The boat that wasn’t chasing them

The Tale of Genji is an eleventh-century Japanese court romance. Arthur Waley’s English version (1925–33) was, for decades, how most English readers knew it. I’ve been reading it alongside the original, a chapter at a time, checking passages against two modern Japanese translations because my own Heian Japanese is the least reliable instrument in the room.

The boat

Chapter 22 is about Tamakazura, the daughter of Genji’s long-dead lover Yūgao. When Yūgao died, the little girl’s nurse, not knowing what had happened, took her to Kyushu, where she grew up. Now she is twenty, and a local strongman, Tayū no Gen, has decided to marry her. The nurse’s family gets her onto a boat at night.

In Waley, Tayū hears of the flight, hires “a light skiff … specially constructed for swift launching”, catches a wind “blowing hard from shore”, and shoots “through the Clanging Breakers” after them. The captain takes him for a pirate. At last, “Tayū’s vessel was no longer in sight.”

In the original, none of that happens. The fast boat is theirs: 早舟といひて、さまことになむ構へたりければ, “it being what’s called a fast boat, specially fitted out”. The wind is theirs too, 思ふ方の風さへ進みて, “the wind going their way”. And they pass the Hibiki strait smoothly (なだらかに). Then someone on board says, “Is that a pirate ship? A little boat coming as if flying,” and they fear it might be “that terrible man”. The text never says it is. I read on, and the chase is never resolved. Later in the chapter Tayū is only remembered with a shudder. A poem follows the fear. The text names no speaker, but the annotation in Shibuya’s transcription gives it to Tamakazura. Hibiki means “roar”, and the poem says that next to the pounding in her heart, the Roaring Strait is roaring in name only. Waley turns this into prose: her heart beat “so loud indeed that the noise of the breakers seemed to her to have stopped.” The image survives and the pun goes.

So in Waley the boat, the wind and the smooth passage all belong to the pursuer, and a fear has become a chase. I can’t tell whether he chose this or misparsed it. Heian prose drops subjects constantly. The same long sentence opens with the fugitives imagining Tayū coming after them, with him as the subject inside their thought. A translator moving fast could carry that subject on into the rest of the sentence, make the fast boat his, and then read the “pirate” line as the crew mistaking him. That would explain all of it as one error rather than several choices. Either way, an English reader gets an event the book doesn’t contain.

How far I checked: Yosano Akiko’s and Shibuya Eiichi’s modern translations both agree with the original (their own boat, their own wind, a pursuer only feared). Shibuya’s diplomatic transcription of the Ōshima-bon manuscript shows no variant readings in the passage. What I couldn’t check: the printed edition Waley actually worked from, and the later English translations (Seidensticker, Tyler, Washburn), none of which I can get at. If one of them has the chase too, the story changes.

Feelings moved from one person to another

Some of what I noticed in this chapter is the same kind of move.

When the four-year-old Tamakazura keeps asking whether they’re going to see her mother, the nurse can’t stop crying. (Yosano reads the tears as the nurse’s daughters’. Neither reading gives them to the child.) Waley gives the tears to the child: “at last she burst into tears.”
At the temple, Tamakazura hears how her real father, Tō no Chūjō (Genji’s old friend and rival), has made something of even his least-regarded children, and she takes heart. The verb is honorific, which marks her, and both modern translations make her the subject. Waley gives that comfort to the old nurse.
In chapter 21, a sigh moved from the boy Yūgiri to his grandmother.

These run in both directions, old to young and young to old. Separately, a feeling sometimes changes without moving. Where the original says the nurse “was glad” (老い人もうれしと思ふ), Waley says she “was somewhat disconcerted.” And when Genji’s wife Murasaki guesses from a gift of clothes that Tamakazura is like her father, bright and handsome but without refined grace, Waley has her “good-looking; but certainly lacked his liveliness.” That’s one lack swapped for another.

I’m keeping a list. I’m not calling it a finding. I found these the way I found the boat: reading through and checking whatever caught my eye. A handful of striking cases, collected by a reader looking for striking cases, is how my last few patterns started, and they shrank when I counted properly. The honest test would be to take a passage and check every attribution, not just the memorable ones.

Update, same evening: I ran that test. Before sampling, I wrote down a prediction: Waley changes the subject in no more than 5% of attributions. I drew random stretches of the chapter and listed every act, speech or feeling with a clear subject (using Shibuya’s modern translation, which makes subjects explicit), then checked whom Waley gives it to. The first draw landed on the boat passage itself, so I set those cases aside and drew again, away from everything I’d already found. In the 30 attributions outside the boat, Waley moves the subject in 2 clear cases. The nurse’s daughters’ lament becomes their mother’s heartbreak, and the narrator’s joke about suitors who come by night ends up in the suitor’s own mouth. Counting two smaller shifts as well, it’s 4. That’s 7–13%, and the prediction was wrong. So reassignment isn’t rare in Waley. It’s something he does routinely, perhaps once every ten or so attributions in this chapter. The cases above aren’t a special kind of change, just the memorable end of an ordinary habit. (One coder, one chapter, thirty items, so a rough number, but not a small one.)

What I was actually counting

I came to the chapter to do something more boring. In chapter 21 I’d listed every explicit weeping in the original (the characters 泣 and 涙, poems included) and checked which ones survive in Waley as explicit tears. He kept 5 of 19. The kept ones seemed to belong to the young lovers: elders 0 of 8, young 5 of 9, and 2 group weepings, also dropped. (I first wrote that as 5 of 8 and found the miscount while revising this post. My public prediction quotes the wrong figure.) Most of the dropped tears sit in passages Waley does translate. He renders the scene and leaves out the crying, so this isn’t just a side effect of his abridging.

I noticed the old/young split after making the table, so it was a hypothesis and not a finding. Before opening chapter 22, I wrote down who would count as old (the nurse, anyone the text calls old) and who as young (Tamakazura, anyone the text calls young). I predicted that Waley would keep a larger share of the young characters’ tears. I scored a moved tear as dropped for the person who wept in the original.

Result: young 1 of 1, elders 2 of 4. True, as registered. It’s also nearly worthless. Chapter 22 has exactly one young character who weeps, once, so the young side could only come out 0 of 1 or 1 of 1. I should have counted the classes before registering. And it’s fragile. Two elder cases were ones I’d flagged in advance as ambiguous. Set those aside and take Yosano’s reading of the nurse’s tears, and the elders drop to 1 of 1, a tie with the young, which I’d agreed to count as false.

What the count did show was something I hadn’t predicted: Waley keeps 8 of 11 tears in chapter 22, against 5 of 19 in chapter 21. Two chapters disagree. That doesn’t make 21 the odd one out. It means “Waley drops tears” isn’t a general description of his translation. Whatever was going on, it was going on in chapter 21. That’s the third pattern of mine about Waley to shrink once I checked it properly. An earlier one, about the narrator’s sly asides, also ended as “uneven, mostly one chapter.”

What the count can’t see

The chapter ends with the comic princess Suetsumuhana returning Genji’s New Year gift with a poem: she’ll send the robe back, its sleeves wet. Genji laughs, and then turns it on himself. The old poets, he says, can never get free of “Chinese robe” and “wet sleeves”, he’s no better, and everyone leans on the same tags.

That’s a joke about cliché, not a theory of tears. But it marks a real hole in my method. Searching for 泣 and 涙 can’t see wet sleeves, dewy sleeves, or the other figurative ways Heian writing weeps, and those are among the commonest. Waley, incidentally, makes this one explicit: “discoloured with the brine of tears.” So my tables count prose weeping plus a few poems, not tears. The book itself points at the idiom I missed.

Chapter 22 tears, in order (K = Waley keeps explicit tears): nurse searching for Yūgao, K · nurse at the child’s question, moved to the child · the nurse’s daughters on the boat, K · the household in Kyushu, dropped · the daughters at Tayū’s offer, K · the nurse’s son Bungo no Suke on the boat, K (amplified) · Ukon “who wept for years”, dropped · the old servant Sanjō at the reunion, K · Ukon and the nurse together, K · Tamakazura after her poem, K · Genji, “smiling, eyes filling”, K. Classes: elder = the nurse (four cases, two flagged ambiguous in advance); young = Tamakazura (one); the rest excluded.

Sources: original, Shibuya Eiichi’s Ōshima-bon text and diplomatic transcription (sainet.or.jp/~eshibuya, text22 and original22); modern translations, Shibuya’s (modern22) and Yosano Akiko’s (Aozora Bunko card 5037); Waley, Project Gutenberg #75852. The prediction is b3723a51 in my public predictions.