Genji was immersed in preparations for his daughter’s initiation ceremonies. Similar ceremonies were to be held for the crown prince in the Second Month. The girl was to go to court immediately afterwards.
It was now the end of the First Month. In his spare time Genji saw to blending the perfumes she would take with her. Dissatisfied with the new ones that had come from the assistant viceroy of Kyushu, he had old Chinese perfumes brought from the Nijō storehouses.
“It is with scents as with brocades: the old ones are more elegant and congenial.
Then there were cushions for his daughter’s trousseau, and covers and trimmings and the like. New fabrics did not compare with the damasks and red and gold brocades which an embassy had brought from Korea early in his father’s reign. He selected the choicest of them and gave the Kyushu silks and damasks to the serving women.
He laid out all the perfumes and divided them among his ladies. Each of them was to prepare two blends, he said. At Rokujō and elsewhere people were busy with gifts for the officiating priests and all the important guests. Every detail, said Genji, must be of the finest. The ladies were hard at work at their perfumes, and the clatter of pestles was very noisy indeed.
Setting up his headquarters in the main hall, apart from Murasaki, Genji turned with great concentration to blending two perfumes the formulas for which — how can they have come into his hands? — had been handed down in secret from the day of the emperor Nimmyō. In a deeply curtained room in the east wing Murasaki was at work on blends of her own, after the secret Hachijō tradition. The competition was intense and the security very strict.
“Let the depths and shallows be sounded,” said Genji solemnly, “before we reach our decisions.” His eagerness was so innocent and boyish that few would have taken him for the father of the initiate.
The ladies reduced their staffs to a minimum and let it be known that they were not limiting themselves to perfumes but were concerned with accessories too. They would be satisfied with nothing but the best and most original jars and boxes and censers.
They had exhausted all their devices and everything was ready. Genji would review the perfumes and seal the best of them in jars.
Prince Hotaru came calling on the tenth of the Second Month. A gentle rain was falling and the rose plum near the veranda was in full and fragant bloom. The ceremonies were to be the next day. Very close since boyhood, the brothers were admiring the blossoms when a note came attached to a plum branch from which most of the blossoms had fallen. It was from Princess Asagao, said the messenger. Prince Hotaru was very curious, having heard rumors.
“I made certain highly personal requests of her,” said Genji, smiling and putting the letter away. “I am sure that as always she has complied with earnest efficiency.”
The princess had sent perfumes kneaded into rather large balls in two jars, indigo and white, the former decorated with a pine branch and the latter a branch of plum. Though the cords and knots were conventional, one immediately detected the hand of a lady of taste. Inspecting the gifts and finding them admirable, the prince came upon a poem in faint ink which he softly read over to himself.
“Its blossoms fallen, the plum is of no further use.
Let its fragrance sink into the sleeves of another.”
Yūgiri had wine brought for the messenger and gave him a set of lady’s robes, among them a Chinese red lined with purple.
Genji’s reply, tied to a spray of rose plum, was on red paper.
“And what have you said to her?” asked the prince. “Must you be so
“I would not dream of having secrets from you.”
This, it would seem, is the poem which he jotted down and handed to his brother:
“The perfume must be hidden lest people talk,
But I cannot take my eye from so lovely a blossom.”
“This grand to-do may strike you as frivolous,” said Genji, “but a man does go to very great troubles when he has only one daughter. She is a homely little thing whom I would not wish strangers to see, and so I am keeping it in the family by asking the empress to officiate. The empress is a lady of very exacting standards, and even though I think of her as one of the family I would not want the smallest detail to be wrong.”
“What better model could a child have than an empress?”
The time had come to review the perfumes.
“It should be on a rainy evening,” said Genji. “And you shall judge them. Who if not you?”
He had censers brought in. A most marvelous display was ranged before the prince, for the ladies were determined that their manufactures be presented to the very best advantage.
“I am hardly the one who knows,” said the prince.
He went over them very carefully, finding this and that delicate flaw, for the finest perfumes are sometimes just a shade too insistent or too bland.
Genji sent for the two perfumes of his own compounding. It being in the old court tradition to bury perfumes beside the guardsmen’s stream, he had buried them near the stream that flowed between the main hall and the west wing. He dispatched Koremitsu’s son, now a councillor, to dig them up. Yūgiri brought them in.
“You have assigned me a most difficult task,” said the prince. “I fear that my judgment may be a bit smoky.”
The same tradition had in several fashions made its way down to the several contestants. Each had added ingeniously original touches. The prince was faced with many interesting and delicate problems.
Despite Asagao’s self-deprecatory poem, her “dark” winter incense was judged the best, somehow gentler and yet deeper than the others. The prince decided that among the autumn scents, the “chamberlain’s perfumes,” as they are called, Genji’s had an intimacy which however did not insist upon itself. Of Murasaki’s three, the plum or spring perfume was especially bright and original, with a tartness that was rather daring.
“Nothing goes better with a spring breeze than a plum blossom,” said the prince.
Observing the competition from her summer quarter, the lady of the orange blossoms was characteristically reticent, as inconspicuous as a wisp of smoke from a censer. She finally submitted a single perfume, a summer lotus-leaf blend with a pungency that was gentle but firm. In the winter quarter the Akashi lady had as little confidence that she could hold her own in such competition. She finally submitted a “hundred pace” sachet from an adaptation of Minamoto Kintada’s formula by the earlier Suzaku emperor, of very great delicacy and refinement.
The prince announced that each of the perfumes was obviously the result of careful thought and that each had much to recommend it.
“A harmless sort of conclusion,” said Genji.
The moon rose, there was wine, the talk was of old times. The mist-enshrouded moon was weirdly beautiful, and the breeze following gently upon the rain brought a soft perfume of plum blossoms. The mixture of scents inside the hall was magical.
It was the eve of the ceremony. The stewards’ offices had brought musical instruments for a rehearsal. Guests had gathered in large numbers and flute and koto echoed through all the galleries. Kashiwagi, Kōbai, and Tō no Chūjō‘s other sons stopped by with formal greetings. Genji insisted that they join the concert. For Prince Hotaru there was a lute, for Genji a thirteen-stringed koto, for Kashiwagi, who had a quick, lively touch, a Japanese koto. Yūgiri took up a flute, and the high, clear strains, appropriate to the season, could scarcely have been improved upon. Beating time with a fan, Kōbai was in magnificent voice as he sang “A Branch of Plum.” Genji and Prince Hotaru joined him at the climax. It was Kōbai who, still a court page, had sung “Takasago” at the rhyme-guessing contest so many years before. Everyone agreed that though informal it was an excellent concert.
Prince Hotaru intoned a poem as wine was brought in:
“The voice of the warbler lays a deeper spell
Over one already enchanted by the blossoms.
“For a thousand years, if they do not fall?”
Genji replied:
“Honor us by sharing our blossoms this spring
Until you have taken on their hue and fragrance.”
Kashiwagi recited this poem as he poured for Yūgiri:
“Sound your bamboo flute all through the night
And shake the plum branch where the warbler sleeps.”
Yūgiri replied:
“I thought we wished to protect them from the winds,
The blossoms you would have me blow upon madly.
“Most unthinking of you, sir.” There was laughter.
This was Kōbai’s poem:
“Did not the mists intercede to dim the moonlight
The birds on these branches might burst into joyous blossom.”
And indeed music did sound all through the night, and it was dawn when Prince Hotaru made ready to leave. Genji had a set of informal court robes and two sealed jars of perfume taken out to his carriage.
“If she catches a scent of blossoms upon these robes,
My lady will charge me with having misbehaved.”
“How very sad for you,” said Genji, coming out as the carriage was being readied.
“I should have thought your lady might be pleased
To have you come home all flowers and brocades.
“She can scarcely be witness to such a sight every day.”
The prince could not immediately think of an answer.
There were modest but tasteful gifts, ladies’ robes and the like, for all the other guests.
Genji went to the southwest quarter early that evening. A porch at the west wing, where Akikonomu was in residence, had been fitted out for the ceremony. The women whose duty it would be to bind up the initiate’s hair were already in attendance. Murasaki thought it a proper occasion to visit Akikonomu. Each of the two ladies had a large retinue with her. The ceremonies reached a climax at about midnight with the tying of the ceremonial train. Though the light was dim, Akikonomu could see that the girl was very pretty indeed.
“Still a gawky child,” said Genji. “I am giving you this glimpse of her because I know you will always be good to her. It awes me to think of the precedent we are setting.”
“Do I make a difference?” replied Akikonomu, very young and pretty herself. “None at all, I should have thought.”
Such a gathering of beauty, said Genji, was itself cause for jubilation.
The Akashi lady was of course saedthat she would not see her daughter on this most important of days. Genji debated the possibility of inviting her but concluded that her presence would make people talk and that the talk would do his daughter no good.
I shall omit the details. Even a partial account of a most ordinary ceremony in such a house can be tedious at the hands of an incompetent
The crown prince’s initiation took place later in the month. He was mature for his years and the competition to enter his service should have been intense. It seemed to the Minister of the Left, however, that Genji’s plans for his daughter made the prospects rather bleak for other ladies. Colleagues with nubile daughters tended to agree, and kept the daughters at home.
“How petty of them,” said Genji. “Do they want the prince to be lonely? Don’t they know that court life is only interesting when all sorts of ladies are in elegant competition?”
He postponed his daughter’s debut. The Minister of the Left presently relented and dispatched his third daughter to court. She was called Reikeiden.
It was now decided that Genji’s daughter would go to court in the Fourth Month. The crown prince was very impatient. The hall in which Genji’s mother had lived and Genji had had his offices was now assigned to his daughter. The finest craftsmen in the land were busy redecorating the rooms, which it might have seemed were splendid enough already. Genji himself went over the plans and designs.
And there was her library, which Genji hoped would be a model for later generations. Among the books and scrolls were masterpieces by calligraphers of an earlier day.
“We live in a degenerate age,” said Genji “Almost nothing but the ‘ladies’ hand’ seems really good. In that we do excel. The old styles have a sameness about them. They seem to have followed the cop............