The sacred tree: Being the second part of 'The tale of Genji'Age-adapted version

The autumn lay heavy over the plains when Prince Genji rode out to the Palace in the Fields. He had heard that Lady Rokujō would follow her daughter, the young maiden chosen for Ise, and leave the capital. For a while he had believed that everything could be as before with Rokujō – that love, even after long months of silence, could still be brought back if only he dared speak to her again. But he had let the time slip by, too busy with sorrows in the palace and his own restlessness, and now she kept her word to leave.

He came almost without an escort, with only a few riders. As little as possible should draw attention. The wind carried the smell of damp earth and withering grass, and from the ditches came the harsh songs of the cicadas. In the distance, notes from a flute rose and fell. Moonlight glided over the low slope, and inside the newly woven fence stood temporary huts for pilgrims. Monks walked quietly between the huts, and everything felt abandoned. Genji suddenly saw how much Rokujō must have suffered this past year.

He sent in a message and asked to speak with her. She replied politely that the house was cramped, that her daughter needed her, that it was not proper. Her women whispered: a prince did not stand in the courtyard. He held firm, said he had come through great difficulty. At last she pushed the reed screen aside and sat behind her screen, with the moonlight on her cheek. He stood and looked. It was the same face that had followed him in dreams and thoughts, the same calmly proud features, only more wounded.

He fumbled for words and talked himself into explanations that did not quite hold together. Then he broke off, reached under the screen with a branch from a sacred tree – a piece of sakaki he had picked in the garden – and whispered that the leaves were a sign of love that did not wither. She answered with a small verse and asked if he was sure that the sacred tree was not just an ordinary cedar top in his hands.

He smiled and said he knew exactly which priestess lived under this tree, and that it was her fault he had come. He lifted the screen and risked everything, knelt at the threshold with his legs dangling over.

They talked until the stars were the only lights left in the sky. Everything they had not dared to say the past year was said. The bitterness they had felt, like a thin layer of ash in their hearts, was blown away by the moon-wind, and it was as if the night had decided to use all its charm for these two.

When at last he rose to leave before dawn, he asked with a low verse that the moon not hurry. She answered: "Do not let the creak in the pine tree add sharper tones to this gray morning."

They both knew that this parting was not caused by gods or a king who commanded, but by his own neglect, and yet it was too late. He rode away with dew on his boots, and she sat with her face in her hands and cried wildly, while her women, who had barely seen him in the moonlight, did not have the heart to blame her for anything.

The next day a letter came from him, full of tenderness, and gifts that belonged to a departure: ceremonial dresses, fine fabrics, a beautiful small comb. Rokujō barely looked at them. Things had been set in motion that could not be turned. She collapsed, and her daughter, who was to leave, became happier than before because her mother this one time would follow her. In the streets people said both good and bad – some remembered old gossip, others were moved that a mother would set aside her position entirely for a child's sake.

On the sixteenth day of the seventh month, the maiden was ritually purified in the Katsura River. The water was green, white runners lay out across the surface, and the gathering was larger than anyone could remember. High-born lords rode out to honor the old, sick ex-emperor. Just before the procession began, a helper came through the crowd with a thin strip of paper tied to a bark streamer.

On the strip was a poem from Genji: "Even the thunder god cannot tear apart such a bond." But the answer was not from the mother – it was from the daughter, cheered on by an aunt who placed the words on her lips: she accused him of faithlessness and sharp shifts in his heart.

Genji breathed heavily when he read it.

He had wished to see the presentation, but realized that his presence would only make everything painful for Rokujō. He stayed home and asked himself – not for the first time – why he always longed for what stood farthest from him, and forgot the hands he actually held.

When the procession later that day passed near his palace, he stood behind a window with a shoot from the sacred tree in his hand and whispered a last line, which was sent after them with a messenger. "When you one day ferry the eighty rapids," it said, "you must remember one who stood on the shore and watched the boat disappear."

His thoughts were soon taken by another darkness. The old emperor – his father, who had abdicated but still held the reins in hidden hands – lay dying. One night he summoned the son who sat on the throne, and also Genji. He spoke gently with the young ruler about the governance of the land, and about the boy in the nursery who was chosen to inherit everything one day – the prince who in secret was Genji's own son with the emperor's widow, Fujitsubo.

The secret name was never spoken aloud in the room, but everyone knew that the old man believed the future lay safest if Genji stood close to the throne.

"Look upon him as your guide," he said to the young ruler. "Give him great things to be responsible for – he is made for it. That is why I once connected him to a house without royal blood – so that he could work freely and watch over the state's affairs." The young one nodded and looked both frightened and reverent at his father. That night the old man passed out of time without noise.

The sorrow swept through the city like a winter wind. Even though the old man had long laid aside the crown, it was he who had kept order among storming families. Now everyone knew what it meant that Kōkiden – the powerful concubine – would have a heavier hand over everything. Fujitsubo, who until recently lived near the nursery to be close to her son, moved quietly out of the palace, over to her own estate in the third ward.

The snow lay thick on pine branches that bent under the weight, and Genji stood by her window looking down into the garden pond that lay like a mirror.

He murmured a verse about an ice surface that could no longer reflect a face that was gone, and knew at the same time that Prince Hyōbukyō, Fujitsubo's brother, who stood nearby, would find his words strained and empty. Still they exchanged small poems, as one does in such times, as if to bind the day with thin, thin threads.

The new year brought no comfort. At Genji's gate there had once been a hundred carriages in line on the first day, lacquered wheels, gifts in baskets, letters under velvet ribbons. Now it was almost empty. He withdrew, walked through his rooms in utter silence, and felt as if the future was already over.

Oborozukiyo, a daughter in Kōkiden's house, became chief of the emperor's bedchamber in the second month, a sign of her mother's power. She was beautiful and learned, but now, when she received the best rooms and the light in the Tōkōden wing, she remembered too strongly a night when she had let a certain man come into the stillness. A careful exchange of letters had continued since, as secretly as possible. Genji was no reckless adventurer. He knew what would happen if this came to light. Perhaps it was the secret and dangerous that made it even harder to resist.

Time, which had held things in place in the old emperor's days, now loosened knots. Kōkiden was free to cultivate all the anger she had carried. Genji was hindered in his work again and again. The old minister of the left, Aoi's father, stayed home and could not bear to watch the new councils. Kōkiden had never forgiven that he once gave his daughter to Genji in marriage instead of to the emperor's son. In that house it was quiet, but when Genji came there, he diligently tended to his son and to Aoi's old waiting women, and the old man's eyes grew warm when they spoke of the child who was learning to read.

One night Genji got into Oborozukiyo's rooms in the palace. He was disguised as well as he could, and Chūnagon, one of the maids, led him through anterooms and screens. Oborozukiyo glowed, lively and youthful. If there was something frivolous in her, it was the way sweetness carries a fresh pear. When they heard that someone was looking for an officer from the Tiger Guard, Genji turned ice-cold and thought everything was over. But the shouts were about a sullen soldier who was missing, not him. Nevertheless, he was seen. A man standing outside, a brother of Lady Jōkyōden, recognized him in the half-darkness and held the words in his belly like a sharp knife.

And while he let himself be drawn into more dangerous rooms, his thoughts – when he dared stand still within himself – turned again and again toward another name and another curtain. Fujitsubo. She was in her own house now, far from the palace. She found no peace. She suffered with a heart that never got to see enough of her son.

And she was afraid for him – not of the emperor, not of the minister, but of him, Genji. She knew that a single misstep could topple everything. Night after night, when he did not leave her in peace with prayers or with short sleeps, she repeated the same words to herself: I must make him give up.

But one night he came anyway. Not because anyone had arranged anything, not because anyone had opened a back door. He seemed to rise straight from the floorboards of an anteroom, like a face in a dream that becomes sharper than reality. Her women, weary from sleepless nights, reached for lamps when she grew faint and had to rest. Genji stood behind a screen, saw her in half-profile, and everything in him converged.

She was so like Murasaki in the way she held her head, the way her hair lay against her neck, that he suddenly felt with a shock what he had done for years: taken a shadow for the woman.

He was past shame and past pride; he pulled her close, cried and begged and called duties and gods false when they shut him out.

She became frightened, but she was too gentle to make the worst sharp. She said she was sick, that he must go, but when he shook his head, she held him with kind words in talk until the night was eaten up. In the morning he slipped out, destroyed by his own behavior, and wrote no morning greeting.

It made her understand how dangerous all this was. Ōmyōbu, who had hidden him in the closet and whispered down shelf after shelf, was indignant and told her lady that he had been there all day, hidden in the house like a thief. Fujitsubo heard the whiteness in the old-fashioned voice and thought with terror that she must never allow anything like this again. Otherwise not only her name would be destroyed, but also her son's fate – the son whom the whole court believed was the emperor's, but who was in truth the son of the man she must not see.

She was finished with the world. It was also the only thing that could stop the whispering before it became shouting. She would go away, lay down her hair and trains and name, and go behind blue curtains with gray robes. First she would see her child with her own eyes one more time. She went one night without escort to the palace, sat beside the boy, and he leaned into her dress and told her small things – about a bird in the garden, a letter that was difficult.

He asked if she would come again soon, and laughed when she said that perhaps she would come back looking very different. "Like old Lady Shikibu?" he said, and she could not say more.

Shortly after, she held a great ceremony in her house – five days of reciting the Sutras for the dead she had loved: her father, her mother, and the husband who had made her empress. On the last evening, when the snow shone in the moonlight outside, she sent for the leader of the Tendai sect. He came. She sat under a thin little umbrella of scarlet silk, and while the reading softly crooned into stillness, her hair was cut off.

A whisper across the floor, a sharp sigh – and then the weeping broke out from everyone. Only Genji stood mute as a pillar by the curtain. When the house was empty, he moved closer and asked quietly why. Her answer came through Ōmyōbu's voice: "It was decided long ago."

After that he dared to come more often. Now that the body's gates were closed, the meeting felt purer, and his restless heart calmed when she spoke of the boy and of prayers. But the desire was still there, only without hope.

Around them power slid from the old to Kōkiden's clan. For example, the peculiar Tō no Bēn, who belonged to the powerful clan, tore off an old saying loudly in the corridor so that Genji would hear it: "When a white rainbow crossed the sun, the crown prince trembled." There was some truth in it, warm and threatening. Genji reddened but walked on.

Instead, he gathered scholars with him, divided them into groups, and let them write poems in old rhymes; he found rare scrolls and small hanging flutes.

He brought out the great rose bush outside the steps and drank wine with Tō no Chūjō, his friend and rival, while they laughed about old tricks – one who had slipped out of a window, another who had lost a ring in a pond. But such light things could not cover what was approaching.

One night a storm brought lightning and thunder rolling in over the city. The house of the minister of the right, where both Kōkiden and her daughter Oborozukiyo lived, woke up. People ran in the corridors between rooms with partitions, servant girls clung to each other. In one of the rooms lay Genji and Oborozukiyo. The minister, worried about his daughter's fever, first went in to the eldest daughter.

Then he took light steps across the floor and drew the curtain from the youngest.

A belt, pale violet, lay together with her clothes, and on the floor lay a piece of paper with slanting handwriting. He bent down, picked up the belt and paper, and opened the curtain. Inside, on the bed, was a young man who turned half away and covered his face. The minister turned blood-red and stormed out. The story soon ended up where it burned best: with Kōkiden.

This was the last drop. Those who hated him got the tools they needed. People said that this attraction – this tangle with Oborozukiyo – was what did it: it slammed the doors in his face in the palace. He understood that it was not wise to wait for the great judgment. He would leave before they cast him out.

He chose Suma by the coast, far from the city, a place with fishermen, wind, and crickets behind the bushes. He could not even fully think the thought of leaving Murasaki. For a moment he was willing to hide her in his following and take her in secret over the sea.

But he saw the journey in bad weather, the huts without proper rooms, a life without neighbors, without books and music – and he saw her, raised in tenderness, sitting in a damp corner under a sloping wall.

He did not say it at once. When she understood that he planned to leave without her, she only turned her head and stared blankly ahead for a long time. It hurt him that she was so silent. But what could he do? He promised that if the stay lasted, he would send for her. He would rather cut a hole in a cliff than pretend she meant less to him.

Before he left, he visited his old father-in-law, the minister of the left, in secret. He came in a simple wicker carriage, his face in shadow. That it was him, hardly anyone in the house believed when they saw him step out. One by one, Aoi's old serving women came forward and bowed. The little boy, his son with Aoi before she died, came running and threw himself on his knee. It was joyfully painful.

The old minister came and sat down. He spoke long about the old emperor, about everything he had seen, and now this. "Exile is for those who commit great wrongs," he said quietly. "What have you done?" Genji answered carefully that everything in this life comes from the previous one; perhaps he had done wrong there and had to bear it now.

Both sat too long, continually prolonged by a hand on a sleeve or a new little story from the nursery.

Before dawn he crept out, left a verse about the smoke from the salt huts that reminded him of the smoke that rose from Aoi's funeral pyre. The whole house followed him with their eyes to the gate. In the strange red moon he looked so beautiful that even a demon, thought one of the old ladies, would have softened.

He arranged everything at home. He put papers in order, gave Shōnagon responsibility for the granaries, handed out small keepsakes to servants in both wings, all the way to the household in the Village of Falling Flowers. He stood over the traveling chests and the empty, dusty guest tables and thought about how rooms must look after a month.

He went to the mirror, noticed that his cheeks had become hollow. Murasaki, with wet eyes, came and looked in the glass with him. He said calmly that now when he left, his image could stay in the mirror and stand by her side. "That would comfort," she said, and sank down behind a pillar to hide her face.

He rode out after midnight, together with five or six nameless men. They also saw it – how different this was from the radiance he once carried around. Ukon, who had once ridden foremost in the Kamo procession, held back the reins at the lower shrine and quoted a verse about how sparing the gods had been in meeting his fate. Genji dismounted, bowed toward the shrine, and whispered resignedly that he would leave hope for justice with a god of justice.

At his father's grave he stood long. The path up was covered with leaves, the moonlight disappeared behind a cloud, and the damp trees smelled like a cave. He knelt and felt his father's face emerge from the stone as if carved in light. He rose, went back to the city, sent a last letter to the Heir Apparent – the child who thought he wrote as an uncle: a small twig with withered flowers tied to it, a poem about a man cast out to barren mountains who longed for the city's spring blossoms.

He spent the last night together with Murasaki. She stumbled in the moonlight beside him all the way to the gate, and he thought that now everything could end, for everything he left behind was better than what he was going toward. "We who swore that only death should part us," he said in a low line, "must tonight let life itself break our vows." She answered, abruptly and calmly, that she would give everything she had to delay his steps a single hour. Therefore he left just before dawn. He could not bear daylight in separation.

Suma was closer than he had imagined, and yet another realm. He stood on the beach and felt sea spray on his cheek for the first time. The hut he received lay close to the shore, not far from where an old exiled poet had once lit his salt-hut pans. For the first time in long he burned with curiosity: what was a hut really put together like? He decided to repair, dig a pond, plant some trees, put everything in order so he could breathe in it.

It did not keep the storm out. The first summer in Suma brought long rain, a wind that lay over the water day and night, and a black, black sky. He wrote letters. To Murasaki, to Fujitsubo – who now as a nun dared more gentleness in her pens and explained with restrained tenderness why she had before shown herself so cold.

A messenger came with paper sheets from Rokujō at Ise. Her writing lay heavy and beautiful on thick, white sheets, and the words were difficult and clear as always. She wrote about separation and guilt, and about the shore's eternal labor with discontent. Genji sat with the letter and felt both shame and gratitude.

It was quiet, but his name still carried somewhere in the world. One day a boat glided past his shore. The great Viceroy was traveling in his splendid sails, with young ladies in silk robes under awnings. A private little note found its way to land, from one who had once danced before him in the emperor's hall. "At the sound of your small lute, far away in the darkness," it said in small, still characters, "a hand was near to cutting the rope that dragged me past."

He smiled wryly and sent a line back: "What was it that hindered you? The rope stood there asking for a small cut." He talked himself away from thoughts of missing a routine laughter, knew that there was no beauty in what was wrongly paired.

Tō no Chūjō, his friend, ventured out once in the spring. He was shocked at how small the hut was, but smiled when he saw how it was built like in the Chinese book – with bamboo windows, unpolished stone steps, and cedar posts. They talked all night about old days and new. When he left, Genji gave him a black stallion from his stable, and said in an old line that horses neigh into the north wind when they long for home. Chūjō cried a little and said he would hear the echo of that sound until they met again. After the visit, the loneliness felt ten times heavier.

What he had feared most came with force. During Purification Day, when they send small paper dolls loaded with misfortunes out into the sea, a storm suddenly rose from flat nothing. The house shook, lightning went straight through the air and struck the roof of one wing. The servants shouted, fishermen on the beach shouted louder. Genji read aloud from a holy book, but then came a blow unlike any other sound, and a small kitchen burned to ash.

They pulled back, stacked woven screens, and sat close together for the first time all night in huts that barely held. One of his men stood in the doorway and gave his own future to the sea gods if only the prince were spared. The others joined in prayers that mixed Shinto and Buddha in one stream, as one did when everything hung by a thread.

At dawn, when the storm eased a little, Genji slept briefly in exhaustion. He dreamed that his father stood by the bed and took his hand. "Why do you sleep in such a corner?" said the figure. "Trust the Sumiyoshi god. Leave this place when the wind calms. Take a boat, and you will be guided." He woke up and knew that the dream's palace was not the emperor's – but the one under the sea.

The next day a small boat came with men from Akashi Bay. The aging former governor, one who had long retired but lived as a layman in monk's clothes, had also had a strange dream. He had been asked to put the boat on the water exactly this day, and despite the storm, the wind had been so kind that he had barely needed to steer.

Now he stood outside and asked that Genji's companion Yoshikiyo come out.

When Genji heard it, he whispered that fate was calling him to go. He sent word back: "I am a stranger here. Is there a corner on your shore where I can hide without becoming a mockery?" The old man rejoiced like a child. Before sunrise, chests and books were on the boat's deck, and Genji sailed away with his four or five most loyal.

Akashi was a different place. The old layman, a man with little flesh on his body and more on his will, offered the whole main house by the sea. Around it lay small huts for fishing and prayers, a little temple hall where he recited daily. The courtyard was arranged with a view over a cove, and the pines stood so that the wind's song set a pattern in everything.

The old man talked long, too long, but he was wise in older stories – about emperors and obscure customs.

Soon he said cautiously that he had a daughter on the hill behind, and that for eighteen years he had prayed to the Sumiyoshi god that she might one day marry a true man from the capital, one of those born high. He did not mention the name of his only candidate, but his eyes made it unnecessary.

Genji sent a letter up to the hut on the hill, written on a thin, greenish paper that was the softest he had – but with a firm grip on the brush. He wrote about clouds that suddenly parted, so that one far away saw the tops of the trees at a house. The old man up on the hill took his daughter's answer, a little verse that revealed boldness behind shyness, together with his own handwriting and sent it down again.

Then Genji climbed one night, on a particularly beautiful moon, up the path between the trees. He did not say clearly what he wanted.

But the door stood slightly ajar. Inside the room stood an instrument, and a screen string had fallen across the strings, so that a chance little motif arose. In a brief moment he saw her in moon-silver – the right bearing, the seriousness, the eyes that did not look up.

He asked her to play a note or two. "If only the zither whispers the gentle words your lips refuse," he said, "then I wake half from the dream that holds me fast." She answered sharply in verse that all dreams were equally empty, and drew back into a side chamber and slid the door shut.

Yet it was a beginning. That night was both wrong and right, but after it she showed herself more often. Then he came several evenings, with great caution. Fishermen's wives talk easily, and he feared the gossip that could fly back to the city like a blue tit in a tailwind. Therefore there were long gaps. She began to think that she had been right all along – that he, like so many high men on a journey, had only taken a diversion. The old father, who had laid his whole life in prayers for this, began to fumble through his days, as if everything cast him between joy and anxiety.

The letter to Murasaki during this time was tender and confused. He composed about a fisherman who lifted dry seaweed and pointed down into the sea – short words that revealed more than he thought. She answered without bitterness, but there was an irony in the lines that was sharper than a cry. He fell silent after that, and for a while he stopped going up the hill.

Soon after, the emperor's eyes became sick, and then darker signs came.

The great minister of the right, Kōkiden's father, died at a great age. The emperor's pain did not improve with prayers. The ruler who had been too young and wavering before, suddenly became very old in the face. Everyone whispered what no one dared say aloud: that misfortune had come over the land because Genji had been treated unjustly.

One day in the third month came the emperor's command: Genji was absolutely to come home. "Before the end of the seventh month," read the scribe's firm, formal tone. It was as if someone laid a hand on his heart and calmed it. He looked up at the room and felt joy in his body – and at the same time a sharp sorrow.

He had not thought that he would want to stay, but now – now there were things he must leave. That night the woman on the hill told him, with her calm face without color, that she was expecting a child.

He felt at once how bound he was. They held each other without words. The next night the old father came in with his elaborate, stiff body, carried his great zither and let his daughter tune the strings as they had been on the last evening on the hill. She played with a power and a lived expression that struck him – he who had heard all the music's queens in the palace. That sound stayed in him as he rode away in a simple but beautiful traveling dress.

Back in the city, everything was turned around. The offices fell into place again like chess pieces in an old position, his rank was washed clean, rooms were made ready for him in the palace. The young emperor – the boy from the nursery, his own secret son – now stood right behind the sliding door that leads out into the world.

The old emperor, who had been sick, no longer thought of the joy of a throne; it was better for him to pray and play music.

He abdicated, and the child took his place, while Lady Jōkyōden's little son became the new heir who would be taught slowly and wisely. It was a restoration everywhere, and everyone said this was more right than before.

But in Genji there was also another current. He wrote letters to Akashi. He remembered her, the calm voice on the hill, the hands on the strings. He sent poems about morning fog that hid the light in the bay. She wrote carefully back. Then came a messenger from the Akashi house: a child was born – a daughter. He felt the strange mixture of strength and weakness that only a new life can give. He was suddenly haunted by guilt that she had lain alone through the pain while he wore his silk robes in the city.

He found a wet nurse. She had recently had a child herself and was the daughter of a former court lady who had become poor. She was afraid of the journey, but enticed by something new, and left after a brief secret meeting. With her he sent chests of strips, small lacquered boxes, warm words. He wrote both to the mother in Akashi and to the old father, saying he would bring mother and child to the city as soon as everything was ready.

The Akashi woman laid her hand on his thick sheets, heard from the nurse stories of his strength and warmth, and felt an unexpected hope that she was both proud and afraid of.

At home he tried to speak directly with Murasaki. He knew she would soon hear it anyway, and it was better that she got it from him. She reddened, her eyes grew wet with warmth and ice, and said that he was far too good at this – to laugh a little, explain a little, and believe everything was fine. He laughed shortly and said that this was "only a little girl."

They sat in the garden together with the new red autumn leaves from Suma placed in a bowl.

He remembered the woman's playing up on the hill and said a few words about it. Murasaki listened and answered with a thin, wounded line about boats that drift apart from each other. He tried to get her to play music with him, she refused. But when he, quite calmly, spoke about a small child, a face the size of a peach blossom, she became gentle.

He asked one evening: "Will you take her here? I want you to give her the first skirt, and lead her as if she were yours."

She lit up, with foolish sparkling eyes that only children can bring forth in adults. "Yes," she said. "Let us have her here." It was not because she had forgiven everything – but because love for a child sometimes lays another path in the heart, without the old one disappearing.

Before he could fetch them, another bond tightened around everything. He had to fulfill promises at the Sumiyoshi shrine, to the god who had sent him the dreams and the boat when the storm nearly took him. He traveled in a retinue that made old men think of times always called "before." That day a small boat sailed into the bay from Akashi, but the people in it turned back when they saw the crowd and the processions.

"Whose retinue is this?" asked a young woman in the boat, as if she could not help but ask. The others laughed almost kindly, and said it was the supreme minister.

She grew still, and the tears fell slowly. Later, when she performed a purification at Naniwa, a small letter unexpectedly came sailing after her with pictures of the tide gauge.

"The water goes up and down," it said, "and sometimes all the way to the top." She answered soberly that she was hardly such a pilgrim that it was fitting for anyone to measure love's flood after her. But when she tied a small paper slip from the Little Island with Rain Coats to the answer, she knew that not a day passed without her waiting.

That day came soon. He sent word: he would fetch her to a place by the Ōi River, an old house her mother had inherited but never collected. The old father begged, but let her go. He said things he had held in his heart a long time, about how he had once laid aside all human striving so that she could have a chance in a better house than his.

He spoke about how a prince who shines in the world cannot stay in a small bay forever – that some lights have another heaven they must return to, while we others shall smilingly shine a little here below.

He went until the last moment in and out of the hall where the child sat, read a verse that allowed an old man's foolish tears in the moment of parting, and would not frighten them with big words like "death." The door closed with a quiet click. The sea held its breath, blue and smooth as a daughter's cheek. The old man sat long on the pier and watched a gray streak of sail disappear.

The house at Ōi was built simply, with more of a courtyard than a mansion. Genji had already sent furniture and small things, but much was missing. The first week was heavy. She took up the zither he had given her and played alone, while the wind spoke in the great trees, and the mother sang from the inner room a little verse about absence.

One evening Genji came with few men, without great signs. He wore a splendid robe and filled every room he entered. They brought the little girl. He saw her for the first time. He was used to beauty, but sat speechless.

"She will become something quite special," he thought, and saw in that face where everything was warmer and clearer than in any other. He spoke kindly to the nurse, praised her for the journey, and asked politely if they would move to a better room as soon as everything was ready. The mother answered carefully. That night no one in the house was alone. In the morning he set men to clearing garden ditches, making small streams, trimming bushes. He laughed with the Akashi woman over strange memories from the sea, and also felt the joy of placing plank after plank in the right place.

In the city, the doors opened every morning. Those who had previously drawn back now pressed toward his table. Among them also stood those who had once pressed on the edge of his fall. He had become the strong man who held everything, and it was a strength that most resembled a great, still shadow that lay under everything. At the same time, he more often stood and looked toward the forest in the west.

There he built a small monastery house for himself, with images of buddhas and texts. He invited old monks to read every month. He often thought of cutting off his hair and going in completely. But his children, and the responsibility for two kings' fates, held his hand down.

Something else happened that he had not dared to think aloud about. Lady Rokujō came back from Ise with her daughter. Her house, renovated and quiet, nevertheless had to see a renewed sorrow. Rokujō, who had fought with pride as her only ring, let her body break down. She wanted to lay everything aside.

She sent for Genji, and he came, full of regret for everything he had not said before. She told him, without bitterness this last day, that she was afraid not for herself, but for her daughter.

"Watch over her," she said, "but do not touch her with your heart. Be good, but not too good – for the world will misunderstand everything you do."

He said quietly that he had changed. As evening turned to night, he went through a small tear hole in the screen and saw the outline of her newly cut head against the pillow and behind her, a little away, the daughter, with her face down. He stopped roughly within himself. Eight days later Rokujō died.

Genji arranged everything. He wrote to the young woman, the daughter, with small careful words, invited her to live in his palace so they would avoid intrusions from outside. He spoke with Fujitsubo, who supported the plan. It was better that the girl be near the young emperor than in solitude, with suitors standing outside the gate. That the retired emperor, Suzaku, had carried an old love for her, made everything more difficult.

He sent her lavish gifts on her presentation day, small boxes of aloes wood and exquisite powder, and in the lid of one of the boxes was a poem hidden in the petal of a flower: "Come not again!

For it fell upon me, under heaven's command, to send you away from your circles." Akikonomu, as she was now called, answered with tears and a line in return about how she had wept when he said those words, and now wept because he did not mean them. Suzaku still carried a wound, and Genji felt, for the first time in a long while in this, a genuine shame – he knew what waiting could do to a person.

The young emperor was still a child, and he liked best to play with Tō no Chūjō's daughter, who was outgoing and easy to be with. Akikonomu was small and quiet and drew rather than talked. But there an opening arose. The young ruler began to draw himself, and he liked to watch how she held the brush, how she captured light and grass.

She became the one he went to when he wanted a quiet amusement. Tō no Chūjō noticed the danger in this and obtained secret painters who made scrolls of romances and calendar-motifs for his daughter – to steal the glances back.

Genji heard about it and smiled – childish play upon play – but nevertheless sent scrolls himself to the competition. Among them he placed something no one had seen in the city: sketches from Suma and Akashi. People had heard about them, but never seen everything with their own eyes.

The room was full the day the picture competition was held. Ladies in two rows with young girls in colored jackets between them, a carpet of brocade before each chest of scrolls. Fujitsubo entered – even now in gray she gripped the room with her gaze and made the young ladies eager and strange at the same time. They brought forth scrolls showing old stories: Princess Kaguya from a bamboo, the endlessly long "Cave-Tree" with shipwrecks in Persia and magical tones on the strings.

Others brought out Lines from the Ise Story and set the room's laughter in motion. Genji came and sat near the emperor, commented when the judgments creaked.

When there were few scrolls left, Akikonomu's side brought out his Suma sketch. Everyone knew at once that the battle was decided. Dried-up men who seldom felt anything inside, grew bright in the eyes.

Even Prince Sochi no Miya, an uncle with a sharp tongue, became soft. There was something in the line and in the way the words lay in the margin – small poems mixed with short, sober sentences – that made what was far away, close. Different from a city-pen art that everyone had learned for decades, this was a hand that had been out in the storm and pointed, both at the sea and at the heart.

Afterward they played music. Tō no Chūjō struck the wagon, the uncle the great zither, Akikonomu's court lady the lute. Genji sat beside and let a small string tone between his fingers that were white against a black string of pearl beads. When morning came, they all went out into the garden, and even the dullest flowers woke up and looked as if they were pleasantly surprised by the light.

In the midst of all this radiance was a ruin that no one asked about. One night, on his way to the Village of Falling Flowers, Genji rode past an old palace. The walls were gone in a jungle of weeds and hemlock that had burst through the roof. Long creepers from a wisteria plant had crawled out over a crooked pine, and the flowers hung like dense, purple grape clusters in the moonlight.

He smelled the fragrance through the crack in his carriage window and felt he had been here. Here he had once visited Princess Suetsumuhana, a strangely shy woman who had held onto an outdated dignity as some hold onto an old musical key. He had not been here in a long time. The wit stung him in the side. He sent Koremitsu off to see if there was life inside.

Koremitsu found a half-open wicker gate, an old woman's cough, a corner with mats that still lay in place as the princess's father had laid them long ago. Other rooms were like a forest, with tall, black bushes, and an owl called in the middle of the day. A fragile voice said that they had waited and waited, but that the world had turned its back on them. Genji, who stood outside and heard words stream back, felt shame that he could pass by so easily.

He forced his way in through the raindrops with Koremitsu lifting a collapsible rain screen to push drops from the branches.

He found the princess behind a sooty screen. She had just tried to mop the floor after the ceiling had dripped all over. She had dressed in some clothes an aunt had once brought to get her to go on a journey. They sat down, she whispered two or three words about how he must be wet after fighting through the bushes.

He promised he would no longer pretend he did not know the way here. He did not stay long, her heart beat too hard, but the next day he sent workmen. They cleared paths, repaired crooked door frames, straightened what could be saved.

Rumor ran before him, and many who had previously left her service asked to come back. After two years she moved into his new east wing – not as a princess enthroned in the house's core, but as a woman who could hear people in the next room when she woke in the morning. He looked in on her every time he passed through that part of the house. It was not love as before, but it was a responsibility, and no one pointed out the lack aloud.

He could not do as much for everyone. The emperor's former beloved, Utsusemi, came back to the city from a distant province at the same time as all this restoration happened. Her husband, Iyo no Suke, fell ill and died after dictating to his sons what they should do to take care of the young stepmother. One of the sons instead tried to approach her in a way that did not resemble a child's. She could no longer bear the world's maneuvers. Without telling anyone, she called for her confessor and took veil and vows. The world became a ring she no longer had to walk in.

There were many rings and many loves. All this kept Genji moving like a man who carries several bowls on a pole over his shoulders. Some he filled with rice, others with water, and he tried to keep his balance. But in him was also a stronger current that pushed, slowly but surely, toward rest: to let everything go. He built the monastery hut, he planted pines along the stream, he set up a hut for nuns near Murasaki's rooms so they could read together on light days. Some evenings he walked alone to the forest edge, lifted his hand, and felt what it was like to want nothing more.

When the Akashi woman had been at Ōi for a while, he came one evening again in secret. He had not told Murasaki, but she already knew that he had stopped by. He had been on his way to the little shrine at Saga to hear the month's reading, had drunk wine by the riverbank with some old men with titles that sat a little looser than before, and yet he had felt a small, restless thread pulling him toward the houses by the trees.

On the steps at Ōi stood the nurse with the child, now nearly three. The little one reached out her hand toward him. He put his cheek against her hand and felt how easy everything could be when one held a child's hand.

The next day he went home and spoke directly with Murasaki. He gave her a small, harmless letter to tear up – a letter she saw came from Ōi – and stole half a day from duty to stay longer with her. She was sulky, but laughed after a while, let him stroke her hair after the new, light cut she had used since he came home, and said yes when he spoke the little child's name again. "Let her come," she said. "I will dress her in the skirt myself." Then he laughed too, and in that laughter was a brief flash of peace.

There was still much that was not in place. He wanted to enter the emperor's great rooms and do everything in the right manner, wanted to read for his father's soul with all eight chapters, wanted to conduct small rites at wells and streams, and at the same time ensure that no one forgot those who did not have the strength to remind the world of themselves.

He went from house to house, from temple to nursery, and on to Ōi. His girls laughed at him and sighed for him and hated him – and yet placed baskets of fruit and flowers where he came. He laughed back, sighed back, and held the baskets up like a plaything.

And in all this he carried silently one thought that was strange, and yet strikingly serious in him: that small prophecies sometimes come true. Once a stargazer had said that he would have three children – the eldest and the youngest would bear crowns, and the one in the middle would rule things with pen and seal. The youngest would be born of one who was not the finest among the people.

His secret son was now emperor, and everything in the world began to arrange itself according to that small line. The girl at Ōi – could she really one day sit behind an even heavier curtain than Murasaki? He dared not say the word. But he carried it dear in his chest, like a small fierce bird.

His legacy in all this soon became visible to those who saw. He was not entirely a saint, and was not allowed to let things go either. But he gave gifts when he could, exchanged small poems with old serving women who had become nuns now and sat in dirty gray robes with sharp eyes for the tensions of the human heart, and he tied knots on cords that were about to slip through the fingers of those he had failed.

He could not save everything. Some houses would always be eaten by hemlock and dark owls, some insides would never quite stop trembling at the memory of a hand in the dark that should not have been there.

But something was held. A child came into a room. An old picture was rolled out and made into a song.

Flowers woke as sunlight filled the room after a night of music. And somewhere sat an old man with a frail body at the outermost edge of a pier and watched a spot far out in the sea that grew smaller and smaller until it was gone. He did not see when it came back. But he saw his knuckles, and smiled anyway.

Thus the months passed, and thus the world's small threads nevertheless came together again.

One day the little girl was led over the doorstep of the Nijo house. Murasaki held her hand and guided her with a newly tied skirt. She did not say that it stung – for it did not. She saw a future in her eyes and a promise that was her own, almost more than the other's. Genji stood in the doorway and looked at both. He had made many misfortunes himself, and many happy moments for others as well. He did not think of grand words. He just stood a little, like a shadow in a door, and let the light land where he once thought that shadows would own everything.

In the palace, the cards shifted once more. The retired emperor, Suzaku, sat with his drawing scrolls and wrote long poems about that day in the sacred circle when he tied a comb in the hair of a young vestal. He sent a box to Akikonomu and a new poem that asked her not to come again. She answered as quietly, with a broken white piece of the old comb tied to the sheet, that tears had fallen the first time, and that they fell now too, but in a different way.

And Tō no Chūjō, who always crowned everything with budding plans, got his nod in the corridor, and went over to his daughter to whisper new advice for how they should be most pleasing on days when everyone drew their sails at the same time.

In rooms that grew warm and died out again, some put on gray, some wore purple, some a robe with salt stains. In all those rooms there was a smell of one thing that did not go away – the light smoke from leaves of sacred trees and the small red seeds that someone always crushed to make a distant, sweet smell of everything-and-nothing.

And through all this he walked, dark and light at once – a man who had begun to understand that everything in the world was connected in ways that were too clever for him. But also that sometimes it is enough to stand and watch someone else's hand hold a child's hand, and feel that it is enough for now.

When winter came again, he passed by the old Hitachi palace one last time. The gardens had less weeds, the snow flatter where they had laid a path between perennials and old trees. Princess Suetsumuhana sat inside and listened to the sound of a large bird clapping its wing against a tree. He stood outside a little and felt the moonlight on his cheek. Then he walked on.

The wind in the pine trees over the Ōi edge lifted. It mixed a little with a tone row from a string and a little with laughter in a room he was not in. That was enough too. He bowed his head and walked into the light of his house, where a small face looked up at him and laughed as if honey hung in the mouth of the world.

And when he sometimes, long afterward, needed to know what he really was – what strength, what weakness – he unrolled the scroll from Suma and let the line and the sea say it to him once more, without his needing to answer back with words.