One Thousand Summers

So his thoughts returned always to the same family. As he sank deeper in memories of Uji, of his strange, cruel ties with the Uji family, drake flies, than which no creatures are more fragile and insubstantial, were flitting back and forth in the evening light.    ‘I see the drake fly, take it up in my hand. Ah, here it is, I say − and it is gone.’   And he added softly, as always: ‘Here, and perhaps not here at all.’

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...