A thread that might link them after all involves a hypothetical conception of imperial beauty. The beginning of the thread can be found in the possibility, suggested by all four passages, that the author and her audience subscribed to an ultimately feminine standard of beauty. If so, then to wish a male were female is to find his beauty wasted on a male. A passage from “Miyuki” seems to point in this direction. From within her carriage, Tamakazura has surveyed the gentlemen of the court and found “none to compare with His Majesty [Reizei] seen in profile, stock-still in his red robes.” Then her eyes turn to the commander of the right (Higekuro, her future husband, although she does not know that yet):
The Commander of the Right, ever weighty and imposing, served His Majesty in great style today with a quiver on his back, but his heavy, black beard was thoroughly unprepossessing. What could such a face ever have had in common with a prettily made up woman’s?[14]
The context suggests that Reizei’s incomparable looks (so similar to Genji’s) are, in contrast, wholly compatible with a woman’s. Tamakazura is keen on Reizei and would gladly enter his service, but the narrative is discreet about desire. Her gaze is admiring and perhaps, like Fujitsubo’s, affectionate, but its mood little resembles that evoked in [1] and [2]. In the end, the significance of her appraisal of Higekuro slips away. After all, the narrator praises Genji’s beauty repeatedly, chapter after chapter, without feeling the need to associate it with a woman’s.
Yoshikai Naoto proposed the hypothesis of an all-but-feminine male beauty associated with the emperor and ranking princes. Noting that the object of desire or admiration in passages [1] to [5] is an emperor or an emperor’s son, he suggested that male beauty capable of being extended by the imagination into a woman’s is a mark of the imperial and lies beyond any commoner’s reach.[15] Another passage from the same “Miyuki” scene appears to support this idea.
[Tamakazura] secretly paid particular attention to His Excellency her father [Tō no Chûjō], but despite his dazzling looks and weighty presence there was only so much and no more to be said for him [kagiri ari kashi].[16]
Kagiri ari: Tō no Chûjō’s looks “go only so far and no further.” Elsewhere, precisely these words may distinguish a commoner from an emperor: the commoner’s standing “has a limit” (kagiri ari), while the emperor’s has none (kagiri nashi). This is exactly what Suzaku means in his mournful speech to Oborozukiyo (“Miotsukushi”):
“I wonder why you would not even give me a child,” he said…“I know you will have one for [Genji], with whom your tie is so much stronger, and the thought makes me very sad indeed. After all, he is what he is and no more [kagiri areba], and your child will have a commoner father.”[17]
Imperial standing seems to transcend power and wealth (the busy realm proper to commoners), and its special aura makes those endowed with it peculiarly desirable. Beautiful features, almost transcending gender as well, then confirm the imperial ideal.
This reasoning sounds promising, but it neither acknowledges nor explains the erotic mood of [1] and [2]; nor does it explain other instances, such as [7] or [9], below, in which the man viewed is not imperial. It also contributes nothing toward understanding the next motif: that of a man admiring or desiring another man from the imagined perspective of a woman.