Table of Contents
“The Possibility of Ukifune” suggested that Part Three differs significantly from the two earlier parts of the tale. “Pity Poor Kaoru” will pursue the question of difference further. It will briefly discuss the way Kaoru has been received and contrast the handling of the theme of “surrogates” in Genji’s case and his. The greater part of it will then argue that the treatment of Kaoru and his troubles is intended above all to elicit the reader’s pity for him, without regard to the other characters involved, and that it employs visible artifice to this end.
A recent essay on Kaoru by Paul Schalow[1] might almost concern a comparable figure in a different book. It illustrates the gulf that can separate divergent perspectives on the same work. Schalow placed in strict parallel the “foundational relationship between Genji’s parents…from which radiates the central dynamic of multiple substitutions in the tale,” and the “new hero and…new foundational relationship for the tale beginning in ‘Hashihime’.”[2] This is the relationship between Kaoru and the Eighth Prince, for whom, according to Schalow, Kaoru conceives a “heroic passion.”[3] Schalow wrote, “When the Eighth Prince dies…his death reverberates throughout the remainder of the tale in the form of another pattern of multiple substitutions.”[4] Therefore, “At their core the Uji chapters depict Kaoru’s attempts to keep alive the memory of his friendship with the Eighth Prince by pursuing a displaced intimacy with the Prince’s three daughters.”[5]
“Pity Poor Kaoru,” on its side, will deny that any “central dynamic of multiple substitutions” exists in Parts One and Two of the tale, and argue that in this regard Part Three differs strikingly from what precedes it. In agreement with the narrative on the subject, it will take the series of substitutions in Part Three to begin with the bond between Kaoru and Ōigimi, the Eighth Prince’s oldest daughter, and from this standpoint it will discuss several passages that do not appear in Schalow’s work: those that attribute to Kaoru urgent desire for a member of the opposite sex. Where Schalow wrote of “the chaste nature of Kaoru’s fascination with Ukifune,” this essay takes it as understood that Kaoru makes love with Ukifune during their first night together, and then presumably again when he visits her at Uji. Above all, “Pity Poor Kaoru” will approach Kaoru’s feelings and motives from a different direction. Rather than probe his psychology, it will question (in concert with several contemporary Japanese scholars) the idea that Kaoru has any coherent psychology at all.
When so many writers have discussed Kaoru in psychological terms, although with many inevitable differences of emphasis, the idea that he has no psychology may sound both startling and gratuitously critical of the chapters that feature him. However, this essay does not question the brilliance of the Uji chapters, which even without Parts One and Two would still be the masterpiece of Heian fiction. Instead, “Pity Poor Kaoru” represents an initial and certainly imperfect attempt to come to grips with a significant aspect of the complex differences of tone, range of interest, narrative method, and so on that characterize this part of the work. One theme in Genji scholarship has to do with interpreting motifs and passages throughout the tale in such a way as to integrate Part Three more convincingly with what precedes it. Schalow’s parallel between Genji and Kaoru (each with his “foundational relationship” and his series of “multiple substitutions”) illustrates that trend.
It is natural that many scholars should prefer to grasp the work in this manner and so to affirm the integrity of the whole. In practice, however, there are many reasons to find Part Three unusual. While the repetition of the pattern discerned by Schalow gives the tale an apparent consistency, the radical difference in content between the two foundation relationships, and between each of these relationships and its ensuing substitute series, only underscores how dissimilar Part Three really is. In the immediate postwar period this part was seen as the culmination of the tale, but current readings shun evaluation.[6] Some, especially Mitani Kuniaki’s influential “Genji monogatari daisanbu no hōhō” (1982),[7] make it difficult to understand how Part Three could be by the same author, although authorship is not an issue that scholars raise. The relationship of Part Three to the rest of the tale seems therefore to remain tacitly unsettled. Under these circumstances there is reason also to identify, for the sake of argument, what makes this part so unlike the rest and to attempt to define the difference. This analysis of the figure of Kaoru attempts to do so.
Readers have always seen a difference between Genji and Kaoru. Later Heian fiction writers did not imitate Genji, however much they may have admired him. Their heroes all resemble Kaoru, in whom the author of Sarashina nikki (mid-eleventh century) saw her ideal.[8] By the end of the Heian period Genji’s behavior with women had apparently become an issue, since the female author of Mumyōzōshi (ca. 1200) wrote of him, “There are many things about him that one might wish otherwise.”[9] In contrast, she wrote of Kaoru, “There is nothing about him that one would wish to be different.”[10] Her criticism of Genji recalls the attitude adopted by the monk Chōken (1125–1203), who condemned the tale on moral grounds in his Genji ippon kyō. In contrast, she defended Kaoru against any sign of similar disapproval. To someone who objected that Kaoru is not always to be trusted in intimate situations, she replied, “That is not his fault. Women are unfortunately much too susceptible.”[11] She also cited as model women characters (konomoshiki hito) in the tale the undoubtedly chaste but also impossibly unattractive Suetsumuhana and Hanachirusato.[12] If the original patrons and audience of the tale had felt this way about Genji, Murasaki Shikibu might never have been able to leave such a hero to posterity.
From the Mumyōzōshi author’s perspective, one apparently common in her time,[13] it is Kaoru’s kokoro (“heart”) that makes him so admirable: the thoughtfulness, tact, and steadfastness of feeling on which the narrator insists. Still, Genji, too, was known to be thoughtful and loyal. Perhaps the decisive difference has to do with Kaoru’s announced reluctance to make love to a woman without her consent and with his unfailing tact (according to the narrator) under intimate circumstances. No such reluctance deterred Genji. Kaoru’s attitude can be seen as the heart of what Mitani Kuniaki, in the title of his essay on the subject, called the “Kaoru illusion” (Kaoru gensō).
[1] “The Uji Chapters: Maidens of the Bridge,” in Schalow, A Poetics of Courtly Male Friendship in Heian Japan.
[2] Schalow, A Poetics of Courtly Male Friendship, 163.
[3] Schalow, A Poetics of Courtly Male Friendship, 167.
[4] Schalow, A Poetics of Courtly Male Friendship, 163.
[5] Schalow, A Poetics of Courtly Male Friendship, 164.
[6] Despite perceptions of difference and vagaries of personal taste, no one seems ever to have suggested seriously that Part Three is inferior. A passage on this issue by Charo D’Etcheverry (Love After The Tale of Genji, 3–4) leaves an erroneous impression.
[7] Mitani Kuniaki, “Genji monogatari daisanbu no hōhō.”
[8] Mitani Kuniaki, “Torawareta shisō,” 283.
[9] Higuchi and Kuboki, Matsura no Miya monogatari, Mumyōzōshi, 198.
[10] Higuchi and Kuboki, Matsura no Miya monogatari, Mumyōzōshi, 202.
[11] Higuchi and Kuboki, Matsura no Miya monogatari, Mumyōzōshi, 202–3.
[12] Higuchi and Kuboki, Matsura no Miya monogatari, Mumyōzōshi, 193.
[13] Mitani Kuniaki, “Torawareta shisō,” 287.