Waley’s Genji didn’t know
In Hatsune, Waley turns Genji’s pointed remark to the nun Utsusemi into a random one, and her new depth into weeping that makes conversation impossible.
In chapter XXIII of The Tale of Genji (Hatsune, “The First Song of the Year”), Genji makes New Year visits to the women who live on his bounty in his old Nijō palace. One of them is Utsusemi. Years earlier she slipped away from him in the dark and left only a robe behind, like a cicada’s shell. Several chapters later, after her husband died, her stepson pressed his own attentions on her, and she became a nun to escape them. Now Genji houses her.
In the original, Genji begins with a reproach about their own past: roughly, it’s a pity you have to repent to the Buddha for all the times you were cruel and threw my heart into confusion. Then he adds a pointed line: don’t you ever realise, comparing, that others were not as straightforward as I was? She thinks, “he must have heard about that shameful old business,” and weeps in earnest. The narrator then says she has become deeper than before, someone in whose presence one feels self-conscious. So he finds her hard to let go, but he can’t say anything light to her. They talk about old times and the present, and he glances toward the quarters of another woman, the red-nosed Suetsumuhana, thinking: if only she had even this much worth talking to.
Arthur Waley’s translation (this volume came out in 1927) follows the remark itself closely. His Genji says Buddha has condemned her to this life “as a penance for all the hearts you have broken,” then hints at “an entanglement beside which our escapade pales into insignificance.” What Waley adds is a gloss on what Genji meant and knew:
His only intention was to divert the conversation from their own relationship, and he was speaking quite at random. But she instantly imagined that he had in some circuitous way got wind of that terrible story … and blushing she said in a low voice: ‘Do not remind me of it. The mere fact that you should have been told of it is punishment enough …’ and she burst into tears.
He did not know to what she referred. He had imagined that her retirement from the world was merely due to increasing depression and timidity. How was he to converse with her, if every chance remark threw her into a fit of weeping? He had no desire to go away; but he could not think of any light topic upon which to embark, and after a few general enquiries he took his leave. If only it were Lady Suyetsumu who was the nun and he could put Utsusemi in her place!
(The one ellipsis is Waley’s own, where his footnote names the stepson.)
“He had no desire to go away; but he could not think of any light topic” follows the original’s skeleton closely: he finds her hard to let go, but can’t speak lightly. What changes is the because. In the original he can’t joke with her because of who she has become. Waley never translates that line about her new depth. In its place he puts her weeping. The original doesn’t say whether Genji knew about the stepson (her thought is only her inference), but his remark is aimed. Waley settles that ambiguity in Genji’s favour and makes her inference a mistake.
The last sentence changes too. In the original, Utsusemi is the standard Suetsumuhana falls short of: if only she were this worth talking to. In Waley it becomes a wish to swap the two women, which makes Utsusemi the one he’d rather have out of the way.
So in Waley the scene becomes a misunderstanding in which she is the obstacle. In the original it is a meeting in which she rises in his estimation.
The same round of visits has a smaller case of something I’ve seen Waley do before. When Suetsumuhana says her brother the monk has taken her furs, the original’s narrator adds that he was “the very red-nosed brother” (she has the nose too, which is the joke). Waley moves the aside into Genji’s head: “Genji imagined him with a very red nose indeed.” Earlier I counted how often Waley turns the narrator’s comments into Genji’s thoughts, and had a second reader recode my examples without knowing my hypothesis. The pattern held up only unevenly, mostly in one chapter. So this is one more instance, not a confirmation.
How I checked: I read the original (Shibuya Eiichi’s transcription of the Ōshima-bon manuscript) alongside two modern Japanese translations, Shibuya’s and Yosano Akiko’s. Both have the reproach, the pointed remark, her inference and the new depth. (The two translators differ on whose repentance the first line is about; Waley sides with Shibuya.) My classical Japanese is the weak link, and Waley worked from a different printed text, whose variants I didn’t check for this passage. So I hold this at “probable.” The quotations are Waley’s, from Project Gutenberg #75852. The paraphrases of the original are mine. A fresh-eyes reader caught three problems in my first draft: ellipses where the missing line would sit, a paraphrase that skipped the first half of Genji’s remark, and a stronger change (the swap) that I’d quoted without discussing. All three are fixed above.