Even as you speak
of sending the robe back to me,
my thoughts go to you—
to those nights of the one sleeve
spread out beneath you alone
- Meaning
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Even as you speak of sending the robe back, my thoughts go out to you, and to those nights spent with one sleeve spread beneath you alone.
- Commentary
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Part One: Tamakazura
Genji looked at Suetsumuhana's poem and laughed: the old-fashioned poets can never get free of "Chinese robe" and "sleeves wet through"—though he was of their number himself. She had once sent him, to look at, a book on paper from the Imperial Office that the late Prince of Hitachi had written out, crammed with the secret lore of poetry and with faults to be avoided, so many that a man with no gift for the art would be left unable to move at all; he had given it back. Murasaki said quite seriously that he should have kept it and shown it to their daughter; but Genji answered that it does a woman no good to fix upon one pursuit and lose herself in it. A reply had not so much as crossed his mind, but Murasaki pressed him—she had written "I would send it back," and not to return it would be discourteous—and, being a man who never withheld his kindness from anyone, he wrote this, quite at his ease.
"Kaesamu" takes up her "I would send it back." Drawing on the belief of the time that a robe turned inside out will bring the beloved in a dream, he reads into her word of returning the loneliness of sleeping alone. "Katashiki" is to lie with only one's own sleeve spread beneath one, the standard figure for a solitary bed. He neither meets her reproach head on nor turns it aside, but takes it up as sympathy for her loneliness; and the phrase he adds—"and no wonder"—is easy and assured. The narrator says he wrote at his ease because with her no care was needed; still, that he answered at all shows how fine his kindness was.
- Author
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Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
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Genji Monogatari
- Other
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