Thoughts from Episode 27: The Uji Chapter
This chapter takes a break from Suiren’s spiralling situation in Heian-kyo to jump back a few weeks and pay a visit to Sara’s spiralled situation in Uji. The end of Episode 26 gave a brief glimpse at a woman (?) with a cat, who turned out to be none other than Sara. This time, we learn that since his sudden disappearance in the previous volume, Sara has been at Tsuwabuki’s villa in Uji, mainly under the care of Torako, Toramitsu and assorted servants.
Tsuwabuki himself is also around some of the time, though he travels between Uji and his job in the capital. Smitten, he has a wonderful time dolling up Sara, who decides to grin and bear it until the baby is born. Then one day, Tsuwabuki receives a letter from Saemon, informing him that Shi no Hime – Sara’s wife who is scandalously also pregnant with Tsuwabuki’s child… – has been thrown out of her home. And when Tsuwabuki goes to visit Shi no Hime (at Sara’s insistence), he finds her feeble and hopeless, and is so moved by her situation that he vows to nurse her back to health. Finally, all alone in Uji, Sara can do nothing but compose a Sad Moon Poem™.
Panel from volume 6, page 43.
©Chiho Saito／Shogakukan
Not for the first time, the story of Torikae baya (and its source material) bears some resemblance to The Tale of Genji. The final ten chapters of Genji are famously known as “the Uji chapters”, taking place after the titular character passes away and focusing instead on his sons, legitimate and illegitimate, as they compete over women in Uji. Now, Torikae baya’s own Uji chapter is Sara’s first appearance after he vanished from the capital, an act the story repeatedly associates with death. To cap it off, I’m even convinced that the title of Episode 24 (霧の迷い), when everyone is wondering what happened to Sara, is meant to bring to mind the title of the chapter where Genji dies (雲隠).
Another interesting aspect of this chapter is that after a pretty linear chronology up to now, the beginning of Sara’s time in Uji is presented as a flashback. Just as Suiren tells her parents she’s reached a decision in the previous chapter, we see “Sara-hime” holding a cat. Then after rewinding to Sara and Tsuwabuki’s arrival in Uji – specifically a month and a half earlier – and looking at Sara’s new life there, that cat is the signal that the story has caught up to where Episode 26 left off. It belongs to Aguri, who is going home after visiting Sara.
I find this interesting because it just isn’t a technique that Saito uses very often in this series! Events follow one after another, and most flashbacks are just a panel or two, often to scenes that we’ve already encountered once. The narrative jumps significantly forward in time at a few points, but rarely back. The only other similar part that I can think of happens in Episode 62, and even then it’s quite brief.
That’s not to say that the timeline is totally straightforward though. I talked before about the complexity of the story’s timeline and looking out for hints of how much time passes between events. Another complicating factor is that around this point in the story, we learn a bit more about things that happened in the past. Tucked in among the political gossip in Episode 26, Shikibu-kyo no Miya refers to a previous succession dispute which resulted in one of the parties withdrawing to Yoshino. Yoshino no Miya has himself hinted at having a dark past, such as when he implied that he had to be reborn after being exiled for his misdeeds.
At this stage, this is all we really know about this mysterious incident, and that it happened over ten years ago but not too much over ten years ago (ほんの十数年前, according to Shikibu-kyo). But we learn a bit more in the coming chapters, with implications for the timeline, for Yoshino, and for other characters in the story.
