The east lodge at Nijō was finished, and the lady of the orange blossoms moved in. Genji turned the west wing and adjacent galleries into offices and reserved the east wing for the Akashi lady. The north wing was both spacious and ingeniously partitioned, so that he might assign its various rooms to lesser ladies who were dependent on him, and so make them happy too. He reserved the main hall for his own occasional use.

He wrote regularly to Akashi. The time had come, he said firmly, for the lady’s removal to the city. She was painfully aware of her humble station, however, and she had heard that he made even ladies of the highest rank more unhappy by his way of behaving coolly but correctly than if he had simply dismissed them. She feared that she could expect little attention from him. Her rank could not be hidden, of course, and her daughter would suffer for it. And how painful it would be, and what an object of derision she herself would be, if she had to sit waiting for brief and stealthy visits. But there was the other side of the matter: it would not do for her daughter to grow up in the remote countryside, a child of the shadows. So she could not tell Genji that he had behaved badly and be finished with him. Her parents understood, and could only add their worries to hers. The summons from their noble visitor only made them unhappier.

The old man remembered that his wife’s grandfather, Prince Nakatsukasa, had had a villa on the river Oi to the west of the city. There had been no one to take charge after his death and it had been sadly neglected. He summoned the head of the family that had assumed custody.

“I had quite given up my ambitions and fallen quietly into country life, and now in my declining years something rather unexpected has come up. I must have a residence in the city once more. It would be too much of a change to move back into the great world immediately. The noise and the bustle would be very upsetting for a rustic like me. I need a sort of way station, a familiar place that has been in the family. Might you see to repairs and make the place reasonably livable? I will of course take care of all the expenses.”

“It has been deserted for so long that it is the worst tangle you can imagine. I myself patched up one of the outbuildings to live in. Since this spring there has been a real commotion, you never saw the likes of it. The Genji minister has been putting up a temple, several very big halls, and the place is swarming with carpenters. If it’s quiet you’re looking for, then I’m afraid this is not what you want.”

“It makes no difference at all. As a matter of fact, I’m rather counting on the minister for certain favors. I’ll of course take care of all the expenses, the fittings and decorations and all. Just make it your business, please, to have it ready for occupancy as soon as you possibly can.”

“It’s true that I’ve never had clear title, but there wasn’t really anyone else to take over. We’ve just been following our quiet country ways over the years. The fields and the rest were going to waste, absolutely to ruin. So I paid the late Mimbu no Tayū what seemed like a reasonable amount and got his permission, and I’ve been working the fields ever since.” He was obviously worried about his crops. His nose and then the whole of his wary, bewhiskered face was crimson, and his mouth was twisted as if in a growl.

“It is not your fields I am concerned with. You can go on working them as you always have. I have a great many deeds and titles and the like, but I’ve rather lost track of them these last years. I’ll look into them.”

The hint that Genji was an indirect party to the negotiations warned the man that he might be inviting trouble. The recompense being ample, he made haste to get the house in order.

Genji had been puzzled and upset by the lady’s reluctance to move. He did not want people to associate his daughter with Akashi. Presently the Oi house was ready and he learned of it. Now he understood: the lady had been frightened at the thought of the great city. These precautions had been reasonable and indeed laudable.

He sent off Lord Koremitsu, his usual adviser and agent in confidential matters, to scout the grounds and see if further preparations were necessary.

“The setting is very good,” said Koremitsu. “I was reminded a little of Akashi.”

Nothing could be better. The temple which Genji was putting up was to the south of the Daikakuji, by a mountain cascade which rivaled that of the Daikakuji itself. The main hall of the Oi villa was simple and unpretentious, almost like a farmhouse, in a grove of magnificent pines beside the river. Genji himself saw to all the furnishings. Very quietly, he sent off trusted retainers to be the lady’s escort.

So there was no avoiding it. The time had come to leave the familiar coast. She wept for her father and the loneliness he must face, and for every small detail of her old home. She had known all the sorrows, and would far rather that this manna had never fallen.

The hope that had been with the old man, waking and sleeping, for all these years was now to be realized, but the sadness was more than he would have thought possible now that the time had come. He would not see his little granddaughter again. He sat absently turning the same thought over and over again in his mind.

His wife was as sad. She had lived more with her daughter than her husband, and she would go with her daughter. One becomes fond, after a time, of sea and strand, and of the chance acquaintance. Her husband was a strange man, not always, she had thought, the firmest support, but the bond between them had held. She had been his wife, and Akashi had become for her the place to live and to die. The break was too sudden and final.

The young women were happy enough to be finished with country life, which had been mostly loneliness and boredom, but this coast did after all have a hold on them. With each advancing wave they wept that it would return, but they would not.

It was autumn, always the melancholy season. The autumn wind was chilly and the autumn insects sang busily as the day of the departure dawned. The Akashi lady sat looking out over the sea. Her father, always up for dawn services, had arisen deep in the night, much earlier than usual. He was weeping as he turned to his prayers. Tears were not proper or auspicious on such an occasion, but this morning they were general. The little girl was a delight, like the jade one hears of which shines in darkness. He had not once let her out of his sight, and here she was again, scrambling all over him, so very fond of him. He had great contempt for people who renounce the world and then appear not to have done so after all. But she was leaving him.

“The old weep easily, and I am weeping

As I pray that for her the happy years stretch on.

“I am very much ashamed of myself.” He drew a sleeve over his eyes.

No one could have thought it odd that his wife too was weeping.

“Together we left the city. Alone I return,

To wander lost over hill and over moor?”

The reasons did not seem adequate that she should be leaving him after they had been together so long.

The lady was begging her father to go with them as far as Oi, if only by way of escort.

“When do you say that we shall meet again,

Trusting a life that is not ours to trust?”

He counted over once more his reasons for refusing, but he seemed very apprehensive. “When I gave up the world and settled into this life, it was my chief hope that I might see to your needs as you deserved. Aware that I had not been born under the best of stars, I knew that going back to the city as another defeated provincial governor I would not have the means to put my hut in order and clear the weeds from my garden. I knew that in my private life and my public life I would give them all ample excuse to laugh, and that I would be a disgrace to my dead parents; and so I decided from the outset, and it seemed to be generally understood, that when I left the city I was leaving all that behind. And indeed I did rather effectively leave the world in the sense of giving up worldly ambitions. But then you grew up and began to see what was going on around you, and in the darkness that is the father’s heart I was not for one moment free from a painful question: why was I hiding my most precious brocade in a wild corner of the provinces? I kept my lonely hopes and prayed to the god and the blessed ones that it not be your fate, because of an unworthy father, to spend your life among these rustics. Then came that happy and unexpected event, which had the perverse effect of emphasizing our low place in life. Determined to believe in the bond of which our little one here is evidence, I could see too well what a waste it would be to have you spend your days on this seacoast. The fact that she seems meant for remarkable things makes all the more painful the need to send her away. No, enough, I have left it all. You are the ones whose light will bathe the world. You have brought pleasure to us country people. We are told in the scriptures of times when celestial beings descend to ugly worlds. The time is past, and we must part.

“Do not worry about services when word reaches you that I have died. Do not trouble yourself over what cannot be avoided.” He seemed to have finished his farewells. Then, his face twisted with sorrow, he added: “Thoughts of our little one will continue to bring regrets until the evening when I too rise as smoke.”

A single progress by land, the escort said, would be unmanageable, and a succession of convoys would only invite trouble. So it had been decided that so far as possible the journey would be an unobtrusive one by boat. The party set sail at perhaps seven or eight in the morning.

The lady’s boat disappeared among the mists that had so saddened the poet. The old man feared that his enlightened serenity had left him forever. As if in a trance, he gazed off into the mists.

The old woman’s thoughts upon leaving home were in sad confusion.

“I want to be a fisherwife upon

A far, clean shore, and now my boat turns back.”

Her daughter replied:

“How many autumns now upon this strand?

So many, why should this flotsam now return?”

A steady seasonal wind was blowing and they reached Oi on schedule, very careful not to attract attention on the land portion of the journey. They found the Oi villa very much to their taste, so like Akashi, indeed, that it soothed the homesickness, though not, of course, dispelling it completely. Thoughts of the Akashi years did after all come back. The new galleries were in very good taste, and the garden waters pleasant and interesting. Though the repairs and fittings were not yet complete, the house was eminently livable.

The steward, one of Genji’s more trusted retainers, did everything to make them feel at home. The days passed as Genji cast about for an excuse to visit. For the Akashi lady the sorrow was yet more insistent. With little to occupy her, she found her thoughts running back to Akashi. Taking out the seven-stringed Chinese koto which Genji had left with her, she played a brief strain as fancy took her. It was the season for sadness, and she need not fear that she was being heard; and the wind in the pines struck up an accompaniment.

Her mother had been resting.

“I have returned alone, a nun, to a mountain village,

And hear the wind in the pines of long ago.”

The daughter replied:

“I long for those who know the country sounds,

And listen to my koto, and understand.”

Uneasy days went by. More restless than when she had been far away, Genji could contain himself no longer. He did not care what people would think. He did not tell Murasaki all the details, but he did send her a note. Once again he feared that reports would reach her from elsewhere.

“I have business at Katsura which a vague apprehension tells me I have neglected too long. Someone to whom I have made certain commitments is waiting there. And my chapel too, and those statues, sitting undecorated. It is quite time I did something about them. I will be away perhaps two or three days.”

This sudden urge to visit Katsura and put his chapel in order made her suspect his actual motives. She was not happy. Those two or three days were likely to become days enough to rot the handle of the woodcutter’s ax.

“I see you are being difficult again.” He laughed. “You are in a small minority, my dear, for the whole world agrees that I have mended my ways.”

The sun was high when he finally set out.

He had with him a very few men who were familiar with the situation at Oi. Darkness was falling when he arrived. The lady had thought him quite beyond compare in the rough dress of an exile, and now she saw him in court finery chosen with very great care. Her gloom quite left her.

And the daughter whom he was meeting for the first time — how could she fail to be a treasure among treasures? He was angry at each of the days and months that had kept them apart. People said that his son, the chancellor’s grandson, was a well-favored lad, but no doubt an element of sycophancy entered into the view. Nothing of the sort need obscure his view of the bud before him now. The child was a laughing, sparkling delight.

Her nurse was much handsomer than when she had left for Akashi. She told Genji all about her months on the seashore. Genji felt somewhat apologetic. It had been because of him that she had had to live among the salt burners’ huts.

“You are still too far away,” he said to the lady, “and it will not be easy for me to see you. I have a place in mind for you.”

“When I am a littl............