Merely for being
set beside that fragrant sleeve,
must this body too—
this fruit of the orange tree—
come to nothing, and be gone?

Meaning

Merely for being set beside that fragrant sleeve, must this body of mine, like the orange's fruit, come to nothing and be gone?

Commentary

Part One: Kocho

　With her hand taken, and unused to any such thing, she was deeply distressed, but answered mildly with this poem. Her lying with her face hidden in her distaste only drew him the more, and that day he let something of what he felt be known. She trembled with dislike; he pressed on, saying that he would keep it so well hidden that no one would see, that she must look as though nothing had happened, and that no one in the world felt for her as he did. A most officious parental affection, the narrator remarks. Later, when the rain had stopped and the moon come out, and her women, thinking to leave father and daughter to themselves, kept away, he muffled the rustling of his robes and lay down beside her. She wept, thinking that with a real parent no such wretched thing could have happened.

　"The fragrant sleeve" takes up his own phrase for her dead mother. "Merely for being set beside" is: just because you compare me. "The orange's fruit" plays "mi," fruit, against "mi," body—herself. Being likened to her mother, she fears she will vanish as her mother did, dead young and suddenly. "Mo koso sure" is the form used in dreading an outcome. She does not refuse him outright but turns him aside by speaking of ill omen; and her whole bewilderment before a foster father's unlooked-for behavior is in that. Where he saw the dead woman in the orange, she sees in its fruit the peril of her own life.

Author

Murasaki Shikibu

Source

Genji Monogatari

Other

Merely for being set beside that fragrant sleeve, must this body too— this fruit of the orange tree— come to nothing, and be gone?

Merely for being
set beside that fragrant sleeve,
must this body too—
this fruit of the orange tree—
come to nothing, and be gone?