THE WORLD OF THE TALE

Something essential to remember while reading The Tale of Genji is that no one in it is ever alone. A lord or lady lived surrounded by a more or less large staff of women and, just outside, men. The notions of solitude and privacy did not exist. A lady slept within curtains, it is true, but they were only curtains, and any number of gentlewomen slept just outside them on the floor. When a lord went somewhere secretly at night, he might (at some risk to himself) take only two or three attendants with him. If he said something privately to a gentlewoman, he managed to do so in a room already containing a good many of them.

Still, a lord or lady with no one but attendants or household staff nearby was alone in a way, because in an important sense such people did not count. Relations between people of standing were what mattered, and these were not necessarily conducted face-to-face. Good manners maintained proper distance, which amounted to upholding the accepted social order. A messenger could not deliver even an oral message to a great lord in person. His words had to be relayed in, sometimes in more than one stage. He might not see even the first intermediary, let alone hear the lord's voice. Domestic space, divided by screens, curtains, blinds, and so on—objects hardly more substantial than ways of speaking—similarly upheld distance and inviolate dignity.

This is particularly striking in scenes of courtship. In many the man complains about having to talk to the woman through one of her gentlewomen. Of course, he cannot see her, and he may have no idea what she looks like. He will not normally see her even if she speaks to him in her own voice, since she will still be in another room, behind a blind and a curtain, and the curtain will remain even if she allows him into the room where she is. If he then takes it upon himself to brush her curtain aside and go straight to her, he will by that gesture alone have claimed something close to the final intimacy.

Such fastidious manners do not suggest the atmosphere of blithe permissiveness that moralistic readers down the centuries, and quite close to our own time, have found in the tale. On the contrary, they are meant to defeat erotic spontaneity. The language is similarly reticent. Yume ("dream"), for example, is the stock literary word for sexual intercourse between lovers. Some readers have wondered whether the men and women in the tale ever actually do anything, since they seem to spend their nights merely chatting; but katarau, which ostensibly means that, actually refers to other intimacies as well. (The same euphemism exists in medieval French and probably in many other languages.) The verb "see" can also be stronger than expected. A man who "sees" or "is seeing" a woman (a standard expression) is at least to some extent sharing his life with her, and Genji's having "seen" Utsusemi in a pitch-dark room (chapter 2) means bluntly that he has possessed her. With all the conventions of architecture, furnishings, and manners designed precisely to prevent a suitor or visitor from seeing a woman, the effect of an accidental glimpse (through a crack in a fence, a hole in a sliding panel, a gap in a curtain) could be devastating. In fiction, where the plot may hang on such a moment, kaimami ("seeing through a crack") is an understandably common motif. Of course, a man may also peer through a promising crack on purpose. Perhaps he should not, but at least in a tale the world might not go round so interestingly if he refrained.

In the language of the tale, yo no naka ("our world," "life," "le monde") also means the relationship between a particular man and woman. As often elsewhere, this aspect of life was especially absorbing for women because they so depended on men for their place in "the world." A woman had only one refuge outside a stable relationship with a man: she could become a nun. This did not mean that she joined a convent, an established monastic community. Instead, she took a certain level of religious vows, had her hair cut short, wore plain, discreet colors, and stayed at home. This radical step was not taken lightly.

A good many women in the tale become nuns this way. Among the men, Genji thinks constantly about leaving the world, and Kaoru after him, but neither one ever acts. The only man who becomes a monk roughly comparable to the kind of nun just described is the eccentric Akashi Novice, and the only one who has himself fully ordained is Retired Emperor Suzaku. Whatever their dreams of peace and piety, the men simply do not have the same incentive as the women.