In Parts One and Two, the long-term focus of the narrative is on Genji, while in Part Three it is on Kaoru. The uniqueness of both men is summed up by an attribute peculiar to each: Genji shines, while Kaoru gives off an exquisite perfume. In Japanese literature, Taketori monogatari provides the classic example of personal radiance like Genji’s, but the motif is limited neither to literature nor to Japan. Kaoru’s scent is exotic in comparison.

Two passages in Part Two (“Kashiwagi,” “Yokobue”) evoke Kaoru as a baby, but, as Konishi Jin’ichi observed,^[65] neither mentions his scent. It appears first in “Niou Miya,” the first chapter of Part Three, when Kaoru is in his mid-teens.

This fragrance is ambiguous in meaning. Readers have often associated it with Kaoru’s otherworldly (Buddhist) aspiration and taken it as suggesting a kind of sanctity, but despite his professed piety he is no holier by the end of the tale. Since Genji’s light links him to something beyond the human world, Kaoru’s fragrance may do so too, but in his case the link seems to be to darkness and the gloom of Uji.^[67] Kaoru sometimes complains that he feels singled out for misfortune, and with respect at least to his private life he may be right. His troubles seem connected, as he himself vaguely believes them to be, with the irregular circumstances of his birth. In that sense, the spirit’s appearance in “Tenarai” merely gives an outline identity to a problem that has weighed on him ever since.

The nature of that problem is elusive, but at first glance it seems clear enough. Kaoru began early to suspect that there was something irregular about his birth and that Genji was not his real father. “Takekawa” mentions “rumors that chanced to come his way” and the resulting “constant anxiety.”^[68] He felt somehow apart from others and longed to know the truth. In “Hashihime” he hears the whole story at last and receives a collection of letters between Kashiwagi and his mother. Contrary to what the reader might have expected, however, this revelation makes no difference. The subject never comes up again, and Kaoru’s anxiety and vague aspiration to religion continue as before. He never even reflects that as Kashiwagi’s son he is a Fujiwara, not a Minamoto, and that for all these years he has therefore been honoring the wrong clan deity—an issue that does not escape Tamakazura when the world learns in “Miyuki” that she is Tō no Chūjō’s daughter, not Genji’s. Something else must be wrong.

Kaoru’s existential discomfort remains unchanged when a passage in “Kagerō” casts doubt on the very idea that it has something to do with his birth. After the empress (Genji’s daughter) has spoken of him to one of her women, the narrator continues, “It was true that she and [Kaoru] were brother and sister [harakara], but she was still somewhat in awe of him.”^[69] The narrator in the original may conceivably be speaking from the empress’s point of view, and if so the passage may mean only that the empress believes Kaoru to be her brother. However, this remark, unqualified by any other, rings strangely enough to remind one that in this chapter Kaoru behaves toward the empress exactly as though he were her brother, which would be improper, hence unlike him, if he were not. The passage suggests a link between Kaoru’s state of mind and the miasma of Uji—a miasma associated in the next chapter with a possessing spirit.

The spirit that speaks in “Tenarai” therefore resembles Rokujō’s as an agent of karma, or fate. In pursuing its own ends, which is all that such a spirit can do, it subjects Kaoru to miseries earned before he was born—miseries visible in germ in the tale’s first chapter. As for Genji himself, many people in the tale have reason sooner or later to be grateful to him, but he causes others grievous harm. Yūgao is an example, and yet she never haunted him after her death. That would have been out of character for her, but she also did not matter enough to be able to do so; besides, he never insulted her as he insulted the proud Rokujō. In his world, slights inflicted on the great were especially dangerous, after the victim’s death as well as before. Thus it is indeed Rokujō and Suzaku whom Genji most grievously and most dangerously wrongs. With these two, especially, he loses his footing and provokes an enmity beyond his control, one that will haunt him and his descendants, and wear down even beyond his death the greatest heights of good fortune.