At a certain point in Hamamatsu, the author has her hero “remember her [a love now inaccessible to him] sadly, feeling just like yume no ukihashi.”^[7] This occurrence of the expression seems not to be widely recognized as an allusion to the Genji chapter title, but three parallel Hamamatsu passages clearly suggest that it is one.^[8]

This mention of yume no ukihashi is one of four Hamamatsu passages that sum up a scene or mood with a brief allusion on the pattern, “[It was] just like X.” In two, “X” is a now-lost monogatari. The first goes, “It was just like a picture from the monogatari entitled Karakuni”; the second simply caps a description with the words, “as in Ōi no monogatari”; and the third says, “no doubt just like Ono no shigure no yado.”^[9] “Ono no shigure no yado” may or may not be the title of a lost monogatari, but the expression clearly refers to a specific story. The fourth is the passage in question here.

It has long been recognized that the Genji author must have invented the expression yume no ukihashi for the purpose of naming her last chapter, which made it famous. It does not appear in earlier literature. For this reason alone the Hamamatsu mention of yume no ukihashi probably refers to the Genji chapter, and the pattern of allusion just described confirms the idea. In Hamamatsu the expression clearly alludes to a monogatari or monogatari-like story familiar to every reader in the author’s time, and that story can only have been the Genji chapter. The Hamamatsu author’s allusion shows that, to her, the chapter title described the painfully precarious bond between Kaoru and Ukifune, as experienced especially by Kaoru.

However, contemporary scholarship refrains from taking the Hamamatsu passage this way, at least in any formal context. The relevant headnotes in the Nihon koten bungaku taikei (NKBT) and Shin Nihon koten bungaku zenshū (SNKBZ) editions of Hamamatsu Chūnagon monogatari treat yume no ukihashi as a common noun meaning a perilous passage traversed in dreams (NKBT) or simply a precarious link, for example between lovers (SNKBZ).^[10] Neither mentions the Genji chapter title.

This position is consistent with recent, conservatively presented Genji scholarship. No recent edition of Genji monogatari (SNKS 1985, SNKBT 1997, SNKBZ 1998) suggests such a reading of the chapter title, nor does the Genji manual Jōyō Genji monogatari yōran (1995).^[11] All four note that the expression yume no ukihashi is absent from the chapter itself, but that yume occurs several times; and all mention, hesitantly, a possible connection between the chapter title and a poem originally cited by Fujiwara no Teika in his Okuiri (early thirteenth century) in connection with a passage in “Usugumo.” Two (Yōran, SNKBT) tentatively suggest an allusion to Ukifune’s nightmarish life of rootless wandering (sasurai). That is all.

The poem first mentioned in Okuiri (one regularly acknowledged by later commentaries) goes, Yo no naka wa/ yume no watari no/ ukihashi ka/ uchiwataritsutsu/ mono o koso omoe: “Is this world of ours a floating bridge crossed in dreams, that crossing it should call up such sorrows?”^[12] The “Usugumo” passage reads:

Genji’s “Is it a floating bridge crossed in dreams?” (yume no watari no ukihashi ka, the words glossed by Teika) refers to the complexities that keep him from visiting Ōi more often. The note in the translation therefore explains that yume (Genji’s and the poem’s) alludes to erotic liaisons and the poem’s yo no naka, too, to matters of love. Nothing about this explanation is controversial, but its theme has vanished from the four discussions of the chapter title “Yume no Ukihashi” just cited, despite their acknowledgment of the poem. Instead, two of them mention Ukifune’s sufferings, while the other two suggest nothing at all.

Thus material from either end of the Genji millennium suggests an early association between yume no ukihashi and Kaoru’s longing for Ukifune, and a late reluctance to accept that association. Generally speaking, the pre-modern commentaries encourage this reluctance.

Most of the content of these four recent treatments of the chapter title can be found in the commentaries. Shimeishō (late thirteenth century), Kakaishō (ca. 1365), and others note as an anomaly the absence of the expression yume no ukihashi from the chapter text itself, observe that yume occurs five times in the chapter, and suggest a tentative connection between the chapter title and the poem Teika cited. Ichiyōshō (1494) and four sixteenth-century commentaries link the title to Ukifune’s painfully rootless life. However, all these works emphasize other matters. As the Kakaishō author observed, the title’s meaning “has always been uncertain [korai fushin nari].”^[14]

The dominant trend is clear already in Shimeishō. A questioner who wants to know the meaning of ukihashi remarks that “most people” (yo no hito) take it as referring to Ukifune’s refusal even to open Kaoru’s letter. As evidence, the questioner mentions the words fumi minu (“did not read the letter”), which the chapter text only implies. This fumi minu plays on an implied negative verb fumi-minu (“did not tread [the bridge of dreams]”).^[15] Thus, according to the Shimeishō questioner, “most people” take ukihashi as alluding to the broken communication between Kaoru and Ukifune. This reading is compatible with the Hamamatsu author’s.

However, the Shimeishō author disagreed. “This monogatari,” he wrote, “reveals impermanence and demonstrates that all living beings come to naught. Therefore this chapter, unlike the others, is founded upon yūgen and is intended also to establish a link with enlightenment [bodai no en].” He therefore saw in this chapter a grander, graver theme than the failure of the bond between two lovers. Not that he excluded eros, since he also cited the ame no ukihashi (“floating bridge of heaven”) story from Nihon shoki and wrote, “The distinction between male and female, the separation of man from woman, began with [ame no] ukihashi. How, then, could the heart of one with a taste for gallantry and a fondness for love not cross this ukihashi?” However, he placed greater emphasis on yume, which he took in a mainly religious or philosophical sense. Having quoted the Nehan-gyō and other sutras on the theme “Life, death, and impermanence are all a dream,” he concluded: “Present reality is a dream, good and evil are a dream…Therefore, the final chapter was probably named ‘Yume no ukihashi’ because this title brought together both the ukihashi of this sullied world [edo] and the dream of the dharma-nature [hosshō no yume].”^[16]

Seen from this perspective, ukihashi no longer represents the bipolar tension of perilous desire between lovers but becomes instead one term of a greater tension on the same pattern: that between “this sullied world” (of samsara) and hosshō no yume—the dream of, or the dream that is, pure, timeless truth. Some Genji scholars still hold that the chapter title refers to a bridge between earth and heaven, this world and the next, and so on.

Kakaishō (followed by others) develops this more expansive sort of reading, one tending to favor yume at the expense of ukihashi, by suggesting that “Yume no Ukihashi” is at the same time an alternative title for the whole tale.^[17] This approach of course does not eliminate the erotic dimension of the “dream,” especially considering the tale’s general reputation as an erotic work. However, this erotic dimension receives less and less explicit acknowledgment. Genji kokagami, a digest from about the same period as Kakaishō and perhaps, like Kakaishō, a product of the circle surrounding Nijō Yoshimoto (1320–88), illustrates this trend. It explains that the title refers to Genji’s rise to dream-like glory and to the “single painful moment” (tada hitofushi no on-nageki, probably Murasaki’s death) of his life that at last, before he dies, awakens him to the truth. It also suggests that the final chapter is entitled “Yume no Ukihashi” because it is meant to convey impermanence.^[18] This sort of reading suggests Chuang-tzu’s dream of the butterfly, or the story of the pillow of Kantan, and indeed, several commentaries mention them.

In Kachō yosei (ca. 1470), Ichijō Kanera (1402–81) referred the reader to the long Kakaishō entry on the closing chapter title, but he suggested on his own that it adds pathos (aware) to the situation evoked at the end of “Tenarai” and refers particularly to Kaoru’s longing for Ukifune.^[19] This reading agrees with the Hamamatsu author’s. However, Fujiwara Masaari, the editor of Ichiyōshō (ca. 1494), soon disagreed. “The source of this tale has nothing to do with talk of love,” he wrote. “It reveals the swift passing of all things and teaches that the mighty must fall.”^[20] Regarding the term ukihashi itself, he wrote that it has no special meaning apart from the broad notion of the passage from birth to death. Rōkashō (1510), edited by Sanjōnishi Sanetaka (1455–1537), affirms similarly that the meaning of the chapter title is carried by yume, and that ukihashi has no meaning of its own; so does the Mōshinshō (1575) of Kujō Tanemichi (1507–94).^[21]

The more ambitious later commentaries, such as Sairyūshō (1510–13), Mingō nisso (1598), and Kogetsushō (1673) tend to reproduce the entries from earlier ones without adding anything new, thus juxtaposing divergent ideas without visibly favoring any. However Tama no ogushi (1796), the influential Genji commentary by Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801), is different. Norinaga took a new approach to the subject of “Yume no ukihashi,” as he did to others. “As the old commentaries say,” he wrote, “the title of this chapter applies to the entire tale. However, it would be wrong to call it a title for the whole. The content of the tale is convincingly real, but all of it is invented…Everything in it is as though seen in a dream.” Norinaga condemned the earlier commentators for citing Buddhist and Chinese writings to argue that the chapter title means life is a dream. “That is wrong,” he declared. “It only means that everything written in this tale is a dream.”^[22] His focus on the author is of interest, but more relevant here is the absence of any reference to love or erotic tension, whether particular (Kaoru and Ukifune) or generalized (the “floating bridge of heaven”). The yume of the chapter title has obliterated the ukihashi. Norinaga’s interpretation has the same cool respectability as the four contemporary discussions of the title cited above.

Still, two of those discussions mention the miseries of Ukifune, the most pressing of which have to do with love. They confirm a tendency in the commentaries, noted by Masuda Katsumi in 1991, to read the chapter title from her standpoint. Masuda argued that the chapter is really told more from that of Kaoru.^[23] Indeed, Mori Asao had already stated in 1988 that the Genji chapter title refers to the precarious bond between Kaoru and Ukifune, and especially to the severing of that bond as the chapter ends. Komachiya Teruhiko, writing in 1992, agreed: the issue is the breaking of the bond—the ukihashi—between Ukifune and Kaoru. “Ukifune [now a nun] goes off into a world beyond Kaoru’s comprehension, leaving Kaoru behind, alone, in the profane world.”^[24] Thus Komachiya recognized the ukihashi between Kaoru and Ukifune after all but, echoing Shimeishō, assimilated it to the unbridgeable gulf between the sacred and the profane.

In Hamamatsu Chūnagon monogatari, however, the hero remains in touch by letter with the lady for whom he longs, and although circumstances keep them apart, nothing suggests that she would not meet him if she could. Whether or not they are, in practice, parted forever, the bond between them is not broken. A gap therefore still separates the Hamamatsu author’s reading of the Genji chapter title from that adopted by Mori Asao or Komachiya Kazuhiko, who hold the break to be final.

The analysis of Ukifune’s story in “The Possibility of Ukifune” suggests that the Hamamatsu author was right. The events, situations, and relationships described in “Tenarai” and “Yume no ukihashi” make it difficult to believe either that Kaoru will never see Ukifune again, somewhere past the end of the book, or that Ukifune is in any position to reject him indefinitely.

Motoori Norinaga wrote in Tama no ogushi, “The closing chapter [of Genji] functions as a conclusion, but really it is as though the dreamer had awakened before the dream was anywhere near complete.”^[25] Written speculation about events beyond the end of the tale began with Yamaji no tsuyu, an apocryphal Genji chapter now attributed to Kenreimon’in Ukyō no Daibu (1157?–1233?). In Yamaji no tsuyu Kaoru does see Ukifune again, and at the end of it the situation remains unresolved. Yamaji no tsuyu therefore comments on “Yume no ukihashi” as meaningfully as the work of a medieval or modern scholar. It also seconds the Hamamatsu passage. No one will ever know what the title “Yume no ukihashi” “really” means, but the Hamamatsu allusion to it belongs to the history of Genji reception. Considering that the author lived far closer to Murasaki Shikibu’s time than we do, and inhabited the same world, perhaps it even deserves an extra unit or two of weight.