Though you do not know,
ask, and you will come to know:
like the sedge that grows
in the inlet of Mishima,
these threads of ours will not break
- Meaning
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Though you do not know it, ask and you will learn: like the sedge that grows in the inlet of Mishima, the thread that runs between us will not break.
- Commentary
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Part One: Tamakazura
Hearing from Ukon, back at the Rokujo estate, that Yugao's child had been found, Genji resolved to bring her there. He would not tell her true father, the Minister of the Center; he would let the world think he had turned up a daughter of his own from some unlooked-for quarter, and would keep her handsomely, as bait to trouble the hearts of the gallants. When Ukon put in that to care for the girl in place of the lady who had died so suddenly would be his atonement, he smiled wryly, and his eyes filled: no one, he said, had stayed with him as she had. Worried that the girl might have grown up as fallen in the world as Suetsumuhana, he wished first to see how she wrote, and set this poem at the end of a businesslike letter.
"The sedge that grows in the inlet of Mishima" is a preface leading to "suji." Mishima is an inlet on the middle Yodo, a poetic place of Settsu; the sedge has many veins in its leaves, and from them comes the word for thread or line. "Suji" means lineage, connection: since Tamakazura's father and Genji are brothers-in-law, the thread between them cannot break. But "will not break" carries an undertone, and what seems to speak of a bond of parent and child can be read as a love letter. Through that ambiguity one sees Genji's wish to test how she will respond.
- Author
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Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
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Genji Monogatari
- Other
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