Utsusemi, though she had so fiercely steeled herself against his love, seeing such tenderness hidden under the words of his message, again fell to longing that she were free, and though there was no undoing what was done she found it so hard to go without him that she took up the folded paper and wrote in the margin a poem in which she said that her sleeve, so often wet with tears, was like the cicada’s dew-drenched wing.

[1] Ki no Kami’s sister, referred to later in the story as Nokiba no Ogi.

[2] This name means ‘cicada ‘and is given to her later in the story in reference to the scarf which she ‘discarded as a cicada sheds its husk.’ But at this point it becomes grammatically important that she should have a name and I therefore anticipate.

[3] Allusion to the old poem, ‘Does he know that since he left me my eyes are wet as the coat that the fishers ... left lying upon the shore?’

[4] The visitor.

CHAPTER IV
YŪGAO

IT was at the time when he was secretly visiting the lady of the Sixth Ward.[1] One day on his way back from the Palace he thought that he would call upon his foster-mother who, having for a long while been very ill, had become a nun. She lived in the Fifth Ward. After many enquiries he managed to find the house; but the front gate was locked and he could not drive in. He sent one of his servants for Koremitsu, his foster-nurse’s son, and while he was waiting began to examine the rather wretched looking by-street. The house next door was fenced with a new paling, above which at one place were four or five panels of open trellis-work, screened by blinds which were very white and bare. Through chinks in these blinds a number of foreheads could be seen. They seemed to belong to a group of ladies who must be peeping with interest into the street below.

At first he thought they had merely peeped out as they passed; but he soon realized that if they were standing on the floor they must be giants. No, evidently they had taken the trouble to climb on to some table or bed; which was surely rather odd!

He had come in a plain coach with no outriders. No one could possibly guess who he was, and feeling quite at his ease he leant forward and deliberately examined the house. The gate, also made of a kind of trellis-work, stood ajar, and he could see enough of the interior to realize that it was a very humble and poorly furnished dwelling. For a moment he pitied those who lived in such a place, but then he remembered the song ‘Seek not in the wide world to find a home; but where you chance to rest, call that your house’; and again, ‘Monarchs may keep their palaces of jade, for in a leafy cottage two can sleep.’

There was a wattled fence over which some ivy-like creeper spread its cool green leaves, and among the leaves were white flowers with petals half unfolded like the lips of people smiling at their own thoughts. ‘They are called Yūgao, “Evening Faces,”’ one of his servants told him; ‘how strange to find so lovely a crowd clustering on this deserted wall!’ And indeed it was a most strange and delightful thing to see how on the narrow tenement in a poor quarter of the town they had clambered over rickety eaves and gables and spread wherever there was room for them to grow. He sent one of his servants to pick some. The man entered at the half-opened door, and had begun to pluck the flowers, when a little girl in a long yellow tunic came through a quite genteel sliding door, and holding out towards Genji’s servant a white fan heavily perfumed with incense, she said to him ‘Would you like something to put them on? I am afraid you have chosen a wretched-looking bunch,’ and she handed him the fan. Just as he was opening the gate on his way back, the old nurse’s son Koremitsu came out of the other house full of apologies for having kept Genji waiting so long—‘I could not find the key of the gate’ he said. ‘Fortunately the people of this humble quarter were not likely to recognize you and press or stare; but I am afraid you must have been very much bored waiting in this hugger-mugger back street,’ and he conducted Genji into the house. Koremitsu’s brother, the deacon, his brother-in-law Mikawa no Kami and his sister all assembled to greet the Prince, delighted by a visit with which they had not thought he was ever likely to honour them again.