in the country, Genji comes across some old palace now overgrown with weeds, the sight stirs doubts within him about the magnificent mansion he himself is building. And when, later in the book, the light suddenly falls on the face of one of his old mistresses, and he realizes that to any eyes but his own she must seem no more than a middle-aged woman, the passing of time is given its sharpest expression.
Although the novel is full of humour and charm, the prevailing impression is one of sadness, in large part because of this insistence on the inexorable motion of time. Its beauty is like that of some of the paintings of Watteau, where we feel something perishable and painfully sad behind the exquisite scenes of ladies and their lovers. The impression of sadness is so dominant that we wonder what conceivably could have made critics liken the work to Tom Jones or to The Decameron. Probably it was no more than the large number of love-affairs treated in the course of the novel. But what a difference between the women Genji courts and those we find in Fielding or Boccaccio! Whether they are haughty like Aoi, or humble like Yugao, possessive like Rokujo, or yielding like the Lady from the Village of Falling Flowers, they are all possessed of an amazing degree of sensitivity and delicacy. The society of The Tale of Genji was of an almost unimaginable subtlety. People constantly exchange remarks as obscure as any conversations in a novel by Henry James, and generally in poetry. Love-affairs, unlike the hearty adventures described in Tom Jones, usually involved more pain than pleasure, as the lovers realized the impossibility of being an entire world for one another. The conduct of the love-affairs is extremely remote from any described in Western books. It was never a matter of boy meets girl, if only because girl remained concealed from boy until they were on the terms of greatest intimacy. What
