Masks (6 page)

“That was some chance she took. If I were you, I’d have dragged her off the train at Atami or somewhere.” The clear assumption of passivity on his part made Ibuki smile grimly, curling the corners of his mouth.

“Let me borrow that article,” he said. “I want to look it over. Are you calling from the hospital?”

“Yes, but the neuropsychiatry society is meeting today, and I’m about to head over to that coffee shop near your office. We won’t be able to talk, but stop by on your way home, and I’ll give it to you there.”

“Good. Half an hour okay?”

“I’ll take a taxi and be there in less than ten minutes.” That settled, Mikamé then asked, “Did Yasuko come to class today?”

“Not since we got back. I suppose she’s tired out from the trip.” He felt the chill of the concrete floor creep slowly up through his feet.

At home that evening, Ibuki began to read the pamphlet containing the article. He knew that Mieko Toganō was a tanka poet of the romantic school, with roots in the
Shinkokinshū
aesthetic of “mystery and depth,” and he
had a high regard for the lyrical immediacy of her poems. But the sudden appearance—after a score of years in oblivion—of a prose work such as this, in a style that lay somewhere between a discursive essay and a memoir, had thrown him off balance.

His new closeness to Yasuko made him jealous of her devotion to Mieko, which showed so plainly in her speech and conduct. Part admiring, part fearful, she seemed indeed to be under the other woman’s spell. The thought of this filled him now with a compelling desire to learn all that he could about his rival.

The attachment to Mieko that Yasuko had developed after Akio’s death appeared to him to consist of more than the simple rechanneling of love for her husband into a tender sympathy for his grieving mother. And he had been right, it would seem, in guessing that the first to take up the study of spirit possession had been neither Akio nor Yasuko, but Mieko herself.

After its appearance in
Clear Stream,
“An Account of the Shrine in the Fields” had been reprinted separately at the author’s expense. The date of publication was October 1937, just after the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War. Mieko’s husband would have still been alive when she wrote it. Akio and Harumé would have been small children. The prospect of glimpsing Mieko as she had been then fired his curiosity.

An Account of the Shrine in the Fields

As we know from
The Tale of Genji
and other sources, the Shrine in the Fields, located in Sagano in western Kyoto, was a sacred place where unmarried daughters of the emperor or of imperial princes would retire for a period of purification before leaving the capital to serve as high priestesses at the Grand Shrine in Ise. In shamanism, transmitters
of the divine oracle are customarily female, and so it seems likely that the choosing of an imperial princess for such a post reflects the influence of ancient shamanistic tradition in Japan.

On a recent visit to Kyoto, after seeing Arashiyama I decided to investigate what remained of the shrine so familiar to me from its mention in
The Tale of Genji
and No drama. Inquiring here and there along a narrow trail that wound through bamboo groves, I came before long to a stone marker on the left which bore the inscription “Shrine in the Fields.” Inside the deserted precincts, on a slight elevation, stood the shrine building—a small and unassuming edifice, its thatched roof green with moss, even to the crossed logs atop the ridgepole. It was flanked on one side by a rock inscribed “Shrine of the High Priestess,” on the other by a stone lantern; around it was a low brushwood fence with a torii gate of unfinished, worm-eaten wood. To the rear was a large grove of cedars and oaks, some lying fallen over sideways. Dead leaves, unswept, covered the ground. The scene had an air of dreary abandonment. Spotting an old stone well nearby, I went over and peered inside, but deep in the colorless water I could make out nothing save the pale and blurred outlines of my own face. Well water flowed through a trough into a stone basin with dipper, though surely few people came by to use it. At the shrine office across the way I learned that the torii gate is made of a certain oak that grows on Mount Atago, thus preserving a small vestige of the shrine’s original appearance-thanks largely, it seems, to references in
The Tale of Genji
and Nō plays to “a gate of black wood, a low brushwood fence.” The old man in the office, a local native, told me also that more bamboo is found near the shrine than anywhere else in Sagano, and that its quality is the best in all Japan.

Having long felt a romantic attraction to the Shrine in the Fields, I was at first disappointed to find no suggestion of the imposing place it must once have been. But the
system of sending high priestesses to Ise disappeared in the Middle Ages, and with it the need for a temporary shrine where a life of preparatory abstinence might be led. From the Ōnin War
^*7
on, moreover, Kyoto had suffered repeatedly from the ravages of fiery wars. That the old shrine on the city outskirts should have been abandoned, its fame lingering only on the pages of classical literature, seemed no cause for wonder.

My own interest in the spot, indeed, derives not from its historical significance but from the intense sympathy I feel for the character of the Rokujō lady in
The Tale of Genji.

Recent work by scholars such as Professors I. and T. tends to treat Kiritsubo, Fujitsubo, and Aoi as major characters, while dismissing the Rokujō lady as a minor character—or, like Empress Kokiden, a mere villainess. To me, however, the role she plays is vastly more significant than this. Such casual treatment is an affront to a great lady, and compels me to speak out on her behalf. While the author’s primary interest appears unquestionably to lie in Genji’s relationships with other women (among them Fujitsubo, Aoi, and the Third Princess), focusing in particular on Genji’s “oedipal complex” and the gradual maturing of his personality, it seems to me equally beyond question that the Rokujō lady, too, has enormous influence over Genji, an influence that is, in essence, shamanistic. Her presence recurs as a strongly discordant motif, a unifying element in the symphony of
The Tale of Genji.

Initial reference to the Rokujō lady comes in the “Evening Faces” chapter, where abruptly in the opening line we learn, indirectly, that young Genji has already struck up an amorous liaison with this lady who is eight years his senior and the widow of the former crown prince. By contrast, other female characters are introduced only after remarkably careful groundwork; in Genji’s first encounters with the
lady of the evening faces, the lady of the locust shell, and Oborozukiyo, each lady has the distinctive beauty of a particular flower. That the beginning of Genji’s romance with the Rokujō lady alone should be missing seems odd indeed, and leads one to suspect rather that it may have been lost. Motoori Norinaga found the omission so disturbing that he himself wrote a chapter entitled “The Armpillow,” based on deductions from later chapters, to describe how Genji pursued and won the Rokujō lady (an expression, one senses, of the intensity of Norinaga’s own regard for her).

The Rckujō lady first came to court at sixteen, bride of the then crown prince; her husband was a younger brother of the Kiritsubo Emperor, the reigning monarch and father of Genji. Her father appears only as “the Minister,” but since the consort of the crown prince would one day be empress, the center of palace life, we may be sure she had few peers in beauty, breeding, or lineage. Shortly after the birth of their daughter, her husband suddenly stepped down as crown prince to take up the burden-free life of a wealthy young nobleman, thereby denying the Rokujō lady, his wife, the glittering future that had awaited her. The setback dealt a grave wound to her pride, for like any beautiful young Heian lady, she would have long dreamed of the day when she might, as empress, command the homage of all. Shortly thereafter her husband died, leaving his young widow and small daughter alone in the world.

Genji’s father, the Kiritsubo Emperor, took pity on the young widow and urged her to come live in his palace along with her daughter, but she declined the invitation. Doubtless her pride made her reject the prospect of becoming the second- or third-ranking imperial concubine.

She settled into a quiet but elegant life as mistress of a large house on Rokujō Avenue, raising her daughter with little hope of greater things to come. Her superb gifts as a writer, poet, and calligrapher, and her unrivaled taste in
matters of music and fashion, helped her to create a refined milieu extending to the least of her attendants. Her home was a stylish playground, much sought after by young royalty and court nobles; she exhibited disdain for all that was coarse or ill-bred. The remaining years of her life seemed destined to pass in the glow of a fine, pale light, like the long evening hours of early summer—until into that wan and solitary twilight, disrupting its tranquillity, strode the shining young Prince Genji.

Having already succeeded in meeting clandestinely with his father’s consort, the empress Fujitsubo, Genji must have felt little compunction about making advances toward the widow of the former crown prince. Her famed wit and beauty, her status as one who had nearly been empress, even her eight-year superiority in age—surely all these were incitements to advance, not retreat. Burning with unrequited love for Fujitsubo, six years his elder, Genji pursued the Rokujō lady as the one closest to his ideal. Her cool dignity and reserve must only have intensified her resemblance to Fujitsubo, and her desirability.

Trouble arose with the consummation of their love. Whatever qualities of refinement, beauty, and cultivation Fujitsubo and the Rokujō lady may have shared on the surface, at heart they were altogether different. Fujitsubo had learned to mold herself to a man by dissolving her identity in his; the Rokujō lady, in contrast, possessed a spirit of such lively intensity that she was incapable of surrendering it fully to any man. However tastefully clad in layers of sophistication, that spirit could not stay hidden for long once she had given herself to a man of Genji’s rare sensitivity.

“At Rokujō he had overcome the lady’s resistance—and now, alas, his longing had cooled. People saw fit to wonder at the rapid dwindling of his ardor once he had made her his own.” Thus remarks the author, in deliberately oblique fashion, on the start of their difficulties.

Commentators generally agree that the Rokujō lady
was jealous and vindictive—traits, they say, which Genji abhorred and which drove him from her. This view is colored by Buddhist teaching. As passion transforms the Rokujō lady into a living ghost, her spirit taking leave of her body again and again to attack and finally to kill Genji’s wife Aoi, the commentators see in her tragic obsession a classic illustration of the evil karma attached to all womankind.

Yet, it seems to me, the author of
The Tale of Genji
does not despise the Rokujō lady. Quite the contrary; there is much evidence of a basic sympathy. The estrangement between Genji and the Rokujō lady that came about after Aoi’s death was probably inevitable, since Genji had witnessed one of the attacks by her spirit, but just over a year later, on learning of the Rokujō lady’s decision to accompany her daughter to Ise, he is shown calling in farewell at the Shrine in the Fields, in a scene that is one of the gems of the novel, filled with the grief of parting. Equally moving are his superb farewell poem, sent after the two by courier on their departure day, and the Rokujō lady’s rejoinder, scribbled in haste at a roadside shelter.

The unhappy stiffness that grew between Genji and the Rokujō lady was due to the intensity of her ego—an intensity that the attentions of Genji, not to mention those of lesser men, were powerless to diminish. Inhibited by the upbringing given to all young Heian princesses (one firmly discouraging any sort of direct action), the Rokujō lady turned unconsciously to spirit possession as the only available outlet for her strong will. Genji himself seems surprisingly tolerant and forgiving of her behavior, as though conceding some justification for it. But Aoi’s attacker was, unquestionably, the spirit of the Rokujō lady in life, and the appearances later of what is taken to be her ghost, visiting the sickbeds of Genji’s subsequent wives, might instead be seen as the spontaneous workings of Genji’s own conscience (the “devil in his heart”), the consequences of his failure to make suitable reparation to her for her
sufferings. While she is alive, he wearies of her aloofness, yet he fears her feminine psychic powers. After her death he attempts a reconciliation by uniting her daughter, Akikonomu, with the Reizei emperor, thus enabling the daughter to realize what had once been the destiny of her mother; it seems his sense of guilt is not to be assuaged so simply, however. How else to explain that the ghost of the Rokujō lady confronts him in his moment of supreme mental anguish, to exact a cruel revenge?

After the Third Princess has taken the tonsure, having given birth to the child of another man, the voice of the Rokujō lady addresses Genji gleefully through a woman servant: “At last I made one of them a nun! When Murasaki’s life was spared, I couldn’t bear to see how happy you were, so I lingered in the house, hiding—but now I am satisfied, and I will go.” One had assumed long before this that the Rokujō lady had been mollified by her daughter’s success, but here the author revives her as the sole lady in the tale who remains at odds with Genji.

In this way, whereas Fujitsubo and Murasaki are women who dissolve their whole beings in the anguish of forgiving men, and thereby create an image of eternal love and beauty in the hearts of the men they love, the Rokujō lady is instead a Ryō no onna: one who chafes at her inability to sublimate her strong ego in deference to any man, but who can carry out her will only by forcing it upon others—and that indirectly, through the possessive capacity of her spirit.

Encountering the words “Ryō no onna,” Ibuki was startled. A sensation of being watched stole over him, as if from somewhere in the room the toothless, sunken-cheeked mask he had seen that day on the Nō stage at Yorikata Yakushiji’s was staring down at him with hollow eyes.