5

Kaoru's mother had quite given herself up to her devotions. She spared herself no expense in arranging the monthly invocation of the holy name and the semiannual reading of the Lotus Sutra and all the other prescribed rites. Her son's visits were her chief pleasure. Sometimes he almost seemed more like a father than a son—a fact which he was aware of and though rather sad. He was a constant companion of both the reigning emperor and the retired emperor, and was much sought after by the crown prince and other princes too, until he sometimes wished that he could be in two places at once. From his childhood there had been things, chance remarks, brief snatches of an overheard conversation, that had upset him and made him wish that there were someone to whom he could go for an explanation. There was no one. His mother would be distressed at any hint that he had even these vague suspicions. He could only brood in solitude and ask what missteps in a former life might explain the painful doubts with which he had grown up—and wish that he had the clairvoyance of a Prince Ra~hula,* who instinctively knew the truth about his own birth.

“Whom might I ask? Why must it be

That I do not know the beginning or the end?”

But of course there was no one he could go to for an answer.

These doubts were with him most persistently when he was unwell. His mother, taking the nun's habit when still in the flush of girlhood—had it been from a real and thorough conversion? He suspected rather that some horrible surprise had overtaken her, something that had shaken her to the roots of her being. People must surely have heard about it in the course of everyday events, and for some reason had felt constrained to keep it from him.

His mother was at her devotions, morning and night, but he thought it unlikely that the efforts of a weak and vacillating woman could transform the dew upon the lotus into the bright jewel of the law. A woman labors under five hindrances, after all.* He wanted somehow to help her towards a new start in another life.

He thought too of the gentleman who had died so young.+ His soul must still be wandering lost, unable to free itself of regrets for this world. How he wished that they could meet—there would be other lives in which it might be possible.

His own initiation ceremonies interested him not in the least, but he had to go through with them. Suddenly he found himself a rather con-spicuous young man, indeed the cynosure of all eyes. This new eminence only made him withdraw more resolutely into himself.

The emperor favored him because they were so closely related, but a quite genuine regard had perhaps more to do with the matter. As for the empress, her children had grown up with him and he still seemed almost one of them. She remembered how Genji had sighed at the unlikelihood that he would live to see this child of his late years grown into a man, and felt that Genji's worries had added to her own responsibilities. Yu~giri was more attentive to Kaoru than to his own sons.