No passage in the Uji chapters illustrates the cultivation of pathos more vividly than Kaoru’s journey to Uji with Ukifune.[52] To judge from a recent conference presentation by Mitamura Masako, many readers admire this passage particularly.[53] However, its main features also support the argument of this essay.
After taking possession of Ukifune, Kaoru sets out with her the next morning for Uji. The two occupy the front of the carriage, while the gentlewoman Jijū and the nun Ben ride in the back. The passage has been abbreviated as much as possible.
Now that Jijū could see [Kaoru] a little she forgot every demand of decent manners and gave in to rapt and longing wonder.
[Ukifune] lay face down, dazed by the shock. “The rocky places are very difficult,” he said and took her in his arms. The silk gauze long dress hung to divide the carriage glowed in the light of the newly risen sun, and the nun felt excruciatingly out of place. Ah, she reflected sadly, it is [Ōigimi] I should have seen like this with [him]!…Her face puckered up, and…she wept…Jijū thought her perfectly horrid. Why, she thought, she doesn’t belong here anyway at the happy start of a marriage! What business does she have blubbering away like that…
[Ukifune] was his now…but under such skies his sense of loss only mounted, and the further they went into the hills, the more thickly the mists seemed to rise around him. Their sleeves as he leaned on an armrest, lost in thought, trailed away out of the carriage, one on the other, wet with the mists of the river. The scarlet of the gown looked wrong against the petal blue of the dress cloak: he noticed it at the top of a steep slope and drew both in.
“Now that she is mine, to keep fresh that memory, how the morning dew
settles in fast-falling drops on these sadly moistened sleeves!”he murmured…At this the nun only drenched her sleeves the more…[Her] stifled sniffling started [Kaoru] quietly blowing his nose as well.
Concern for [Ukifune’s] feelings…prompted him to observe, “It makes me sad…to think how often I have taken this path over the years. Do sit up a little…You are so silent!” He made her sit, and the way she looked shyly out, her face prettily hidden behind her fan, struck him as remarkably similar [to Ōigimi], except that she seemed all too worryingly meek and mild. His lost love had had a childlike quality too, but also what depth of reflection! His sorrow, which still had nowhere to go, seemed capable of filling the vast, empty heavens.
Jijū’s rapturous glimpses of Kaoru’s beauty introduce the scene. The silk curtain glows theatrically in the light of the rising sun, and before it Kaoru takes Ukifune tenderly in his arms to protect her from bumps and jolts. Ben’s lament for Ōigimi moves the audience to appreciate Kaoru’s own mood. Then Ben weeps, and Jijū, swept away by romantic fancies, thinks her “perfectly horrid” for blighting the moment with her ill-omened tears. The narrative’s mocking attitude toward the old nun in “Tenarai”[54] suggests that, by inviting her audience to share Jijū’s indignation, the author seeks again to emphasize the depth of Kaoru’s melancholy.
All goes well as long as the audience sympathizes fully with Kaoru. However, it is important that the audience’s sympathy should not wander to include others caught up in his misfortunes. If the young woman in his arms is not Ōigimi, that is because he failed ever to possess Ōigimi. The one with him now, Ukifune, means less to him in her own person than Jijū imagines. He has no intention of establishing with her a relationship that anyone who matters could possibly mistake for a marriage; that is why he is taking her to distant Uji in the first place. No doubt he has been desperate to get her, having among other things suborned a nun to serve this profane purpose, but to him she is still only a stand-in for her late half-sister. Ukifune hardly figures in his thoughts, except as the “doll” of which he once spoke to Nakanokimi. None of this is very nice, but the point of the scene is elsewhere. Poor Kaoru is suffering the torments of a noble, ill-fated love, and “his sorrow…seem[s] capable of filling the vast, empty heavens.”
Inflated sentiments may collapse suddenly. While melancholy mists rise around him, Kaoru notes a discordant tint in the sleeves that spill outside the carriage. The moment recalls the effect of the ice held by Kaoru’s wife, of the incense smoke and Ōigimi’s mourning grey, and of Nakanokimi’s hip band. Ukifune’s scarlet over his light blue yields a grey-mauve that reminds him of mourning,[55] and in a gesture of vain struggle against the mood that has already overwhelmed him he draws the sleeves in. There is no more artfully precious touch in the whole tale. Then Kaoru murmurs his dewy poem; Ben begins crying again, to Jijū’s disgust; and her sniffling starts Kaoru himself blowing his nose. The scene threatens to tip over into self-parody.