Thoughts from Episode 23: The Flower Festival

The cherry trees are in full bloom on Sara’s last day of work at the imperial court, and he is making a point of going around talking to everybody. By now, he’s clearly getting tired quite quickly, so he has help from Aguri’s daughter Torako and son Toramitsu, whom he’s known since childhood. The palace is in party mood, with Togu asking to see Sara and Suiren together – prompting tears of joy from their father – and court officials reciting Chinese poetry (唐歌, karauta as they call it in the manga). Sara’s recitation is so moving that the Emperor sends him a robe as a gift and later requests a musical performance from him and Suiren as the day comes to an end. Sara instead plays the flute alone and thinks back on his time as a court gentleman.

Soon, the Emperor decides Sara deserves a promotion to General (右大将) of the Imperial Guards, but Sara is nowhere to be seen. Unbeknownst to everyone present, he’s already leaving under cover of darkness, with Torako and Toramitsu leading him to an ox-drawn carriage. There, much to his displeasure, he finds Tsuwabuki – as it turns out, Aguri revealed the plans to him and he insisted on helping. In the end, Sara is too exhausted to keep fighting, and the group heads off for Tsuwabuki’s villa in Uji.

I don’t normally do this, but the title of today’s blog post, The Flower Festival, is the same as the chapter title for Episode 23. In Japanese, it’s hana no utage (花の宴), which, like several other chapter titles, is also the title of a chapter in The Tale of Genji. I made an exception this time because it’s particularly apt: not only does the chapter revolve around a flower viewing party in the palace, but it’s also full of meaningful references to flowers.

Title page of Episode 23 from volume 5, page 79.

©Chiho Saito／Shogakukan

In Episode 12, Sara’s personality was compared to spring. Fittingly, on the day he bows out from court service, he’s given the theme of “spring” in the poetry recital. He tastefully recites two consecutive poems by Heian blorbo Bai Juyi from the “last day of the third month” (that is, the end of spring) section of the Wakan roeishu, a famous anthology of Japanese and Chinese poetry. The way this is presented in the manga is as he recites it, not in Chinese but using kanbun kundoku, a traditional of not exactly translating the original poem but converting it to (classical) Japanese grammar. And that’s how we get this:

春 留むるに 春 住まらず

春 帰って 人 寂漠たり

風を厭うに 風 定まらず

風 起って 花 蕭索たり

And this:

竹院に 君 静かにして 永日をけすならん

花亭に 我 酔うて 残んの春を 送る

Now, I can’t just read Chinese as-is, but it does have something distinctive about it, so in my translation, I wanted it to sound a bit different from how I’ve translated the Japanese poems so far. With that in mind, I again took advantage of the fact that we’re shown a classical Japanese and a modern Japanese version. While my translation of the modern Japanese gave me a chance to flesh it out and explain it more, in the first versions I tried to stick quite closely to order of the characters in the original Chinese poems and avoid too many extraneous words in an effort to express their structure. So the first poem ended up like this:

Hold back spring, but it will not stay.

Spring leaves; we are all alone.

Despise the wind, but it will not abate.

Wind rises; flowers are desolate.

(Even if one tries to hold onto spring, it will not remain.

Spring goes away and people reflect quietly on their solitude.

Even if one hates the wind that scatters the flowers, it will not die down.

The petals falling as the wind blows are all the more saddening.)

And the second one (my personal preference!):

You, serene, in a house with bamboo, as the long day dwindles.

I, drunk, in a hut with flowers, watch spring leave.

(In a quiet manor house, surrounded by bamboo,

you spend this long day as spring comes to an end.

In a small house, surrounded by flowers,

I become drunk and gaze out at what little remains of spring.)

Something you’ll notice is that these both make reference to flowers. The first feels particularly significant in Episode 23, with the idea that the wind sadly blows all the blossoms away aligning with some of the other imagery in this chapter. They also share a melancholic description of the passing away of spring. We can think of spring as representing Sara in the eyes of those who care about him, and also in his eyes as the life he’s led so far – something to be missed as it imminently departs.

Other touching references to flowers come up throughout the day, like early on when Sara speaks to a lady who says the flowers are “at their very peak of beauty today” (今日が満開の美しさですわね) and at sunset when Sara laments the end of the day and an official tells him “this is when the blossoms look best” (桜が一番きれいに見える時ぞ). On the surface, these are about what is literally happening, but in the overall narrative, they’re obviously about Sara too.

And the clearest such connection comes at the start, when Sara tells us, “Today is the day I disappear” (今日は 私が散る日). He used the word 散る in Chapter 22 as well, when deciding that he would go out with a bang: “Brilliantly, colourfully, just like a flower, I will fall” (華々しく煌らかに 花のように 散ってみせよう)*. I find myself translating this word differently each time – and it does come up again after this too – because of its double meaning. On the one hand, it is literally “to fall” or “to scatter” as petals might, but it also means “to die nobly”. Sara intends to do as Yoshino no Miya advised him, and “die” so he can live again.

Sara’s repeated use of 散る in reference to himself also calls to mind his name. The sarasoju (沙羅双樹), or sal tree, or natsutsubaki (not all necessarily the same plant!) is known for its briefly blooming flowers, and is associated both with the death of the Buddha and with the opening lines of The Tale of the Heike, a story full of noble death. Frankly, I think I’d better write an entire post just about his name one of these days!

But basically, 散る is just about the most evocative way Sara could describe his departure from the Heian court. And it casts a different light on all the mentions of flowers throughout this flowery chapter!

*I particularly love this line because it feels like a twist on “Let’s live our lives heroically, let’s live them with style” (潔く、格好良く生きて行こう– the similarity is clearer in Japanese!)