Set beside the sleeve
that once was fragrant with
the orange blossom,
you do not seem to me at all
a different person from her
- Meaning
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Set beside the sleeve that was once fragrant with orange blossom, you do not seem to me a different person at all.
- Commentary
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Part One: Kocho
Genji, unable to put her from his mind, came often. On a still evening after rain, looking out at the young maples and oaks massed in green before her rooms and murmuring a line about the mild and limpid weather, he found himself thinking of this lady's glowing beauty, and went quietly across as usual. She had been at her writing practice, at her ease; she sat up, and the color of her face in its confusion was very lovely. Something in her gentleness put him so in mind of the woman of old that he could not bear it, and he said, with tears in his eyes, that when he first saw her he had not thought her so like, and that now there were times when he took her for that very person. Then, turning over a piece of orange from the fruit set out on a box lid, he made this poem.
"The sleeve that was fragrant with the orange" draws on the old poem about smelling the orange blossom that waits for the Fifth Month and finding in it the scent of a beloved's sleeve; it means the dead Yugao. "Yosou" is to set beside, to compare. "A different person" plays "mi," body or person, against "mi," the fruit of the orange. He says she is her mother over again—and on the strength of those words reaches for her, so that remembrance slides straight into desire. He went on to say that he had never been able to forget, that caring for her seemed a dream and yet was more than he could bear, and that she must not turn from him; and he took her hand. A single fruit of the season is all it takes for the dead woman and the living one to become one.
- Author
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Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
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Genji Monogatari
- Other
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