playing most agreeably on her lute. She was so good a performer that she was often called upon to play with the professional male musicians in the Imperial orchestra. It happened that at this moment she was somewhat downcast and discontented, and in such a mood she played with even greater feeling and verve. She was singing the ‘Melon-growers Song’[1]; admirably, he thought, despite its inappropriateness to her age. So must the voice of the mysterious lady at O-chou have sounded in Po Chü-i’s ears when he heard her singing on her boat at night[2]; and he stood listening. At the end of the song the player sighed heavily as though quite worn out by the passionate vehemence of her serenade. Genji approached softly humming the ‘Azumaya’: ‘Here in the portico of the eastern house rain splashes on me while I wait. Come, my beloved, open the door and let me in.’ Immediately, indeed with an unseemly haste, she answered as does the lady in the song ‘Open the door and come in,’[3] adding the verse: ‘In the wide shelter of that portico no man yet was ever splashed with rain,’ and again she sighed so portentously that although he did not at all suppose that he alone was the cause of this demonstration he felt it in any case to be somewhat exaggerated and answered with the poem: ‘Your sighs show clearly that, despite the song, you are another’s bride, and I for my part have no mind to haunt the loggias of your eastern house.’ He would gladly have passed on, but he felt that this would be too unkind, and seeing that someone else was coming towards her room he stepped
- ↑ An old folk-song the refrain of which is ‘At the melon-hoeing he said he loved me and what am I to do, what am I to do?’
- ↑ The poem referred to is not the famous Lute Girl’s Song, but a much shorter one (Works x. 8) on a similar theme. O-chou is the modern Wu-ch’ang in Hupeh.
- ↑ In the song the lady says: ‘The door is not bolted or barred. Come quickly and talk to me. Am I another’s bride, that you should be so careful and shy?’
