All the characters in Parts One and Two appear to have the narrator’s respect and, usually, her sympathy. She does not mock or belittle even the villainous Kokiden Consort of Genji’s early years; and if the Akashi Novice’s ways are sometimes amusing, the intensity of his ambition for a daughter so vital to Genji’s future, and the divine sanction this ambition enjoys, restore his dignity. Despite the comedy around her, Suetsumuhana retains her stature as a princess and as a human being. Even the randy Dame of Staff has wit and accomplishment that narrow her absurdity to that single obsession and otherwise suggest personal distinction. In amorous relationships the narrator never demeans Genji, even if at times she deplores his behavior, and her women, such as the vividly complex Utsusemi, are convincingly alive. The Uji chapters are not like this.

Contrasting passages from “Yomogiu” and “Agemaki” illustrate the difference. In “Yomogiu,” Suetsumuhana’s aunt presses her destitute niece to accompany her to Kyushu as a governess for her children. Suetsumuhana replies mainly with silence, but her ancient, starving women beg her to say yes, as does her foster sister Jijū. However, Suetsumuhana will not compromise her dignity as a princess or abandon the property left her by her father, and she blindly trusts Genji to honor his word and rescue her in the end. No, she finally says aloud, “I just want to fade away as I am.”^[26] Her guiding interests differ completely from her women’s, but neither she nor the narrator on her behalf blames them for feeling as they do. No wonder they long to leave a house that is collapsing around them. Jijū, who has no sensible choice but to go, still understands that her mistress should prefer to stay, and Suetsumuhana, heartbroken by Jijū’s departure, refrains from reproaching her. Instead, she hunts through her meager possessions for a suitable parting gift.

Perhaps the similar situation in “Agemaki” parodies the earlier one. Ōigimi, also a princess, likes Kaoru, but out of loyalty to what she believes were her late father wishes she refuses to marry him and move to the capital. If she goes on this way she will risk Suetsumuhana’s fate. Her old governess (Ben, now a nun) replies at length with sentiments just as reasonable as the women’s protests to Suetsumuhana. No one with Ōigimi’s best interests at heart (as the world commonly and sensibly understands such interests) could possibly speak otherwise. To Ōigimi, however, her words are “repellant and offensive.” To silence Ben she lies face down on the floor. Naturally the other women of the household, too, hope that she will accept her distinguished suitor, just as they hope that Nakanokimi will marry Niou. However, the narrator dismisses them repeatedly as ignorant, selfish, officious, base-minded nuisances. There seems to be no communication at all between the sisters and their women; nor, on this issue, is there any between the sisters themselves, or between Ōigimi and Kaoru.

Others have noted this failure or refusal of communication between the characters in the Uji chapters. Amanda Stinchecum wrote in her study of “Ukifune”:

“Continuity of thought and feeling between one character and another” is as present especially in Part One of The Tale of Genji as it is in To the Lighthouse, and as absent from the Uji chapters in general as it is from “Ukifune” in particular. The effect of this shift in narrative character can be compared loosely to a contrast noted by the narrator in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu.

Having seen a young woman encouraging her female lover to desecrate an image of her (the young woman’s) father, the narrator observes:

“A Paris theatre” translates théâtres de boulevard, places of popular entertainment that favor the lurid or melodramatic.^[29] The comparison suggested here involves neither sadism nor any notion that the Uji chapters actually are melodrama. Rather, it appeals to a general feature of mélodrame as understood in French: stress on calculatedly pathetic effect.^[30] The shift in question is therefore one from apparent naturalness to visible artifice, or from convincingly natural emotion to affective states dramatically unfamiliar enough to strain comprehension. It also recalls the Chief Equerry’s distinction, in “Hahakigi,” between paintings of “commonplace mountains and streams, the everyday shapes of houses, all looking just as one knows them to be,” and of “things like Mount Hōrai, raging leviathans amid stormy seas…or the faces of invisible demons.”^[31] The former corresponds to Proust’s “under the homely lamp of an actual country house,” and the latter to his “girl encouraging a friend to spit upon the portrait of a father who has lived and died for her alone.”

Ōigimi’s feelings about marriage to Kaoru illustrate the latter. Despite refusing to marry him, she still feels such possibilities of spiritual communion with him that she wants to have her younger sister turn away her suitor, Niou, and marry Kaoru instead. “I feel as though I should then be with both,” she explains to Ben, “and our two hearts, hers and mine, would be one in her.”^[32] She means to unite herself with Kaoru after all, but through her sister. As Norma Field put it: “An extraordinary vision, this: shrouded and thus invisible in her sister’s body, Ōigimi will be able to see (possess) Kaoru’s and conclude a marriage of true minds.”^[33] Although heartrending in its desperate ingenuity, Ōigimi’s imagined solution to her dilemma is also as impenetrable in practice as the rage and hatred of Proust’s young woman. Suggesting as it does a degree of artifice, it therefore reveals, on the underside of the author’s expertly woven brocade, the threads of intention that lead to Kaoru’s agonizingly chaste night with Nakanokimi and then maneuver Ōigimi, Nakanokimi, and Kaoru through it.

Discussions of Ōigimi, as of Kaoru and other characters in the Uji chapters, generally approach her from a psychological perspective, thus treating her as an autonomous agent whose refusal to marry Kaoru and subsequent death from self-starvation can be explained from what the narrator reveals, more or less transparently, about her. However, it is also possible to view what she says, does, or feels, as well as what she knows about the attitudes and intentions of others, from the standpoint of plot construction. Being relatively isolated from one another, the characters in the Uji chapters are available to be manipulated for the purpose of achieving a desired effect. The analysis of Kaoru will pursue this theme of disassociation not only between characters, but between elements of individual personality.

Ōigimi’s father makes it clear to Kaoru that he hopes Kaoru will look after his daughters after he is gone (“Hashihime”). In Part Two (“Wakana One”), Retired Emperor Suzaku similarly asks Genji to look after his favorite daughter, the Third Princess. He means that Genji should marry her, as Genji does. Kaoru apparently understands Ōigimi’s father to mean the same thing, especially since he contemplates taking possession of both. He and the reader are therefore entitled to believe that if he marries Ōigimi, he will do so with her father’s posthumous approval. As Ben’s lengthy reply to Ōigimi shows, the whole household believes that Ōigimi’s father desired this marriage, having heard him say “often enough that, should [Kaoru] be so inclined, he would very gladly see [Ōigimi] that well settled.”^[34]

However, Ōigimi knows nothing of this. She believes that her father merely warned his daughters against taking any rash step in the direction of marriage, lest they court shame and misfortune, and she is unaware that he ever favored her accepting Kaoru. To her, the notion of marriage is therefore dangerous and unauthorized.^[35] She accepts that her father counted on Kaoru to look after them materially, but she recognizes no connection between material support and marriage. This makes her unique in the tale. The purpose of her misapprehension therefore seems to be an impasse designed for pathetic effect.

Personal feeling on either side furthers the impasse. Each feels a community of spirit with the other, encouraged by the high-minded sentiments that Kaoru professes both to Ōigimi and to himself. However, Kaoru also desires her sexually, while for her, sexual relations (marriage) are out of the question. On this level, neither has the slightest comprehension of the other. To secure the impasse, and to drive Ōigimi to mortal despair, the author must ensure that Kaoru never achieves with Ōigimi what Genji’s son Yūgiri does with Princess Ochiba (“Yūgiri”).

Princess Ochiba, the widow of Yūgiri’s friend Kashiwagi, resists Yūgiri when he pursues her. She has no parental authorization to accept him, and she also knows that Kashiwagi found her unattractive. This, together with her age, convinces her that she is in any case too unsightly to remarry. However, Yūgiri perseveres. His first attempt to make love with her ends badly when she escapes through a door he cannot open, and his prolonged presence in the house, at night, nonetheless convinces outsiders that he has succeeded. The shock kills her mother, weakened as she already is by illness. Eventually, he more or less corners her in a room where she cowers with a robe over her head, sweeps the robe aside, and accomplishes his purpose at last. The act constitutes the marriage he desired, and it saves her. She would have been lost otherwise.

The same outcome would serve Ōigimi equally well. Kaori would not fail her. The mechanism that moves her toward death therefore sums up the purposeful desolation of these chapters as fully as her death itself. Critical to this mechanism is Kaoru’s sexual tact, discretion, or diffidence. The shining Genji was so daring and resourceful in love, and in sexual relations so quick to act, that the Mumyōzōshi author objected to him. Kaoru’s compunction can seem admirable in comparison. Some readers may also feel an affinity with him because of his slips and failures in the intimate situations that are so important to us all and that do not always go smoothly.

The Mumyōzōshi author was probably thinking especially of Kaoru’s “hope that in time [Ōigimi, who has just frustrated his advances] would yield to him on her own.”^[36] She presumably accepted the narrator’s repeated assurances that Kaoru is kind, steadfast, thoughtful, tactful, and deeply pious. However, it is possible to ask whether Kaoru really is what he seems, and even whether a coherent Kaoru exists at all. If none does, then Kaoru’s reason for not taking the decisive initiative with Ōigimi comes into question. The author then fosters the “Kaoru illusion” by focusing the reader’s whole sympathy on him, as on a beloved child at odds with the world, and weaves her narrative so as to make him suffer repeatedly as the innocent victim of fate, birth, ill luck, or misunderstanding. To achieve this pathetic effect she leaves visible threads of intention on the underside of her weave.

Mitani Kuniaki stated in his “Genji monogatari daisanbu no hōhō” that Part Three (especially the Uji chapters) throws the “myth of unity” of character into question and that Kaoru’s character, in particular, is “dispersed” and without central meaning. “Speech, interior monologue, the unconscious, and so on,” he wrote, “lose their unity, disperse, and enter into ‘dialogue’ with one another.”^[37] More recently, Kanda Tatsumi noted similarly that Kaoru knows nothing about himself because his self is “hollowed out” (an expression borrowed from Mitani) and lacks any foundation. As a result, Kanda wrote, the narrator is obliged at times to supply, in her own comments, a psychology of which Kaoru himself knows nothing.^[38] This Kaoru is therefore not psychologically conceived. He dissolves as a character if the reader ceases to commiserate with him. His apparent psychological complexity can then be described as an illusion created by the many ways devised by the author to renew the reader’s sympathy for him. Seen in this light, he has iconographic attributes rather than psychological traits. These include, among other things, seriousness, piety, dilatoriness, and subjection to desire. They are not psychologically integrated.

This lack of integration extends to Kaoru’s love life. Many readers must have wondered why he never successfully consummates a relationship either with Ōigimi or with her younger sister. His failure, which seems at first to resemble Genji’s with Princess Asagao, could almost be seen as an elaboration on it. Asagao and Ōigimi both like the gentleman well enough but resolutely reject his advances. Both distrust men (Asagao distrusts Genji especially), and both come to suspect their gentlewomen of conniving against them. Kaoru claims to be waiting for Ōigimi’s assent, while Genji, who is “biding his time” until “his devoted attentions…soften [Asagao] toward him,” “seems never to have considered forcibly breaking her resistance.”^[39] This uncharacteristic discretion makes him resemble Kaoru after all. However, the two diverge on a critical point. Although Genji likes Asagao, he is not in love with her. He has been courting her for other reasons, and desire is not one of them.

Kaoru, however, desires Ōigimi, if the narrator is to be believed. Nevertheless, he holds back when he has his one great chance with her, and again with her sister. The narrator insists that he does so because he is so much nicer, kinder, and so on than anyone else, but these protestations are not entirely convincing. Perhaps he has low libido, for example, or some other condition that discourages him unusually easily. The homoerotic feeling for the Uji sisters’ father mentioned by Doris Bargen^[40] and strongly implied by Paul Schalow suggests that possibility. However, even though this reading makes sense with respect to that single relationship, nothing elsewhere in the narrative encourages extending it further.

Mitani Kuniaki suggested another way to solve the problem of Kaoru’s diffidence. He argued that Kaoru’s admiration for the Eighth Prince led him to elaborate for himself a “superego” identified with the Eighth Prince’s purely spiritual nature and to attribute the same nature to his daughters, who to him were extensions of their father. Since no physical desire for Ōigimi or Nakanokimi could then be legitimate, Kaoru’s “superego” intervened to quell it whenever it arose. Mitani’s theory does not acknowledge the narrative’s explanations, discussed below, for Kaoru’s failure to act. It also requires a psychology more coherent than the one Mitani himself attributed to Kaoru when he reasserted in this article the disparate nature of Kaoru’s character. He wrote that Kaoru’s conversation, unvoiced thoughts, behavior, unconscious, and physical person all diverge in different directions.^[41] No such character could have either psychology or autonomy. He could not function at all unless his creator manipulated his disparate parts so as to make them work together toward particular ends.

According to the narrator, Kaoru’s desire for Ōigimi and then Nakanokimi is compelling, and he certainly seems capable of possessing Ukifune as soon as she comes into his hands (“Azumaya”).^[42] His relationship with the gentlewoman Kozaishō (“Kagerō”) appears to be straightforward. Perhaps his last-minute discretion with Ōigimi and Nakanokimi indeed proves that he is as kind as the narrator claims and, in the service of his tact, as fully the master of his ardor. But perhaps it does not.

The first two scenes of all-but-intimacy between Kaoru and Ōigimi or Nakanokimi occur in “Agemaki,” and the third in “Yadorigi.” Each dramatizes the discrepancy between Kaoru’s pious intentions and the behavior to which desire drives him. Each also offers, to a greater or lesser degree, the same possibility of mocking comedy as the scene in which Kaoru dresses his wife up in silk gauze and has her hold a piece of ice. That phantom element of comedy is detectable as well in a fourth scene (“Agemaki”) in which Ōigimi keeps a locked door between herself and Kaoru, despite Kaoru’s entreaties, even as Niou, inside the house, makes love to Nakanokimi. The circumstances throughout are intricately manipulated.