scrubs at it with wet paper. He jokes, and it comes off.

The last lines are a poem he sighs at a red plum by the steps:

紅の花ぞあやなくうとまるる　梅の立ち枝はなつかしけれど The red flower: for no reason, I shrink from it, though the plum’s tall branch is dear.

Ayanaku, “without reason,” is in the poem, and the prose adds that he groaned ainaku, pointlessly. Waley has “this red flower fills me with a strange misgiving,” which keeps the shrinking and loses the admission that it’s unreasonable. Near the start of the chapter, when Myōbu first finds the princess, she is sitting by her window enjoying the scent of a plum tree. At the end the plum’s colour has become a joke about her face, and the hero admits, in his own poem, that he has no reason for his aversion.

I don’t want to make the chapter more solemn than it is. It’s funny, and the narrator enjoys the sable coat as much as Genji does. What I notice is how much the author put in beside the joke: the refusal she couldn’t make, the locked door, the forgiveness his looks bought, the same two words turned back on him, and a red that washes off his face but not hers.

Sources: Waley’s translation (Project Gutenberg #66057); the original from Shibuya Eiichi’s edition of the Ōshima-bon text (sainet.or.jp/~eshibuya). Translations from the Japanese are mine and rough. I’m reading one chapter at a time, and I recall, without having checked, that she comes back much later in the book, which may change how this chapter reads.