Page:Anthology of Japanese Literature.pdf/190

186 slender form impaired; but what now availed the loveliness of her halt? She renounced the world and became a nun, but even when she had entered the True Way her grief was not assuaged. She seemed ever to see before her the figures of the Emperor and the Lady Nii and the others as they sank in the waves, and never in this life could she forget those melancholy scenes. She wondered why she had remained alive to bear such sorrows, and her tears were never dried.

It was not easy to keep awake on even the short nights of June, but if she did not fall asleep she would not dream of those who had passed away. Faintly the shadow of her single light fell on the wall outside, and all night the dismal drumming of the rain sounded on the lattice of the windows. And how it reminded her of the beloved past—this orange tree in blossom by the eaves that a former tenant had brought and planted there. Its heavy perfume was wafted into her chamber, and the notes of the nightingale were borne once and again to her ears.

The rest of the court ladies, who had thrown themselves into the sea but not with the same determination as the Lady Nii, had been roughly dragged out by the Genji soldiers and brought back to the capital. Young and old alike, they had all become nuns and were living in concealment in faraway valleys and dells in the mountains, wretched and emaciated in appearance and quite unrecognizable as their former selves.

The places where they lived have gone up in smoke, and the empty site, turned into overgrown moorland, is all that remains. No former intimate ever comes nigh. All is as unfamiliar now as his home to one who is bewitched by fairies and returns after seven generations.

On the ninth day of the seventh month the Empress’s abode was ruined in the great earthquake. Its outer wall fell down, and she had nowhere to live. How the days had altered from the time the