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“True it is that before Genji left, many even of his relatives and most intimate friends refrained from paying their respects to him, but in the course of time not a few began to correspond with him, and sometimes they communicated their ideas to each other in pathetic poetry.”
In this passage from “Exile at Suma,” Murasaki observes that poetry was a normal way for friends and relatives to communicate. Even though the Empress has forbidden contact between Genji and members of the court, their affection for Genji leads people to disregard her command. The poetry they send is characterized as “pathetic,” which means in this context full of feeling or pathos. The feelings they share, in other words, are those of pity or sadness. Poetry across The Tale of Genji regularly communicates feelings of remorse or melancholy, feelings that were prized in the Heian-era culture as expressions of sensibility and refinement. The chapter does not provide examples of what these letters included, but some of Genji’s poetry appears. These verses speak of his personal loneliness and his longings for people he loves, and provide an apt sense of what Murasaki means when she singles out for emphasis the idea of “pathetic” poetry. The verses not only share emotion but help the reader to feel it as well.
“It happened on a cool summer evening that Genji was sauntering around the Ummeiden in the palace yard. He heard the sound of a biwa (mandolin) proceeding from a veranda. It was played by this lady. She performed well upon it, for she was often accustomed to play it before the Emperor along with male musicians. It sounded very charming.”
This passage from “Maple Fête” captures how music is experienced in The Tale of Genji. Musical notes can drift around walls and across distances, hinting at the presence of people that the characters cannot see, and creating or enhancing moods. Given the cultural emphasis on communicating the nuanced sentiments of a particular moment, music offered an important vehicle for personal expression, well-suited to the modes of indirection and obscurity that characterized the practice of courtship. As Genji’s response indicates, there is a charm to an excellent performance that can lure a listener and arouse his or her interest. In this particular case, the woman is significantly older than the prince, but her music entices him. It cannot sustain his interest when he meets and ascertains her age, but the end of the scene does not diminish the presentation of music’s power, particularly when the performer, regardless of gender, is especially skilled.
“The perspective of gentle mountain slopes, and sequestered nooks surrounded by leafy trees, are drawn with such admirable fidelity to Nature that they carry the spectator in imagination to something beyond them."
In “The Broom-Like Tree,” Sama-no-Kami speaks authoritatively about a variety of subjects, but he is never more compelling than in this passage when he talks about the power of painting. His description is representative of how characters talk about painting in the novel in several ways. First, he emphasizes the representation of nature, with an emphasis on beautiful, rather than sublime, subjects. Second, he stresses the importance of verisimilitude, or a fidelity to the beauty that nature had already created. As with the use of established poetic forms, this is an art that is dependent more on imitation than on the artist’s imagination or originality. But that is not to suggest that the imagination is unimportant. An exquisite work of art works on the viewer’s imagination, he explains, transporting them beyond themselves, into the world of the painting.
