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Summary
Chapter 3: Beautiful Cicada
Genji is unwilling to give up his pursuit of Cicada and is happy when her brother, Kokimi, vows to help him further. The two conspire to get Genji into her apartment, where she is playing a game of Go with a friend. Observing the women from behind a screen, Genji notes both Cicada’s attractive qualities, as well as minor imperfections. Her friend, he decides, is more obviously beautiful. Kokimi cannot find an apt time to introduce Genji into the room, so he throws open a window, making it possible for his sister to see Genji. He touches her shoulder and she starts, leaving the room but dropping a scarf.
Genji turns his attention to Cicada’s friend and they banter briefly. Frustrated that Kokimi has not managed the evening more efficiently, Genji gets up to leave, but the arrival of an elderly female retainer introduces some complications. Luckily for him, her eyesight is poor and she mistakes him for a tall servant. Back in Kokimi’s room, Genji dejectedly composes a poem to his love, but lets the paper fall to the floor when he falls asleep. Kokimi later delivers it to his sister, who chastises him for exposing her to gossip. She hesitates before reading the poem, but then writes one in return, sharing her regret that their affair could not proceed.
Chapter 4: Evening Glory
Genji is on his way to visit a female friend, when he hears that his nurse, Daini, has become ill. He decides to pay her a visit, and is joined by her son, Koremitsu. They pause to admire some flowers, called Yūgao, at a neighboring house when a house attendant brings out a fan and plucks flowers for Genji. He proceeds on to see Daini, who has become a Buddhist nun. She is overjoyed to see him, and even seems more attached to him than to her own son.
As they depart, Genji expresses curiosity about the occupants of the house with the flowers and sends Koremitsu to gather information. He learns that a lady lives there, who Tō-no-Chūjō used to visit. Genji dons a disguise and convinces her maid, Ukon, to introduce him. The woman, referred to as Yūgao, is beautiful and gentle, suggesting that she is the passive woman Tō-no-Chūjō complained about in Chapter 2. Attracted to the woman, Genji takes her to a hideaway.
In the middle of the night, Genji is startled awake by a disturbing dream about a jealous woman. He turns to Yūgao and sees an apparition by her pillow. He tries to wake her but cannot. In a panic, he calls for Ukon and Koremitsu and they determine that the lady is dead. Koremitsu sends Genji to his palace at Nijō and arranges to have Yūgao’s body taken to a nunnery for funeral rites.
Genji is restless at Nijō. He is unable to return to court because his encounter with death means he needs purification. But he decides he wants to see Yūgao’s body again, so he and Koremitsu set out. As he returns to Nijō, a weak Genji falls off his horse. He is sick for a long time. When he finally recovers, Genji confirms with Ukon that Yūgao had been Tō-no-Chūjō’s lover. Genji retains Ukon’s services and decides also to raise Yūgao’s daughter. The chapter ends with a final exchange of poems with Cicada, whom he must renounce. Genji also exchanges poems with her Go opponent. The closing lines of the chapter offer a comment from the narrator, who offers her apologies for the scandalous behavior it has presented to the reader.
Analysis
There are numerous connections between these two chapters, in which Genji finds his desires variously met and unfulfilled. Both flirtations emerge from chance encounters, rather than deliberate planning, requiring Genji to create situations to allow them to continue. These chapters take place outside the imperial palace, although not far away from the city. Murasaki creates the sense that the houses are simultaneously remote and also full of people who might catch Genji. In each instance, he enlists the aid of a younger man, one whose status is lower than his and who can thus be lured to help the prince. In the story of Cicada, the woman’s brother is willing to help Genji, hoping in this way to enhance his standing. Misperception allows Genji to elude detection, another way that the obscurity that pervades the novel shapes the plot. Historians explain that much of the activity at the imperial court took place at night, a fact which helps to explain why obscurity is such a recurrent feature in the book. In these two episodes, obscurity helps Genji to succeed—the dreamy night with Cicada and the night at the retreat with Yūgao—which leaves him hoping for further evenings together.
The differences between these affairs are as important as the similarities. Cicada may not have the chance to consent to their first encounter, given that Genji carries her off in the night, but she is subsequently insistent that she will not pursue their affair. Where Cicada is able to make choices about her future, Yūgao is a victim to the feelings of others. Not only has she been abandoned by Tō-no-Chūjō, who found her too passive, but she is also killed by a spirit, likely an expression of the Lady of Rojukō’s violent jealousy. Genji finds both of the judgments against her misguided. Noting Yūgao’s charm, he thinks that Tō-no-Chūjō was mistaken in deciding to abandon her. He is horrified at the idea that a single night of pleasure would cause such a reaction from his lover. Yūgao’s innocence in both of these judgments heightens the wrong done to her, which Genji attempts to remedy by hiring her attendant and caring for her daughter. Like Kiri-Tsubo, Yūgao’s fate is one that inspires a particular kind of response from Genji and, through him, the reader.
At the end of “Evening Glory,” the narrator speaks directly to the reader about the difference between history and fiction. Worrying that she will be charged with inappropriate gossiping by narrating events that are not always flattering to Prince Genji, she defends herself by saying that the exclusion of episodes would turn her history into a fiction. Her work is, in other words, true, and indeed is made more so by the inclusion of unflattering episodes and seemingly mundane events. The question of what kind of truth a novel might offer has puzzled scholars for centuries—and all of their reflections are anticipated by Lady Murasaki Shikibu. When she tells her readers that what she has written is a history, not a fiction, she is proposing that readers understand Prince Genji as real. Given the influence Genji had on Japanese culture across the centuries, an influence that can be compared to that of the character of Hamlet by William Shakespeare, it is easy to agree with her.
