Genji says nothing to Murasaki about his pursuit of Asagao in part because, for him, his ambition to marry Asagao is unrelated to his love for Murasaki, and in part because he knows that this time he is in earnest. Murasaki, who learns what he is up to only through rumor, says nothing either. Her silence measures the seriousness of the matter. She is not just hurt but frightened. Noticing her changed mood, Genji reproaches her as before, although with sharper deceit.
One evening, overcome by the empty hours, Genji decided on one of his so-called visits to [Asagao’s aunt]…“I gather that the Fifth Princess is unwell, and I thought I might pay her a call,” he said, on one knee before [Murasaki]; but she did not even look at him. Her profile as she played instead with her little girl suggested that something was wrong. “You are looking strangely unlike yourself these days,” he said. “I have not done anything. I have been staying away a bit because I thought you might find the same old salt-burner’s robe dull by now. Now what can you possibly have been making of that?”
“Familiarity often breeds contempt,” she replied and lay down with her back to him…She lay there thinking how naive she had always been, when such things as this could happen…As she watched him go…she ached unbearably to think that he might really be leaving her.[64]
The way she turns her back recalls the ware wa ware of three years earlier. His conduct is beyond words. She can hardly speak to him.
Further, decisive rebuffs from Asagao leave Genji undaunted, but when Murasaki’s continuing torment troubles him and draws him back towards her after all, at first reluctantly, this crisis, too, begins to pass.
“You are looking curiously unlike yourself—I cannot imagine why,” Genji said to her, stroking her hair…“You are quite grown up now, but you still think seldom of others, and it is just that way you have of getting their feelings wrong that makes you so dear.” He tidied a wet lock of hair at her forehead, but she turned further from him and said not a word.
“Who can have brought you up to be such a baby?” he asked. It was such a pity, when life was short anyway, to have her so upset with him! But then daydreams would sweep him off again…“Please understand that you have no need to worry.” He spent the whole day trying to make her feel better.[65]
That night a brilliant moon illumines the snow, and Genji waxes eloquent as he strives for reconciliation.
“More than the glory of flowers and fall leaves that season by season capture everyone’s heart, it is the night sky in winter, with snow glittering under a brilliant moon, that in the absence of all color speaks to me strangely and carries my thoughts beyond this world.”[66]
Although justly famous, his praise of winter is not a good sign. He is becoming overwrought.
Keen to act and to be amused, Genji sends the girls down to the garden to roll their snowball, while exaltation sweeps him on to dream aloud about Fujitsubo. It is not that the thought of Fujitsubo, having filled his mind all the time he courted her stand-in, Asagao, has at last spilled over into words. His thoughts of Fujitsubo and his interest in Asagao are unrelated, belonging as they do to the realms of private feeling on the one hand and of public ambition on the other. Having failed with Asagao, he seeks solace and reassurance in memories of Fujitsubo, and he also seeks to bring Murasaki closer to him by confiding in her. Thus he flirts not only with betraying what Fujitsubo was to him but with taking her name in vain, so to speak, by putting her memory to the ends of his own self-satisfaction. “The smallest thing she did always seemed miraculous,” he says. “How one misses her on every occasion…She made no show of brilliance, but a talk with her was always worthwhile…No, we shall never see her like again.” He then goes straight on to compound his fault towards her and Murasaki by comparing Murasaki explicitly, and unflatteringly, to her and then to Asagao.
“For all her serenity, [Fujitsubo] had a profound distinction that no other could attain, whereas you, who despite everything have so much of the noble murasaki,[67] have a difficult side to you as well and I am afraid you may be a little headstrong. The Former Kamo Priestess’s [Asagao’s] temperament seems to me very different. When I am lonely, I need no particular reason to converse with her, and by now she is really the only one left who requires the best of me.”[68]
A discussion of Oborozukiyo and others follows, without comparisons. In the guise of confiding in Murasaki, Genji has complacently reviewed his secure emotional assets while simultaneously placating her and reminding her that she depends on his indulgence. Nonetheless, her protest has worked as a loyal wife’s was supposed to in the “rainy night conversation”: it has convinced him of his folly and returned him to her. After a day spent talking her round, he has come round himself. Having indulged in calling up the image of Fujitsubo, he sees that Murasaki, there before him, has exactly her quality. This is not a new discovery for him. He has made it before when failure to grasp some petty prize has opened his eyes again to the treasure he already has. Disappointment with the Third Princess will affect him the same way, but by then it will be too late.
Later that night Genji falls asleep thinking of Fujitsubo, and his performance earns its reward when “he saw her dimly—it was not a dream—and perceived her to be extremely angry. ‘You promised never to tell, yet what I did is now known to all. I am ashamed, and my present suffering makes you hateful to me!’”[69] He awakes with a pounding heart to hear Murasaki crying out, “What is the matter?”
Murasaki’s challenge to his willful ways has provoked a play of ambition, treachery, love, conceit, cajolery, and contrition with an eerie outcome, and this pattern will recur in connection with the Third Princess. Murasaki’s open unhappiness over Asagao recalls her behavior as a girl, when her sulking persuaded him to stay home instead of going out for the night. While her conduct then appeared wanton, she was really only an innocent child, and her feelings in “Miotsukushi” or “Asagao” are natural to any wife. Still, to Genji’s mind, especially when he compares her to Fujitsubo or Asagao, the sharpness of her temper is a flaw, even if an attractive one. It is the inner counterpart, and perhaps the consequence, of her flawed origins. “Who can have brought you up such a baby?” he asks. The girl he reared himself, hoping to form her entirely to his will, has a will, an “I” of her own. She has “a difficult side to her” (sukoshi wazurawashiki ki soite) and is “perhaps, alas, a little headstrong” (kadokadoshisa no susumitamaeru ya kurushikaran). That could not be said of Fujitsubo, who despite her great depth “never put herself forward” (moteidete rōrōjiki koto mo mietamawazarishikado). Supremely distinguished, she betrayed no sharp glint of wit or temper. No more does Asagao, who, apart from her stubborn refusal to engage with Genji, seems utterly bland. These two great ladies do not have Murasaki’s “prickles.” Murasaki is too proud, cares too deeply for Genji, and depends on him too much to hold her peace; while Genji, more headstrong even than she, loves her too much either to ignore her or to scold her outright. It is the exceptional strength of the bond between them that allows their story to grow through crises like these towards real disaster.