This essay has sought to acknowledge that the Genji text conveys after all, through its wit and grace, some of the major realities of life. Haruo Shirane wrote, in agreement with many others, “In the Genji it is not the fulfillment or frustration of desire that becomes the focus of the narrative so much as the elegant and elaborate process of courtship…Almost every aspect of social intercourse is transformed into an aesthetic mode.”^[127]

A good deal of the narrative indeed concerns courtship, and perhaps some of this courtship really is “elegant and elaborate.” Some of it, however, is another thing first. Genji’s pursuit of Utsusemi is more naively brazen than intrinsically elegant, his pursuit of Susetsumuhana more comical, and his abduction of the child Murasaki more racily dramatic (or, as some now say, criminal). His conquest of Oborozukiyo is far from elaborate, and his courtship of Asagao, so unrelenting that she fears betrayal by her own women, lacks any elegance at all beyond the civilized forms that Genji still upholds. This is not to criticize the tale or its hero. Rather, it is to insist that, even in the realm of courtship, less rarefied realities show plainly enough through the tale’s “aesthetic mode.”

Moreover, much of the tale is not about courtship at all. Shirane continued:

Genji’s mastery of the arts—assisted by his wealth, rank, skill, looks, and charm—undoubtedly makes him a cultural paragon in his world. However, his ambitions and triumphs, as well as his slow disintegration, also involve aspirations and personal maneuvering unrelated to any particular “cultural and aesthetic code.” Nothing in the narrative except its supernatural elements suggests that this aspect of Genji’s experience “transcends the usual notion of power and influence.” Far from being unusual, except in the degree to which he is gifted, Genji succeeds by the methods of any courtier and fails as might anyone whose extravagant success impairs his judgment.

Some writers on the tale have taken it for granted that Genji represents an “ideal.” Murasaki, too, has been seen as an “ideal woman.” However, this view seems to put beyond question certain things that, when examined, enrich the work and give Genji and Murasaki fuller life.

The notion of “ideal” associated with Genji is probably summed up by his peerless looks and grace, which the narrator evokes repeatedly, but his enchanting quality also diverts the audience’s attention from what he is up to. Many more or less troubling passages end when the narrator turns the scene into a beautiful tableau, or the gentlewomen, watching him leave, whisper to each other what a wonder he is to behold. He also has superb intellectual and artistic gifts, as well as the personal charisma that gives him, in Kashiwagi’s words, such a “singular light.” He is never ordinary. It is this quality that gives him in all circumstances a dignity commensurate with his exquisitely ambiguous proximity to the throne. However, while his beauty in this broad sense makes him fascinating, it does not make him a model of laudable thought or behavior. His “light” is not a sign of goodness. On the contrary, it lends grace and style to that in him which may not be laudable at all. At each moment the audience sees of him what the narrator wishes to show, but in the imagination the reader puts these moments together, looks beyond the words, and sees more or less distinctly a man. No one could think, talk, or write about “him” otherwise. This man is like other men, even if his gifts lift him above all others.

Naturally Genji has always stirred readers’ dreams, but Murasaki lives with Genji the man. It is he who claims her, tests her, hurts her, cajoles her, lies to her, loves her, and, even against her wishes, never lets her go. Some have described their love, too, as “ideal” and called its story “the fulfillment of ideal love.”^[129] However, their fate is not a happy one.

Genji alone provokes this fate, moved by ambition that requires more of Murasaki than she can give him. After the abdication of Emperor Reizei (“Wakana Two”), his secret son, he entertains before the reader thoughts if not of empire, then at least of dynasty. Already the grandfather of a future emperor in the female line, he nonetheless regrets not being the same in the male:

Thus Genji, who would really have reigned if his father had not refrained from naming him heir apparent, has long wished to correct this error and, so to speak, rewrite history. Dare one imagine that he made love to Fujitsubo with that, too, in mind? At any rate, it is to this sort of desire—one his gifts allowed him the hope of fulfilling—that he sacrifices with deep but blind sorrow the woman he really loves.

Murasaki may understand little of this, but there is much that Genji does not understand about her, either. She has her own destiny. If he, in a truer world than the flawed one they inhabit, is a born emperor whom only fortune has cheated of his realm, she in that truer world is his equal, and in this one suffers a counterpart misfortune. Her resistance to his three infidelities proceeds from no intrinsic trait, but only from the predicament of a flawed birth that does not match her nature. For him, reclaiming what should have been his requires such manipulation of persons and circumstances that despite both genius and supernatural favor he falls short after all. He wanted too much. Reizei has no heir, the Third Princess slips from him, and these two great transgressions (against his father and against Murasaki) cost him the substance of what he is and has.

Murasaki, as beautiful as he, has never for a moment been ordinary either. Still, she is a woman, and her different destiny depends on his. Despite her repeated affirmations of distinctness, she does not free herself from his appetites until his powers begin to fail and her own death approaches; and if she were not thanks to him an empress’s adoptive mother, that empress’s last visit to her could not seal her life. Yet in rising at the end above happiness or unhappiness she achieves something that he does not, for until lost to view he remains, like many another great man, entangled in the complexities of an extravagant pride.