The first scene^[43] starts with Kaoru longing merely (or so he believes) to spend the night in quiet conversation with Ōigimi. Monogatari su (“chat”), like the more common katarau, is a cover expression for lovemaking, but the narrator has him take it literally. However, Ōigimi detects in his manner a “vague irritation” (monouramigachi naru on-keshiki) that may portend something else. She is reluctant to receive him, but he has always been so kind that she does so nonetheless, after taking care to protect herself and keep the place well lit. He complains, then makes himself at home and is soon thinking “how silly it [is] of him, with no more than a screen and a blind between them, to remain so slow to act on his ardent desire.”

This callous “silly” (okogamashiku) counters the thoughtfulness for which Kaoru is known and extends a pattern, initiated by the complaints mentioned, that pervades these scenes: a layered alternation of tact and petulance, generosity and self-pitying anger. Such mood shifts occur in living people, too, but in Kaoru’s case the alternation continues as though the narrator highlighted now one iconographic attribute, now another; or as though Kaoru were a puppet in a split costume, red and blue, and the puppeteer displayed now one side, now the other. As Suzuki Hideo observed, Kaoru’s self-justifications “sound reasonable but make no sense.”^[44] Throughout the Uji chapters Kaoru vacillates in the same way between pious sentiment and helpless subjection to erotic longings. Noting this phenomenon, Mitani observed that it is useless to search the Uji chapters for any deepening of theme or characterization. Kaoru remains the same from beginning to end. Mitani called this a manifestation of the “absence” that characterizes Part Three.^[45]

When Ōigimi moves to retire, Kaoru reproves her, sweeps aside the screen between them, enters the room, and seizes her skirts. Furious, she accuses him of appalling behavior. He bitterly protests injured innocence, but nothing in Parts One and Two supports him: violation of a woman’s privacy and claims of innocent intentions are mutually contradictory. He has already crossed the line, and in a moment he will go further: “By the intriguingly dim lamplight he swept her streaming hair aside and looked at her face.” If there is anywhere in The Tale of Genji a genuine example of what Richard Bowring called “visual rape,”^[46] this is it. A kind, tactful Kaoru genuinely intent on respecting her wishes could not possibly do such a thing. The effect on her self-esteem is devastating, as the narrative shows later on, but he goes on nonetheless to congratulate himself for not having done what any “lustful man” would have done in his place. His sentiments call on the reader to admire his restraint, but his actions make them unintelligible. While he tries to soothe her feelings, she silently laments that he has now seen, “caught in the lamplight,” the grey she wears in mourning for her late father. This thought, too, is pure misery.

The room contains also her father’s altar, with its conventional offerings of star anise (shikimi) and burning incense. Decorously from his standpoint, perhaps, but suggestively from the reader’s, Kaoru places a curtain between them and the altar, and then lies down beside her. Has the moment come after all? No, this time the incense and the scent of star anise trouble him, to whom (the narrator reminds us) the Buddha means so much. “Especially now when she is still in mourning,” he says to himself, “struggling to regain his composure, any thoughtless concession to my impatience would be an offense against what I aspired to first [a life of Buddhist renunciation].” In other words, his alleged respect for Ōigimi’s wishes, and her obvious distress, restrain him less than the Buddhist fragrances wafting about him and the grey of her robes, both of which recall his own pious aspirations, and both of which he should have foreseen from the start. Despite the pathos in this collision between eros and piety, the piety may also look naïve and selfish. The night ends with a picture of the pair looking out together at a poignant dawn sky.

For Kaoru it is the incense smoke and those grey robes, rather than respect for Ōigimi, that live on in mind as the reason he went no further. However, they do not deter him from trying once more. The next scene begins, “[Kaoru], too eager to await the ninth month when [Ōigimi] would no longer wear the mourning he had felt obliged to respect, now came again.”^[47]