Repository path: workshop/translations/genji-yomogiu/R06-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

Genji monogatari, ch. 15 「蓬生」, §§2‑3–2‑4 — the single-pass draft

This is the frozen R06 draft required by R04 §Procedure step 2a. It is the first pass, written straight through from the source with no revision, and it is frozen here before the revision begins so that the R04/R06 pair exists by construction. The revised text is T-genji-yomogiu-R04-v2.

Ordinarily she was on no such intimate terms with her; but with a mind to talk her into setting out, she had a set of robes made up to present to her, rode in a fine carriage, and came bowling up without warning, her face and her bearing proud and untroubled by any care. From the moment she had the gate opened, the shabbiness and desolation of the place were past all measure. Both leaves of the gate had sagged and fallen, so the men had to lend a hand and made a great business of getting it open. Which of these, she wondered, picking her way, are the three paths that they say must be trodden even in a lonely dwelling like this?

She had the carriage drawn up at the one bay on the south front where the shutters were raised. The Princess felt the mortification of it keenly; but a shockingly sooty curtain-frame was pushed out, and Jijū came forth. Her looks had fallen off. She had wasted badly over the years, and yet she still had a neat, well-bred air about her — enough that one might, though it is an unbecoming thing to say, have exchanged her for her mistress.

"I have been thinking of setting out, but I could not bring myself to go off and leave you in circumstances so painful to see. I have come to fetch Jijū. You have hardened your heart against me and will not so much as come over for a moment yourself, so I thought you might at least let me have this one. But what a pitiable way to be living!"

— and here she ought to have wept. Her mind, though, was on the journey before her, and she looked thoroughly pleased with herself.

"While my late brother the Prince was alive he thought me a disgrace and cast me off, so we began on distant terms; but all these years — what of that? You held yourself high and grand, and with His Excellency the Commander and the like coming and going in your fortunes, it seemed to me too presumptuous, and there was much to hold me back from pressing my intimacy on you, and so I have let the time pass. But the world proving as uncertain as this, a person of no account is, after all, the more at ease. It was a grief and a pain to me to see your circumstances, so far above my reach as they were; while I was near at hand, even in the times when I neglected you, I was a quiet resource you could count on. Now that I am going so far away, I find myself uneasy for you, and sorry."

So she talked on, but the Princess would give her no unguarded answer.

"It is very kind of you. But I am so unlike other people — what would be the good of it? I think I shall just moulder away here as I am."

That was all she said, and so:

"Yes, no doubt that is how you must feel. But to throw away a living body and go on in a place as grim as this — is there anybody else who does it? If His Excellency the Commander would take it in hand and do it up, it would turn overnight into a palace of jewels, no doubt, and there would be something to count on. Only just now, apart from His Highness of the Ministry of Rites' daughter, there is no one, they say, he divides his heart for. With that amorous disposition of his from of old, the places he used to visit without much thought he has all put out of his mind, they say. Still less will he come asking after a person living as precariously as this in a bramble thicket, on the strength of her having trusted him with a clean heart. That will be very hard indeed."

She spoke so as to drive it home; and the Princess, thinking it true, was so sad that she wept and wept. But she was not to be moved, and after a whole day of arguing this way and that,

"Then let me have Jijū at least,"

she said, hurrying as the day drew to its close; and Jijū, flustered, in tears:

"Then, for today only. She presses me so; I shall go no further than seeing her off. What she says is reasonable too. And that you should be distressed about it is natural as well, so that to be caught between you is painful to me."

she said quietly.

That even this one was about to abandon her she felt as resentment and as grief, but there was no way for her to say her nay, and she wept the harder — weeping was the only strength she had.

For a keepsake to send with her, the clothes she had worn were too worn and too salt-stained; she had nothing to show for the years they had been together. So she gathered up the hair that had fallen from her own head, which she had had made into a switch — over nine feet of it, and very beautiful — put it in a pretty box, and gave it to her, with a jar of an old robe-incense, very fragrant.

I trusted the strand of this jewelled vine would never part; beyond all thought, it is cut off and gone.

"Your late mother left word about it too, so, useless as I am, I had thought you would see me to the end. That you should leave me is reasonable enough; but to whom, I wonder, are you handing me on? I cannot help resenting it."

And she wept bitterly. Jijū too could get nothing out.

"My mother's dying words — I need not so much as speak of them. Through all these years I have lived out a wretchedness hardly to be borne; and now to be lured off on a road I never looked for, and to go wandering so far away —"

Though the jewelled vine be cut, it shall not end: on the road I go I will swear it by the god of the wayside offerings. Only for my life I cannot answer.

As she was saying it —

"Where are you? It has grown dark,"

came the muttering; and with her heart quite gone out of her she was drawn away, and could do nothing but look back.

That the one person who through all those years had grieved and yet never gone should now be parted from her left her utterly forlorn; and even the old women, whom nobody in the world would have any use for,

"Well, it stands to reason. How could she be expected to stay? We shall hardly hold out to the end ourselves,"

— and, calling to mind what connections each of them had, they were of a mind not to stay; and she heard them, and it was a wretched thing to hear.