The Tale of Genji: 4
Suzaku, weary of the world, prepares to take the tonsure, and his greatest anxiety is the fate of his young Third Princess. Out of pity for an old friend and former sovereign, Genji agrees to receive her as his wife. The blossoming radiance of the Rokujō-in is suddenly shaken; for Lady Murasaki, who has shared his life through every joy and sorrow, the arrival of a princess of higher rank is an inward wound she will not let show.
Kashiwagi, the Captain of the Right Gate Guards, has cherished a hopeless love for the Third Princess from afar. One spring day, when his cat catches at her standing curtain and reveals her figure for an instant, that single glimpse becomes a fire he cannot extinguish. The secret meeting that follows, the child born of it, and Genji's silent perception of all that has happened - together they bring Kashiwagi himself to a slow and grieving death. Among the flute of Yokobue and the bell crickets of Suzumushi, the Third Princess takes vows and the small Kaoru grows quietly to manhood. Yūgiri, meanwhile, finds his upright resolve undone by the Second Princess of Ichijō, and a different kind of evening mist gathers over the next generation.
Then, in The Rites, the lady who has been at the center of the Shining Prince's life passes from this world. The autumn after Murasaki's death is The Wizard - a year given over to memory, in which Genji watches the seasons turn one last time and prepares, in his own heart, to leave the world. After the blank chapter that says only that he has gone, the tale opens again upon the Perfumed Prince, the grandson Niou and the fragrant young Kaoru, on whom the long story will now turn.
Written at the dawn of the eleventh century by a lady-in-waiting known to posterity as Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji has been read for a thousand years as the world's oldest full-length psychological novel. This volume contains chapters 34 through 42 - from "Spring Shoots" to "The Perfumed Prince."
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