Had it only bent
to the dew beneath the tree,
the maiden flower
would not have been left to wither
in the roughness of the wind
- Meaning
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Had it only bent to the dew beneath the tree, the maiden flower would never have been left to wither in the rough wind.
- Commentary
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Part One: Nowaki
This is Genji's reply, to which he added that she should look at the pliant bamboo—which bends before the wind and therefore does not break. Yugiri, anxious not to be found so close at hand, had gone away and did not hear it all; and the narrator, too, dismisses it, saying that perhaps she misheard, and that in any case it was not pleasant to listen to. Genji went on to visit the lady of the falling flowers and the Akashi girl, while Yugiri, likening the ladies he had glimpsed to cherry, kerria, and wisteria, grew more and more unsettled.
"The dew beneath the tree" is Genji's own feeling for her. "Had it bent" is a contrary-to-fact supposition. "The rough wind" takes up her "wind in wild disorder"—but in his hands it now means the other men, the rough ones, not himself. Had you yielded to me, he says, you would not be tormented by them; and so, with a straight face, he substitutes something else for the very wind she had meant him to be. Using the same maiden flower and changing only what the wind stands for is a deft turn—and its deftness is precisely its selfishness.
- Author
-
Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
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Genji Monogatari
- Other
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Even the sound of
an ordinary wind that
passes through the reeds
seems to sink into this one
wretched body of mine, and stay
-
In this wild disorder
of wind, the maiden flower
feels itself about
to wither quite away and
be finished, and be gone
-
Even on an evening
when the wind is up and clouds
run and mass and blur,
there is not a moment when
I forget, or can forget, you
-
On Oshio hill,
where the snow lies deep, the pheasant
rises and leaves tracks—
follow, today, those old tracks,
and look for what went before