3

Having finished his ablutions, he turned as usual to his prayers. A woman gathered embers from the ashes of the night before and another brought in a brazier. Chu~nagon and Chu~jo~ were with him.*

“Every night is difficult when you are alone, but last night was worse than most of them. I was a fool not to leave it all behind long ago.”

How sad life would be for these women if he were to renounce the world! His voice rising and falling in the silence of the chapel as he read from a sutra had always had a strange power to move, unlike any other, and for the women who served him it now brought tears that were not to be held back.

“I have always had everything,” he said to them. “That was the station in life I was born to. Yet it has always seemed that I was meant for sad things too. I have often wondered whether the Blessed One was not determined to make me see more than others what a useless, insubstantial world it is. I pretended that I did not see the point, and now as my life comes to a close I know the ultimate in sorrow. I see and accept my own inadequacies and the disabilities I brought with me from other lives. There is nothing, not the slenderest bond, that still ties me to the world. No, that is not true: there are you who seem so much nearer than when she was alive. It will be very hard to say goodbye.”

He dried his tears and still they flowed on. The women were weeping so piteously that they could not tell him what sorrow it would be to leave him.

In sad twilight in the morning and evening he would summon the women who had meant most to him. He had known Chu~jo~ since she was a little girl, and would seem to have favored her with discreet attentions. She had been too fond of Murasaki to let the affair go on for very long, and he thought of her now, with none of the old desire, as one of Murasaki's favorites, a sort of memento the dead lady had left behind. A pretty, good-natured woman, she was, so to speak, a yew tree* nearer the dead lady's grave than most.