The riot of threads for decking out the sacred incense led one of the princesses to remark upon the stubborn way their own lives had of spinning on.* Catching sight of a spool through a gap in the curtains, Kaoru recognized the allusion. ‘Join my tears as beads,’† he said softly. They found it very affecting, this suggestion that the sorrow of Lady Ise had been even as theirs; yet they were reluctant to answer. To show that they had caught the reference might seem pretentious.‡ But an answering reference immediately came to them: they could not help thinking of Tsurayuki, whose heart had not been ‘that sort of thread’, and who had likened it to a thread all the same as he sang the sadness of a parting that was not a bereavement.[*] Old poems, they could see, had much to say about the unchanging human heart.
－ Murasaki Shikibu 紫式部, The Tale of Genji (源氏物語 Genji monogatari)
Chapter 47 “Trefoil Knots” (総角 Agemaki)
* Anonymous, Kokinshū 806:
This life goes on, however sad we are.
Would that the thread would snap − but still it spins.
† Ise, Kokin Rokujō, Zoku Kokka Taikan 33326:
Make of these laments a thread to join us,
And add my tears as beads to string upon it.
‡ Since the next poem is misquoted, it has been suggested that the princesses’ shyness has to do with an uncertain grasp of the classics.
[*] Ki no Tsurayuki, Kokinshū 415:
Threads are thin; my heart is no such thread.
Yet now. As I set forth, it is at the breaking.
The poem is held together by the adjective ‘thin’. To be thin-hearted, in Japanese, is to be sad and lonely.
Translation and commentary by Edward Seidensticker.