The narrator makes it clear that Genji and Fujitsubo both feel intensely guilty about Fujitsubo’s pregnancy, and the child so astonishingly resembles Genji that no one privy to the secret could imagine anyone else failing to notice it. Fujitsubo is terrified. However, in “Momiji no ga” the Kiritsubo Emperor sees the resemblance only to dismiss it.
When Genji visited Her Highness’s residence as usual, to join in music making, His Majesty appeared with the child in his arms. “I have many children,” he said, “but you are the only one I have seen day and night since you were this small. I expect it is the way he reminds me of those days that makes him look so very like you. Perhaps all babies are like that.” He simply doted on his little son.[11]
The emperor claims to believe that the resemblance is no more than a figment of his fond imagination, and perhaps the author really meant her audience to take him at his word. However, this passage is so far out of keeping with similar ones from Genji and elsewhere that the reader is not obliged to do so. The emperor may recognize whose child this is and simply let the matter pass.[12]
As Okada noted, the Kiritsubo Emperor brought Genji and Fujitsubo together quite purposefully during Genji’s late childhood (“Kiritsubo”).[13]
His Majesty, who cared so deeply for both [Genji and Fujitsubo], asked her not to maintain her reserve. “I am not sure why,” he said, “but it seems right to me that he should take you for his mother. Do not think him uncivil. Just be kind to him. His face and eyes are so like hers that your own resemblance to her makes it look quite natural.” Genji therefore lost no chance offered by the least flower or autumn leaf to let her know in his childish way how much he liked her…
Genji’s looks had an indescribably fresh sweetness, one beyond even Her Highness’s celebrated and, to His Majesty, peerless beauty, and this moved people to call him the Shining Lord. Since Fujitsubo made a pair with him, and His Majesty loved them both, they called her the Sunlight Princess.[14]
Thus Genji’s father once encouraged such intimacy between Fujitsubo and his favorite son that Genji fell in love with her; and this in a tale in which Genji himself, thinking later on about Yūgiri and Murasaki, and Tō no Chūjō thinking about Yūgiri and Kumoi no Kari, know very well where such permissiveness may lead. He even allowed the two to seem a pair in the eyes of the world. No doubt Suzaku’s appointment as heir apparent, and his subsequent accession, weighed on the Kiritsubo Emperor not only as personally disappointing but also as detrimental to the realm. Then came the confusion over Fujitsubo’s pregnancy, since her real date of conception—obscured as thoroughly as possible by her women—made his paternity unlikely. Perhaps he began then to suspect a truth that the child’s face confirmed: this boy was not his son, but instead his beloved Genji’s. Through this child, and for the good of all (as confirmed later by the success of Reizei’s reign), his own choice for the succession could still be restored and Genji could play a role commensurate with his merit. To encourage this happy outcome, the Kiritsubo Emperor had only to remain silent. So he did.
Some twenty years later, after Kaoru’s birth (“Kashiwagi”), Genji reflects that he once did to his father with Fujitsubo what Kashiwagi has now done to him with the Third Princess, and he wonders whether his father knew after all.[15] If his father did not, then Genji’s suffering in this case makes sense as retribution for his undetected crime. However, if the Kiritsubo Emperor not only knew, but silently condoned an act that promised to rectify the injustice Genji had suffered, then for him, as for the Sumiyoshi deity, what seemed to be a crime was not one after all.[16]
[11] TTG, 142; GM 1:329.
[12] The baby could just as well look like Genji because he and Genji are both (ostensibly) the Kiritsubo Emperor’s sons and because, in addition, their mothers closely resemble each other. However, the narrative never suggests any such possibility and so appears to offer less real conjecture than a set motif. Examples from Sagoromo monogatari as well as Genji support this idea. In Sagoromo the empress has no idea who violated her daughter, but when the baby is born she instantly recognizes Sagoromo’s features, and so does the emperor when he eventually sees the boy. Other passages in Genji (Genji pleading to Tamakazura that she looks exactly like her mother, Yūgao) and Sagoromo (Sagoromo seeing the deceased Asukai no Himegimi’s face in her daughter’s) suggest that seeing the parent’s face in the child’s is a convention that may have prepared the original audience to doubt the Kiritsubo Emperor’s candor. Tanizaki Jun’ichirō certainly did. In “Yume no ukihashi,” which he presented as a comment on Genji, he had the narrator’s father (the Kiritsubo Emperor) purposely encourage a scandalously intimate relationship between the narrator’s stepmother (Fujitsubo) and the narrator himself (Genji).
[13] Okada, Figures of Resistance, 195–6.
[14] TTG, 15; GM 1:44.
[15] Genji’s inability to forgive Kashiwagi is repellent in comparison, but it is also true that, in violating the Third Princess, Kashiwagi yielded less to sanctioned destiny than to pathetic folly.
[16] Norma Field suggested something similar when she wrote (The Splendor of Longing, 29), “For instance, it is possible that Genji’s violation of the imperial succession does not ultimately constitute a transgression, for according to a higher principle, he was born to rule, if not directly, then through his enthroned children.”