Genji has at last left Murasaki to spend some time with the Third Princess when word reaches him that Murasaki has died. He rushes back to Nijō and summons the most powerful healers. In response to their prayers the afflicting spirit suddenly “moved into a little girl, in whom it screamed and raged while his love began at last to breathe again.”[113] It is Rokujō.
Many studies of Murasaki and issues affecting her have neglected the dramatic scene that follows, and those who mention it may still dismiss it. Tanabe Seiko found it “tacked on” and recalled Shimizu Yoshiko saying that the author must have written it only because her readers liked the counterpart scene in “Aoi” and wanted more. For Kojima Yukiko, the text makes it perfectly clear why Murasaki falls ill: she is unhappy about the Third Princess. The possession scene, Kojima wrote, is simply a “device” to explain how the dying Murasaki can unaccountably revive and regain Genji’s attention.[114]
Doris Bargen rightly treated the scene at length,[115] but her conclusions amount to a denial that it represents what the text says it does: a renewed intervention in Genji’s life by a personage known as Rokujō. Bargen contended that the Rokujō who possesses the medium is not an autonomous entity but Murasaki’s own image of a woman whose “charisma” Murasaki appropriates to “empower herself”;[116] and she charged “critics” with mistakenly adopting Genji’s own, biased “preoccupation with identifying the possessing spirit,”[117] when here and in the earlier possession scene in “Aoi” they and Genji should both know that the real speaker is Genji’s possessed wife. However, it takes no preoccupation with anything to accept that the spirit is Rokujō. In “Aoi” the reader already knows that the spirit is Rokujō, and Genji recognizes her instantly. In this one, Genji behaves normally for someone addressed by a medium in a trance: he seeks to verify who the speaker is. His fear that he knows the answer already is all the more reason to make sure. To agree that the speaker is Rokujō is not to take Genji’s side. It is simply to read what is there.[118]
There are three possible ways to explain the possession: Murasaki somehow provokes her relapse and Rokujō’s outburst in order to get Genji’s attention and rebuke him, as Bargen would have it; the author arbitrarily does it for her, as Kojima suggested; or Genji’s absence removes his protection from Murasaki, and Rokujō seizes the opportunity to capture his attention herself. Only the third follows from the narrative itself, even if it does not make modern, rational or psychological sense. The spirit says:
I kept my eye on you from on high, and what you did for Her Majesty [Akikonomu] made me pleased and grateful, but perhaps I do not care that much about my daughter now that she and I inhabit different realms, because that bitterness of mine, which made you hateful to me, remains.
The spirit’s remark that in the afterworld she cares less about her daughter than Genji assumes has a ghastly plausibility. The spirit also confirms that Genji’s indiscretion is the immediate reason for her renewed reproach:
What I find particularly offensive, more so even than your spurning me for others when I was among the living, is that in conversation with one for whom you do care you callously made me out to be a disagreeable woman.
That is just what Genji did. The spirit continues:
I had hoped, as I did then, that you might at least be forgiving towards the dead and come to my defense when others maligned me; and that is why, since I have this shocking appearance, things have come to this at last. I have little enough against this woman, but you are strongly guarded. I feel far away and cannot approach you, and even your voice reaches me only faintly.
None of this has anything obvious to do with Murasaki, although in this scene Murasaki and Rokujō certainly are briefly and eerily superimposed—superimposed, not merged. That this superimposition resists explanation neither diminishes its power nor authorizes the suppression of one of the pair. To accept it is to feel doubly the heart-rending force of this, the height of Rokujō’s speech:
The weeping figure, her hair over her face, resembled the spirit he had seen then [in “Aoi”]. Shuddering with the same fear and astonishment, he took the girl’s hands and held her down lest she embarrass him. “Is it really you?” he asked…“Say plainly who you are! Or else, tell me something to make it obvious, something no one else could know. Then I will believe you, at least a little.”
The spirit sobbed loudly.
“Yes, as I am now, my form is one new and strange, but plainly the while
you are still just the same you, who always refuse to know.Oh, I hate you, I hate you!”[119]
The voice speaks the truth. Genji refuses to know. Murasaki, who does not hate him, could still say the same thing, but she does not.
Murasaki’s ware wa ware (“I am I”) long ago, over Akashi, was akin in spirit and rhetoric to love poems that set “I” against “you.” Rokujō’s utterance, which does so, too, belongs to the same family: I am no longer what I was, she says, but you are you (kimi wa kimi nari)—you are just the same as ever. It is the classic lover’s reproach become a nightmare voice, but Genji, who has no ears with which to heed it, will let this rebuke, too, pass.
[113] TTG, 654; GM 4:234. The influence of this spirit has been assumed from the start, since it begins its speech to Genji by saying, “For months you have cruelly confined me and inflicted on me such pain that I had thought I might teach you a proper lesson.”
[114] Tanabe, Genji monogatari kami fūsen, 130; Kojima, “Murasaki no Ue,” 68.
[115] Bargen, A Woman’s Weapon, 124–44.
[116] Bargen, A Woman’s Weapon, 124, 27.
[117] Bargen, A Woman’s Weapon, 26.
[118] Bargen’s reading requires a strange understanding of Rokujō. No degree of admiration or sympathy for Rokujō can explain why Murasaki or any other woman in the tale, however desperate, would seek the authority of someone so ill used by Genji. Bargen described Rokujō as “a proud, dissatisfied, and demanding woman who knew how to gain control over a man” (A Woman’s Weapon, 136), but Rokujō never gained control over Genji. If she had, he would have recognized his relationship with her publicly, as she wished. His failure to do so brought her years of intense suffering. To propose Rokujō as an inspiration to Murasaki is cruel to Rokujō and denies Murasaki any sense.
[119] TTG, 654–5; GM 4:235–6.