Frailty, Melancholy and the Death of Yūgao: The Japanese Aesthetics of Wabi-sabi in The Tale of Genji (源氏物語)

徳川美術館蔵、源氏物語絵巻(国宝)、夕顔の断裁は未発見だそうです。

(photo taken from: http://blogs.yahoo.co.jp/yunitake2000/45490645.html)

The aesthetic conception of wabi-sabi (please see: The Definition of Wabi-sabi)is manifested profoundly in the fourth chapter of the well-known Japanese Heian literature The Tale of Genji – Yūgao: The Twilight Beauty. The chapter begins with Genji’s visit to his old nurse who lives in Gojō. Genji examines the neighbourhood and notices a lovely crowd of white flowers clustering among a bright green vine against the deserted wall of a small house (where the female protagonist of the chapter, Yūgao, dwells in). Stunned by the flowers’ delicate beauty of tenderness and feebleness, Genji murmurs absent-mindedly, “A word I would have with you, O you from afar.”(1) These white flowers are called yūgao (夕顔), which literally means “twilight beauty,” grow and flourish only in a cramped and shabby environment. “Poor flowers!” Genji exclaims. He then orders his man to go and pick him some of these pitiful flowers. Genji is not only sympathetic but also drawn to the shabbiness and frailty of the pale blossom. Leaning miserably in every direction in such a wretched neighbourhood, yūgao is humble and simple yet melancholy and pitiful.

Unlike bright red rose, which symbolizes royalty, devotion and sophistication, or Chinese orchid, which symbolizes literati culture, elegance and refinement, the pale yūgao is endearing in its own aesthetic quality and principles – wabi and sabi. These feeble white flowers enjoy being surrounded by austerity, rusticity and chaos – which are characteristics of the wild primitive state of nature that is untouched by civilization and culture. Yūgao does not at all concern about worldly matters such as status, power, fame, human civilization and material. While roses and orchids live in a civilized yet artificial world celebrating all the noble symbolic meanings that are attached to them, yūgao lives in the wild enjoying its shabby and primitive yet genuine and inartificial state as an integrated part of the mighty Mother Nature. In other words, roses and orchids have already become an anthropocentric victim that is constantly being manipulated in different ways (for political, economic and religious purposes) while yūgao, though unrecognised, isolated and far from the civilized human world, takes pleasure in “un-civilization”, unpretentiousness, solitude, tranquillity and wabi. By being “imperfect”, powerless and distant from mundaneness, yūgaoremains its harmonious cosmic relationship with nature as well as the universe.

Besides wabi, this tiny pale flower also embodies the Japanese aesthetic value of sabi. In the scene in which Genji’s man, obeying the order from his master, goes and picks the white flowers for Genji, a pretty young maid comes out from the small house and offers the man with a perfumed fan. “Here,” she says, “give them (the yūgao) to him on this – their stems are so hopeless.”(2) The flowers are too fragile to be held by human hands. With its feebleness and colourlessness, yūgao stirs sorrow and desolate sentiments. These white flowers are so fragile as if they are dying. Yet, such feeble state and “imperfection” become a form of perfection. In the aesthetic concept of sabi, beauty does not necessarily require a perfection of form. The delicacy and ephemerality of yūgao should not be understood as being in the process of dying; instead, the flowers are returning to their origin. They are returning to the earth. Their “imperfection” allows them to achieve reunification with the universe. The feebleness of yūgao manifests the circle of departing from and returning to nature: being born from the universe, leaving the universe for ego, individualism, reason and civilization, and becoming one with the universe again. It is exactly the aesthetics of sabi that makes yūgao’s frailty so endearing, spiritual, beautiful and alluring.

Yūgao, the female protagonist of the chapter who shared the same name with the white flowers, is persuaded by Genji and goes with him to a deserted villa near Gojō at dawn. The place is strangely disturbing and quite isolated. “The place is eerie,” Genji says to himself when he is examining the surroundings of the villa.(3) With the shrubbery plants, ancient groves and a fallen gate covered with ferns, the atmosphere is not only silent and remote, but also very desolate and gloomy. Yūgao and Genji spend the evening together in the villa exchanging affectionate poems and gazing out at the melancholic scenery of the place under the twilight glow. Terrified by the gloomy view of the villa’s garden, Yūgao is anxious and yields to Genji little by little. “She had now lain by him all day, piercingly young and sweet in her shy terror.”(4) Genji is charmed by Yūgao’s bashfulness, timidity and feebleness.

Yūgao’s delicate charm of frailty is known as rōtashi(﨟たし), which is “an adjective denoting a Heian ideal of feminine beauty that is used to describe the frail beauty and charm of a girl or woman that inspires in the observer a desire to protect or cherish her.”(5) Similar to the white flowers, the charm of rōtashiis aroused by the beauty of wabi-sabi. Yūgao, the female protagonist, and yūgao, the white flowers, are both a feeble and timid being. Not clinging on materials, status or reputation, both of them are pure, humble and effortlessly beautiful. “It is frailty that gives a woman her charm, though. I do not care for a woman who insists on valuing her own wits,” Genji says to Ukon, the nurse of Yūgao, one evening after the death of the lady. Shy, weak and powerless, both Yūgao and yūgao gleam in their own modest and bashful way, profoundly revealing the beauty of wabi and sabi.

As the story proceeds, a growing grotesque atmosphere dominates the scene. In the dead of night, Genji sees a beautiful woman in his dream, accusing him of being heartless and berates him for having a love affair with an insignificant person like Yūgao. The woman then begins to shake Yūgao awake. Frightened, Genji wakes up and feels a heavy menacing presence around him. Yūgao moans. Turning to look at her in the torchlight, Genji catches a glimpse of the woman in his dream sitting next to Yūgao’s pillow. The woman immediately vanishes. Yūgao is possessed by a malign spirit. Terrified and delirious, she soon grows cold and stops breathing.

When the night is finally over, Koremitsu, Genji’s foster brother and confidant, comes to the villa and conveys Yūgao’s corpse to a quiet temple in Eastern Hills. “Genji did not have the strength to lift her in his arms, and it was Koremitsu who wrapped her in a padded mat and laid her in the carriage. She was so slight that he was more drawn than repelled.”(6) Even though Yūgao is now a corpse, cold and unpleasant to touch, Genji finds her “more drawn than repelled.” The beauty of the corpse is revealed as it embodies the aesthetics of wabi-sabi. The bleak melancholic corpse, rather than frightening, is calm and tranquil. It evokes a deeply personal and sensual aesthetic consciousness. It is a bittersweet representation of both melancholy and serenity, a sense of peace and solitude buoyed by liberation from emotions, desires and material hindrance of the earthly mundane world. Thus, the beauty of the corpse can only be perceived when one turns the focus from outer appearance to look within. Genji is drawn to the inner spirituality and solitude of Yūgao’s corpse, which is now subtly, piece by piece, returning to nature, returning to the origin of life. Similar to yūgao, the white flowers, the corpse of Yūgao does not symbolize death. Instead, its ephemerality witnesses a rebirth in another metaphysical space. The corpse symbolizes the reunification with nature. The perishing is beautiful.

On the second evening after Yūgao’s death, Genji follows Koremitsu to the temple where the corpse is rested. Looking at the pale corpse, Genji is not afraid. “No fear troubled him. She was as lovely as ever; as yet she betrayed no change.”(7) Once again, Genji finds the corpse pleasant to gaze upon. Although the corpse is cold, pale and static, one can feel the vivid circulation of qi (8) under such unvivid, imperfect and weary appearance. One can sense the substance of the corpse, piece by piece, tranquilly returning to the mighty Mother Nature. It is the beauty of wabi-sabithat cultivates the inner aesthetics of a dead body, and helps viewers maintain a calm and peaceful mind when they see corpse or witness the death of someone.

Higashiyama Kaii, a Japanese artist, once said, “When I enjoy the sunset over the far mountains while sitting on a manless grassland, I feel that, at that very moment, I am reunified with nature. There is a very powerful self-consciousness of being one entity with nature. I am alive and dead at the same time.”(9) The beauty of wabi and sabi is manifested profoundly in this statement. Alive, because he is an individual who has a strong ego and is clinging on the materialistic world, making him disconnected with nature; dead, because Higashiyama, while being alone on the grassland, is reunified with nature, leaving all human desires and material hindrance behind in the earthly world and returning back to the origin, thus the universe. What Higashiyama experienced is a cycle of birth and rebirth. Being alive is a process of approaching death; while death is in fact the origin of being. Death is the beginning of a new life. Thus, death is the end of being alive, while at the same time, seemingly paradoxically, it is also the beginning of being alive. It is an eternal cycle. It is the order of the universe. The death of Yūgao, therefore, in spite of its sorrow and desolate appearance, symbolizes her grand reunification with nature – the ultimate goal of human life, as in the contexts of Taoism and Zen Buddhism. This is the essence of the aesthetic concepts of wabi-sabi. Yūgao’s desolate corpse becomes gracefully beautiful, exemplifying the beauty of vitality and longevity at another cognitive and metaphysical level that cannot be explained by worldly logos or human’s analytic powers.

After seeing Yūgao for the very last time, Genji goes back home and, under the clouded twilight sky, murmurs in blank despair:

“When the clouds to me seem always to be the smoke that rose from her pyre, 

how fondly I rest my gaze even on the evening sky!”(10)

Such poetic atmosphere not only reflects Genji’s great grief over his loss of his lover, but also testifies Yūgao’s reunification with nature, her being one with nature. All her sadness, happiness, pain, memories, desires, emotions, sensuality and earthly attachments are now melting into air, leaving only peace and tranquillity. Genji’s poem is solitary without an affectionate response.(11) The absence of a respondent poem underscores the finality of the parting of the two lovers. Genji’s poetic lament undoubtedly manifests the aesthetics of wabi-sabi melancholically and elegantly.

The image of the lovely feeble yūgaoblooming briefly against the deserted wall in the shabby neighbourhood of Gojō illustrated in the beginning of the chapter effectively coveys, along the proceeding of the story, Yūgao’s feebleness, humble existence and ephemeral beauty, and presages her early and sudden death. The evanescent quality of both yūgao and Yūgao thrives most profoundly in the twilight, corresponding to the meaning of the name – “Twilight Beauty” – and at the same time revealing the aesthetic ideal of wabi-sabi with the finest manner. Frailty, desolation and melancholy are the most significant elements in this chapter, giving The Tale of Genji greater sensitivity and grotesquery as well as a refinedly lyrical tone. The beauty of yūgao, the feeble white flowers, and Yūgao, the pitiful young protagonist, is not defined by superficial appearance. Such sublime beauty can only be perceived by a tranquil and sensitive state of mind. Having the ability to see the “invisible” and pare away the unnecessary can lead one to the essence of wabi-sabi.

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References:
(1) Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji, trans. Royall Tyler (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 56.
(2) Ibid.
(3) Ibid, 65.
(4) Ibid, 66.
(5) Janet Emily Goff, “The Tale of Genji as a Source of the Nō: Yūgao and Hajitomi,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. 42, No. 1 (1982): 195.
(6) Murasaki, The Tale of Genji,69-70.
(7) Ibid, 72.
(8) Qi is a Taoist term that can be translated as “energy flow” or “life force.”
(9) Higashiyama Kaii東山魁夷, Mei yu you li 美與遊歷 [Beauty and Travel], trans. Zhuge Weidong 諸葛蔚東 (Shijiazhuang Shi: Hua shan wen yi chu ban she: Hebei jiao yu chu ban she, 2001), 38.
(10) Murasaki, The Tale of Genji, 76.
(11) In the manner of sequence of love poetry in the Heian imperial anthologies, a lover should start the initial overture and his/her partner should respond the overture with a corresponding affectionate poem, declaring the mutual affection or personal hesitation.