We must not look at goblin men,
We must not buy their fruits:
Who knows upon what soil they fed
Their hungry, thirsty roots.
- Christina Rossetti

1. The controversial Japanese critic, author, and translator Setouchi Jakuchô has characterized the early 11th-century Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji) as a sex education manual designed at least in part to guide Empress Akiko, who was brought to Court as a young child, through the complex maze of male/female relations.[1] In this context, the Ôigimi story is highly instructive regarding author Murasaki Shikibu's attitude toward love and sexuality, dealing as it does with the ultimately fatal anorexia of a woman who feels an overpowering need to escape being wedded and bedded. Many episodes found in Japanese literature of the Heian period (8th through 12th century) show how, despite varying degrees of initial reluctance, women are married off. Michitsuna no Haha, author of the biographical Kagerô nikki written in the mid- to late-10th century, accepts Kaneie's suit and, in the Genji monogatari, the young Murasaki, the Akashi Lady, Tamakazura, and countless others do in the end become brides, to name but a few examples. Thus, while Heian heroines are frequently portrayed as offering a posture of resistance to the sexual demands made by men, most do at one time or another yield more or less willingly to such demands. In the darker Uji chapters that form the final third of the Genji, however, a unique female character appears, one who clings to her decision to resist marriage and all that it entails, even unto death. When viewed microscopically, the actions of this ie no onna (literally, "house woman," i.e., one not serving at the imperial court) may well appear paranoid and irrational (or, in Freudian terms, frigid), but macroscopically, taking into account the women's stories that have come before, they are all too justifiable. Through a discussion of the tactics she uses to resist her suitor, and especially of the rationale behind such resistance, this article will argue that Ôigimi's behaviour actually demonstrates a powerfully subversive response to male invasion and attempted appropriation of the self.
   
   
2. In the interests of readability, references to Murasaki Shikibu's text will be drawn primarily from Edward Seidensticker's 1976 English version (1989 Knopf edition), with Japanese terms and phrases introduced only where specifically relevant. While use of a translation rather than the original is necessarily problematic, this strategy has the not inconsiderable benefit of rendering my argument accessible to an audience beyond that versed in the Classical Japanese language.[2] Critical works written in both English and Japanese (in the latter case, translations are my own) will, of course, be employed throughout.
   
   
3. Similarly, while examples drawn from elsewhere in Japanese literature will be used to illustrate the various points, I have also chosen to engage with certain textual references more familiar to a Western reader. Given that both Comparative Literature and feminist research are largely interdisciplinary in scope, they expose the falsity of many purportedly common-sensical divisions, revealing that certain artificial barriers may have "obstructed a complete view of women's situations and the social structures that perpetuated gender inequalities" (Hesse-Biber 1) and suggesting that there is an inherent value to bringing disparate elements together, to moving beyond the bounds of national literatures. In a recent report on the status of the discipline, Charles Bernheimer argues convincingly that

   comparative literature illuminates the artistic and cultural patterns of sameness and difference which exist both within and between societies, and it thereby gives us a precious contrastive portrait of societies' values and beliefs, as well as their aesthetic and literary traditions. (81)

   New ways of seeing and theorizing the condition of women may well be revealed when the point of departure is located elsewhere than in Europe and North America. Ultimately, by focussing attention on a work of pre-modern Japanese literature, I am making an argument for a decentring move, questioning and destabilizing assumptions as to how our world can be understood and thus potentially leading to a re-thinking of certain feminist projects that have previously been rooted in the West.
   
   
4. Reading a 1000-year-old Japanese text from an early 21st-century Canadian perspective does inevitably run the serious risk of appropriation of voice. As Toril Moi rightly cautions, "it is not an unproblematic project to try to speak for the other woman, since this is precisely what the ventriloquism of patriarchy has always done: men have constantly spoken for women, or in the name of women" (67-8). Any analysis of a culture other than one's own needs to remain aware of the danger of daring to speak for the Other, of appropriating and (mis)interpreting what those from utterly different centuries and circumstances have said. While one could assert that every attempt to interpret a cultural artefact means a de facto act of speaking for its creator, whether sympathetically or not, it is a fact that the cross-cultural researcher must always remain especially conscious of the need to respect another's separate identity and experience if s/he is to avoid the pitfalls of misrepresentation and ahistoricism. One has also to be wary of anachronistic terminology such as "medieval feminist" and unjustified exploitation of early texts for supporting an unrelated, foreign perspective. Terms and phrases such as "patriarchal oppression" and "violation of personal space" certainly were not part of the vocabulary (be it Japanese or English) until very recent times indeed. Regardless, the ideas and emotions behind this modern-day wording are hardly new or geographically specific. Despite obvious and significant differences of culture and language, therefore, an examination of similar literary strategies can fruitfully exemplify and shed light on many of the concepts and arguments that have fascinated readers in both past and present, east and west.
   
   
5. Turning now to our main topic, we note that the reader is given a multitude of reasons for the elder Uji princess' rejection of Kaoru's advances. Her most often stated rationale is the desire to honour her father's wishes and protect the family name from ridicule (hitowarae). As Haruo Shirane explains at some length in The Bridge of Dreams, while her high rank requires Ôigimi to marry within an elite group or suffer social opprobrium, the family's status has diminished to the point where she has little hope of marrying well, if at all.[3] The aristocratic Kaoru's offer should, therefore, logically be received as a welcome one. As for the purported parental disapproval, Hachi no Miya (the Eighth Prince) clearly had never intended his stricture against marrying to apply in this case; on the contrary, he entertained the fond hope that one of the daughters would indeed wed his trustworthy and admirable pupil. The Prince makes several rather vague comments about the nature of the relationship either Ôigimi or Nakanokimi might eventually enter into with Kaoru, such as "his thoughts have turned to you because I once chanced to hint at a hope that he would watch over you after my death" (Seidensticker 1989: 792). Nonetheless, other statements become much more explicit: "I have done what I could to bring you together. You have years ahead of you and I must leave the rest to you" (805), and especially: "Kaoru was exactly what he hoped a son-in-law might be" (801). Should a proposal be made, therefore, it would scarcely fall into the category of "unsuitable marriages" (807) against which he warns the sisters, and one is hard pressed to misinterpret the father's actual wishes in this matter.
   
   
6. So why does Ôigimi adamantly refuse the suitor? A far more convincing factor behind her decision not to accept this husband is a fear of what intimacy with men will entail. While allowing males to have access to her person would provide the support (ushiromi) Ôigimi needs to make her way in society, accepting such support would place her completely at the mercy of a patriarchy that is more than a little misogynous. Consequently, the resistance she manifests can be viewed as a conscious attempt to retain her autonomy and sense of self. Ironically, in this case, self-preservation is possible only through self-annihilation, and the reader bears witness to Ôigimi's inexorable progress toward death.
   
   
7. While the isolated domestic space of Uji initially offers a stable place of refuge for the princesses, loss of the father-protector exposes them to Kaoru's and Niou's claims to right of access. Despite her initial protestations that she prefers to spend the rest of her life alone with her sister, Nakanokimi soon succumbs to what is considered a normal woman's fate and marries Niou. The elder sister, however, is unable to conceive of wedlock as a desirable or even imaginable option, and repeatedly rejects Kaoru's overtures. Unwilling or unable to accept this quite unparalleled resistance as genuine, the hero nonetheless continues to badger her. Given that external flight is not a viable option, Ôigimi's fear of the Phallus (and the threat it represents) necessitates ever further retreat within the inner sphere. Eventually, her desperate efforts to maintain spatial integrity lead her to reject any trespass of bodily boundaries, including via the act of eating. By starving herself to death, she gradually succeeds in eliminating her own physicality, which has served to attract the unwanted and insistent suitor. To Ôigimi's mind, intimacy with the male can be achieved only by sacrificing autonomy and identity, and is thus a destiny to be avoided at all costs.
   
   
8. Although born in Heian-kyô, Ôigimi and Nakanokimi have spent many years of their lives in the Uji villa, isolated from the capital and the glories of civilization it has to offer. Poetic allusions in The Tale of Genji and elsewhere play repeatedly on the association of the place name Uji with ushi, an adjective meaning gloomy, wearisome, distasteful, or miserable. Indeed, the Eighth Prince moved his family to this location only as a last resort, when their principal residence in the city burned down. He is aware of the hardship such a rusticated life may pose for his young daughters, but has no viable alternative. This environment is described in quite forbidding terms:

   Mountain upon mountain separated his [the Prince's] dwelling from the larger world. Rough people of the lower classes, woodcutters and the like, sometimes came by to do chores for him. There were no other callers. The gloom continued day after day, as stubborn and clinging as 'the morning mist on the peaks'. (779-80)

   Not only is the villa remote from the city and human companionship, it is constantly enshrouded in oppressive mist and surrounded by dense undergrowth:

   As he [Kaoru] came into the mountains the mist was so heavy and the underbrush so thick that he could hardly make out the path; and as he pushed his way through thickets the rough wind would throw showers of dew upon him from a turmoil of falling leaves. (783)

   The modern reader cannot help but be reminded of Sleeping Beauty, where the hero must fight his way through an almost impenetrable forest to rescue a virginal and insensible heroine. Nevertheless, as we will see below, in this case the acutely sensible beauty considers the wilderness an asylum and, to the consternation of her would-be champion, declines to be delivered from her unwed status in the traditional manner.
   
   
9. As Rachel Brownstein points out, this cult of the chaste maiden is an important and recurring motif in Western literature: "A beautiful virgin walled off from an imperfect world is the central figure in romance" (35). During Japan's Heian period as well, high-born women were very much "walled off," in that they remained jealously guarded behind several layers of both moveable and immoveable barriers. Clearly defined separate spheres for the sexes were fundamental to the elaborate etiquette of the time: "Good manners maintained proper distance, which amounted to upholding the accepted social order. […] Domestic space, divided by screens, curtains, blinds, and so on […] upheld distance and inviolate dignity" (Tyler xix). It is important to note that women in this society normally lived apart from their husbands in property owned by themselves, and thus could, at least in theory, limit intrusions to a significant degree. Direct access by even closely related adult males was not socially acceptable, with the result that the interior is portrayed as an almost exclusively female-gendered space. As a recent Japanese critical study on the architectural setting of the Genji (Yasuhara Morihiko, Genji monogatari: Kûkan dokkai, 2000) points out, female ownership of real estate meant that the woman's ability to decide what went on in her home was widely recognized, including even where a male visitor was allowed to sit.[4]
   
   
10. Ironically, however, most Heian architecture is revealed to be insubstantial, in that physical, visual, and aural penetration is within the reach of any moderately resourceful voyeur. Indeed, the entire tragedy of Ôigimi begins to unfold with Kaoru catching a hint of music wafting from the sisters' quarters. In this initially accidental, although not unqualifiedly innocent[5], aural violation of their privacy, the young man becomes tantalized by the faint strains of the lovely and melancholy duet that Ôigimi and Nakanokimi are playing on koto and biwa. Once he learns that the Prince, whom he has intended to visit, is away on a spiritual retreat (and that the two young women are thus alone and unprotected), the titillating possibility of a chance at kaimami (literally, "peering through a gap in the fence," but more generally this literature's omnipresent peeping tom motif) proves irresistible. With the connivance of a guardsman employed by the princesses, he hides behind a fence and, by the light of the moon shining out from behind a cloud, is able to peer at the two unsuspecting women under their raised blinds. The reader participates in this surreptitious violation of their privacy and Kaoru's resulting arousal, which fact is made clear in countless illustrations (such as the emaki, or picture scrolls) of this and similar scenes. As Joshua Mostow comments:

    The female narrator and her illustrator have internalized the masculine gaze and have been colonized by it: the narrator and viewer both merge with Kaoru and become complicit in his voyeurism. Essential to the voyeur's pleasure is the obliviousness of his object: the one he views must be totally absorbed in her own actions and unaware of the presence of a viewer. (467)

    Ôigimi and her sister certainly have no reason to suspect the presence of a peeping tom, although they do subsequently blame themselves for being oblivious to Kaoru's distinctive aroma, which had been carried to them on the breeze. After all, they are described here as uchi naru hito (Abe 16: 131)—literally, "the people inside"—thus hardly sitting out in the open, or even on the verandah as two of their ladies-in-waiting do. It is only reasonable for the princesses to assume that they were sheltered from prying eyes there in their private quarters, behind gates and fences, surrounded by serving women and protected by guardsmen outside, as had been the case until this fateful day.
    
    
11. In these chapters, nature and geography appear to offer additional barriers to violation and protect Ôigimi and Nakanokimi from unwanted intrusions. The Uji palace is presented as both a religious and secular sanctuary, the tortuous route from the capital serving to discourage most gallants and thus keeping its occupants safe from harm. Seidensticker rightly comments on the significance of the "gothic mists and waters of Uji" (1983: 203), and one is tempted to see the Uji River as a moat-like additional defense against invaders. Of course, being on the far side of the Eighth Prince's property, it does not pose a physical barrier to access. Nevertheless, the river is repeatedly described in terms that make of it an omnipresent symbol of nature's power, serving as a warning to those from outside but somehow a source of comfort to the female inmates. I have already pointed out that prospective suitors must struggle through almost impassible thickets and underbrush, their passage made more difficult by the ever-present fog. Until Kaoru thoughtlessly discloses their existence to the licentious Niou, the sisters enjoy an almost uterine security in what is in effect a secure, woman-centred world. Let us not forget that this is a society where homes are principally inherited on a matrilineal basis, and thus female characters are intimately associated with their residences.
    
    
12. Given that Ôigimi lost her mother at a tender age, this locale can even, to a certain extent, be taken as a mother figure—an abstraction of the feminine principle. It is worth noting in this connection that, as a would-be priest who, despite pressure from members of his household, declines to remarry following his wife's death, the Eighth Prince is presented as a de-sexed or not-male character. Norma Field underscores the effeminate nature of the princesses' father by positing a homoerotic attraction between Kaoru and his spiritual tutor. Along these lines, Ôigimi's anorexia can be interpreted as a rejection of her own sexuality or femaleness in imitation of her sole parental role model: a final desire to regress to childhood, to undifferentiation, even if this regression means death. Such a reading would then significantly parallel the failed attempt by the Third Princess (another motherless child in the Genji) to cling to the prepubescent space that she views as her one refuge from the menacing Phallus.[6] Kaoru's violation would accordingly take on even more ominous overtones as an attack on not only Ôigimi herself, but also Child or Woman in general.
    
    
13. Bearing all these connotations associated with Uji in mind helps make more readily comprehensible Ôigimi's inward-looking obsession and consistent reluctance to leave. The security of her home is not something an intelligent woman throws away lightly, and the princesses have no hope of effective support elsewhere. As Brownstein points out, heroines of romance, symbolized by a rooted flower fated passively to await the male, must stand guard over their spatial and corporeal boundaries:

    Everything that can happen to the Rose while the lover struggles to reach her happens inside. She cannot but be self-preoccupied (which is not to say self-aware); unlike the Lover, she has no Rose outside of herself to draw her out or up. Her life must be passed in staring at the bare insides of garden walls. Eternal vigilance is her lot; if she lets herself be distracted it may be dangerous. (36)

    The interior is clearly identified as her predestined space, and allowing any male to have access is a step fraught with danger. This lesson seems to have been instinctively learned by women in the Heian period: "So the last veil had been stripped away, thought Ôigimi. One thing was clear: theirs was a world in which not a single unguarded moment was possible" (835). The fatal conclusion of her story proves just how dangerous distraction can be.
    
    
14. Space is unambiguously presented as a locus of power relationships. While Ôigimi has long been marginal to society at large and the class into which she was born, she conversely enjoys a pivotal position in the domestic haven at Uji. Her role as mistress of the house, companion to her father, and mother-substitute to Nakanokimi has been relatively autonomous. She thus resists Kaoru's intention to displace her from her house to his, where she would clearly become more subject to another's whims. This situation is strikingly analogous to that of the Akashi Lady from earlier in The Tale of Genji, who has benefited from a childhood and youth where the world revolved around herself, and who sees no personal advantage—indeed considerable disadvantage—in being transported to Genji's household. As Charlotte Perkins Gilman once wrote:

    The life of the female savage is freedom itself … compared with the increasing constriction of custom closing in upon the woman, as civilization advances, like the iron torture chamber of romance. (65)

    To these intellectually astute women who have come of age in the hinterlands of Uji or Akashi, which offer (relatively speaking) a certain amount of personal freedom, Heian-kyô and the patriarchal society there enshrined do symbolize such an iron chamber waiting to close in on them. In their view, far from the pinnacle of joy and security that it represents to the waiting women and others in their entourage, the capital is a site of dependence and potential humiliation. Ôigimi's preference for the independence she has known, in spite of its obscure and peripheral nature, is thus understandable and leads her to resist being brought to a central position (i.e., to an estate within the city limits) that will inevitably be a weaker one. What makes the situation of this Uji princess even more untenable than most is the fact that, in his concern for the well-being of his daughters, the Eighth Prince has to a certain degree dispossessed her by making both sisters de facto wards of another man. (This other man is, of course, Kaoru, the stubbornly persistent suitor.) Although she does inherit the property that has been her home for many years and thus gains increased nominal autonomy, Ôigimi finds herself even more reliant on Kaoru's good will than ever before as, in his role as protector sanctioned by her late father, he presses her with unwelcome attentions that she now finds extremely awkward and risky to rebuff.
    
    
15. Ôigimi's dilemma is a metaphor for woman's ambiguous position within and without the dominant male culture of Heian Japan and elsewhere, where the appropriation of space signifies appropriation of the body. A paralyzing fear of, or at least pronounced distaste for, intimacy with men offers little mystery in a society where women can achieve sexual union only at the cost of totally sacrificing independence and self. It has been said that, "conceiving of herself as the creature of her relationships with others, and bound by her woman's fate to a life of relationships, the conscious heroine longs for solitude and separateness" (Brownstein 288-9). In Kaoru, our author has created the ideal marriage partner, a man who is almost unfailingly patient and sensitive. Regardless, the society in which they live generally precludes wedded bliss. Donno yô ni zen'i no otoko, ii otoko to musubaretemo onna wa fukô da ("Entering into relations with a man, no matter how kind or good he may be, means unhappiness for the woman."), as one Japanese critic (Komashaku 220) has put it. Ôigimi is perceptive enough to see that she and Kaoru cannot meet as equals, without one exploiting/dominating the other. According to this admittedly dismal view of love and marriage, a life of isolation and celibacy is perceived as the sole refuge from mistreatment under the patriarchy. The option of withdrawal from social intercourse is, nonetheless, denied her and her sister due to the relentless attacks of libidinous men.
    
    
16. Ôigimi is unusually fortunate, in that her admirer is unwilling actually to force himself upon her. He proceeds astonishingly slowly, allowing three years to pass before his visits with the father result in the first meeting with the daughters. Even when the inevitable kaimami opportunity finally presents itself, the young man does no more than peer in on them briefly as they play and chat, and then exact a few minutes' conversation separated by the usual curtains and blinds. Ôigimi's evident elegance and modesty somehow discourage him from pressing his luck further—Japanese critics such as Imai Hisayo (173) comment that Kaoru ga ai no shôgai toshite surudoku ishiki shita no ga, misu ya byôbu no hedate de atta ("despite Kaoru's painful consciousness of the obstacles to their meeting, the blinds and screens remained"). Kaoru's impotence buys our heroine time as he vacillates between action and inaction, aggression and indecision. Such restraint is wholly unlike what we see in the more ruthless behaviour of Genji, Kashiwagi, and Niou, to name but a few examples in Murasaki Shikibu's masterpiece. And, as we see in the Kagerô nikki, the inamorato Tônori's bold advances are repulsed only thanks to Michitsuna no Haha's astounding coolness and presence of mind. Kaoru himself recognizes that his patient and readily thwarted demeanor is far from typical:

    Suppose someone with more active inclinations were to come upon this lonely, unprotected house—there would be nothing to keep him from having his way. Had the visitor been anyone but himself, matters would by now have come to a showdown. (827)

    The reader does indeed hesitate to think of Ôigimi's fate if it had been she, rather than Nakanokimi, who had been betrayed to the hot-blooded Niou, for instance. If this elder sister encounters difficulty fighting off the almost unswervingly self-possessed and respectful Kaoru, surely her feeble resources would be inadequate to deal with the lustful impatience displayed by his friend, the more customary sexual adventurer.
    
    
17. What would capitulation mean for a woman of her standing? Ôigimi is certainly old enough (around 27 years of age) to know the pathetic fate awaiting a woman who marries only to be summarily abandoned. Shirane in fact suggests that Murasaki Shikibu has given this heroine a communal memory with her other characters Murasaki and Princess Ochiba.[7] The sufferings of these women at the hands of their insensitive, egocentric men paint a clear picture of what Ôigimi herself can expect. And Nakanokimi's own experiences as a neglected wife reinforce the dangers inherent in succumbing to sexual temptation and male insistence:

    her sister's predicament had left her thinking that relations between husband and wife must be the bleakest the world has to offer. How could she even consider giving herself to a man? The first overtures, capable of arousing such tenderness, must lead to unhappiness later. No, it would be better for them to go on as they were, neither of them demeaning the other and neither going flagrantly against the other's wishes. Her resolve was firmer than ever. (849)

    Seidensticker rightly points out elsewhere that while the Heike monogatari (a 13th-century Japanese classical tale of warfare) describes women happy to suffer and be trodden upon, "Murasaki Shikibu takes the more realistic view that a helpless woman is in a pretty sad position and cannot be expected to enjoy it" (1983: 123). Ôigimi knows full well that surrendering autonomy will mean laying herself open to potential abuse and humiliation, and thus takes every step possible to avoid that fate.
    
    
18. Ôigimi is not alone in the Genji in firmly rejecting the advances of a man. Both Asagao and Tamakazura successfully resist Genji himself, although the latter manages to avoid the Shining One only by submitting to another. Seidensticker claims that Asagao and Ôigimi remain virgins owing to a fear of men, which is symptomatic of their lack of knowledge of the other sex:

    How like the oldest Uji princess is Asagao, both of them brought up in seclusion by a father without the educational presence of brothers. Was the type, terrified by men, so common at court? […] Did Murasaki have a model, or did her instinct for the workings of the human spirit tell her that such circumstances would produce a sort of suicidal frigidity, a wish to see oneself extinguished before doing anything about the perpetuation of the line? I suspect the absence of brothers would be crucial. Their presence would tell a lady something of the world beyond her curtains, even though she did not see a great deal of them. (1983: 114)

    Yet, as demonstrated above, Ôigimi's problem does not appear to stem from ignorance of men, but rather from the fact that she knows altogether too much of them (albeit primarily by hearsay) and how she can expect to be treated once she gives in. Komashaku Kimi (160) characterizes her as riaruna me o motsu onna ("a woman who has her eyes wide open"). This woman has seemingly never known innocence, being imbued from birth with the weight of female memory, eternally awake to the dangers and evils of her world as experienced by her predecessors. As she painfully witnesses what Nakanokimi is enduring, the elder sister reacts defensively: "On one score her resolve was now firm: she would not allow any man to bring this sort of uncertainty into her life" (848). Because this heroine's vision is clouded by neither innocence nor unrealistic ideals, she finds the willpower to stand her ground against incursions. A more romantic and less well-informed young woman would be more susceptible to masculine temptation, as we see throughout this tale.
    
    
19. Ôigimi must exert resistance on a number of fronts. First, the initial successes enjoyed by the forces of masculinity, represented by the characters of Kaoru and Niou, reveal that her physical personal space provides no real protection: "This tiny house […] offered no better a hiding place than was granted the proverbial mountain pear" (832) and again: "It was, indeed, a house that offered no refuge" (833). Even while the father lives and can act as a buffer against the world, marauding males react patronizingly to the wish that the princesses remain secreted away, commenting with a smile: ajikinaki onmono kakushinari (Abe et al. 16: 130)—literally, "a silly kind of hiding of things." The ease by which men insinuate themselves into her presence and her life, in some cases aided by the very guardsmen hired to protect her from such intrusions, impresses upon the princess how exposed she is to real and figurative violation. With the eventual loss of their father, both sisters recognize their increasingly helpless position:

    They looked back over the way they had come. It had, to be sure, had its uncertainties, but they had traveled it with serenity and without fear or shame or any thought that such a disaster might one day come. And now the wind was roaring, strangers were pounding to be admitted. The panic, the terror, the loneliness, worse each day, were almost beyond endurance. (814)

    The above description demonstrates beyond a doubt that even where a woman owns her own house, she remains at the mercy of any passing male who, on a whim, can choose to possess them both.
    
    
20. To make matters worse, it is not only men against whom she must remain vigilant. Ôigimi's waiting women look upon Kaoru as "their one hope in this impossible darkness" (831) and repeatedly urge her to accept him. They pester their mistress to give in, and expose her to almost certain violation by ignoring her wishes:

    from behind her blinds she called to her women to come nearer. No doubt thinking that chaperones would be out of place, they pretended not to hear, and indeed withdrew yet further as they lay down to rest. […] Again she called out softly, and no one answered. (826)

    Not content with a passive complicity, these ladies-in-waiting next begin to plot actively with the intruder. In particular, Kaoru enlists the help of Bennokimi in his attack:

    They had plotted ways of admitting him to her boudoir. Though not aware of the details, Ôigimi had certain suspicions: given Kaoru's remarkable fondness for Bennokimi, and indeed their apparent fondness for each other, the old woman might have acquired sinister ideas, and because in old romances wellborn ladies never threw themselves at men without benefit of intermediary, her women presented the weakest point in her defenses. (831)

    The formidable armaments available to Heian aristocratic women are shown to offer only an illusion of security, with by far the most dangerous breach caused by members of her own sex. The mediators ostensibly employed to maintain the distance so essential to one's self respect often do exactly the opposite, forwarding the cause of an outsider who has gained their sympathy. Like her many counterparts elsewhere in the literature, Ôigimi is betrayed by women who, having no choice to do otherwise, buy into the values of the patriarchal system. It has been rightly pointed out that the domestic power struggle between Ôigimi and her servants functions as a microcosm of the larger one played out between a woman's personal needs and desires and the contradictory societal pressures.[8] Faced with overwhelming opposition, she feels utterly helpless: "it was as if they were intent upon pushing her into the man's arms. And indeed what was to keep them from having their way?" (832). There is little solace in female companionship where those who are sworn to serve and protect her prove more than a little traitorous: "she was attended by crones, women with obsessions that made no allowance for her own feelings" (832). Not intentionally unkind, but firmly believing they know best, the ladies-in-waiting willingly act as "partners in the conspiracy" (834) against their mistress and thus leave her to fend for herself in an increasingly hopeless battle of wills.[9]
    
    
21. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, she must resist her own desire, given that she is genuinely fond of Kaoru and initially gives some consideration to accepting him. He is, after all, neither an unattractive nor an unsympathetic man and had earned the respect and admiration of her father. The latter had in fact spent several years rather ineffectually casting about for a reliable person to look after the sisters should he either die or take the tonsure. Who could be more ideally suited to Ôigimi than this handsome, well-connected young man of such steady character?

    Kaoru did not at all displease her. The Eighth Prince had said more than once that if Kaoru should be inclined to ask for her hand, he would not disapprove. But no. She wanted to go on as she was. (829)

    Steeling her resolve, Ôigimi refuses to be led down the treacherous path of romance. In bemoaning her own belated wisdom following an ill-advised erotic encounter, Rousseau's Julie states: "Ah ! le premier pas, qui coûte le plus, était celui qu'il ne fallait pas faire" (qtd. in Miller, x). Give in but once, and a woman is lost, that first, ruinous step leading automatically and fatally to subsequent ones. And this proves true even when the male in question is as perfect as Kaoru appears. Ôigimi does not reject this particular suitor because of any particular flaw in himself, but rather because the entire gender relations and marriage system of the time is corrupt and hostile to women. As Komashaku puts it in explaining what she calls the irokoki messêji ("dark message") of the Genji:

    Onna no fukô wa, aite no otoko ga tamatama warui otoko de atta to iu yôna koto dewa nai, to Murasaki Shikibu wa hakkiri ninshiki shite ita. Dakara, Ôigimi ni shitemo Ukifune ni shitemo, aite no otoko ga ki ni iranai kara kyohi suru no dewa nai. Donna aite de atte mo, kyohi suru de aru. (221)
    ("Murasaki Shikibu was fully aware that a woman's unhappiness is not a matter of her happening to meet up with an evil man. Accordingly, neither Ôigimi nor Ukifune reject their suitor because he does not appeal to them. They reject any suitor regardless of who or what he is.")

22. The scene where the elder sister busies herself with preparations for Nakanokimi's third nuptial night[10] gives the reader a glimpse into the pain Ôigimi must feel in being left behind to play the role of old maid so prematurely. In the prime of life, she likely experiences, fleetingly at least, conflicting emotions about her decision to remain single. Nonetheless, she cannot reconcile normal human desires with her overpowering need to shield herself from the potentially insulting advances of men who may "look down upon ladies left to waste away in the mountains" (804). Field argues that Kaoru does indeed interest the princess sexually, and that rejection of the suitor costs her dearly. She posits that the princess' actions are prompted to some degree by a poor sense of self-worth as reflected in the eyes of patriarchal society:

    What's left for Oigimi to preserve is her pride, and all that remains for her pride to protect is the privacy (the secret) of her aging flesh. Woman's flesh, that most public of commodities in the functioning of the Fujiwara regency, is turned into the last refuge of the private self. Not, however, that this is acknowledged by that self. For the metaphysically inclined Ôigimi, the body, like other material things (such as partitions and screens) is subsidiary, serving to protect that pure essence called kokoro—heart-mind-spirit. (242)

23. The retreating tactics employed to protect that kokoro are varied. Ôigimi first hopes to discourage interest by claiming utter ignorance of courting rituals: "We know nothing, nothing. How can we pretend otherwise?" (786). When that fails, she reasons that by ignoring Kaoru, she can make him go away: "whenever he became forward, however slightly, she feigned deafness" (817). Next she tries to appeal to his better nature, reasoning that he should be satisfied with the uncommon degree of access that she has already granted him: kô made ayashiki yo no tameshi naru arisama nite, hedate naku mote nashi habere. Sore o oboshiwakazarikeru koso wa, asaki koto mo majiritaru kokochi sure (Abe et al. 16: 216; my translation: "I have allowed us to meet so intimately [literally: without barriers] that people must be scandalized. The fact that you cannot understand my feelings make me think you somewhat superficial." Seidensticker renders this section on p. 823 as: "[…] so near that people must think it very odd. I gather that your view of the matter is different, and I must confess that I am disappointed.") The male is not so easily silenced, however, and she succeeds merely in being roundly scolded for stubbornness, with Kaoru using terms that demonstrate her constant privileging of interior space, especially noteworthy in Seidensticker's version: "Might you just possibly persuade yourself to be a little more friendly? You are not an insensitive lady, I know, and yet you do go on slamming the door" (823). A few pages later, he adds to himself: "If only she would stop retreating and putting up walls between us" (825). No matter what obstacles she erects, however, they all prove to be fatally permeable. Kaoru easily breaks through her flimsy defenses, for example: "[Ôigimi] withdrew behind a blind and a screen. […] He quietly pushed the screen aside" (826). The importance of this action cannot be underestimated: that screen has often been described as the final protective barrier to her self (see, for example, Imai 174: jiko o mamoru saigo no hedate). Although she attempts to lock and bar access, the male is always ready and willing to gain access to the female by force: "clutch[ing] at her sleeve through a crack in the door" (839), he is "prepared to break the door in" (840).[11] Interiority is unambiguously aligned with the feminine, and functions as a metaphor for the eternal vulnerability of her body to male penetration. As Ôigimi recognizes, by this point "neither she nor her sister had any defenses left" (844) in their attempts at self-preservation.
    
    
24. Accordingly, Ôigimi's resistance to the patriarchal dynamic is manifested within the one sphere over which she has actual control: her body. Women throughout history have stereotypically responded to the oppressive social order with anorexia, bulimia, and other eating disorders. In contrast to the heroine of an early-20th-century Japanese short story by the well-known Nakamoto Takako entitled "Suzumushi no Mesu" (see Yukiko Tanaka's 1987 translation, "The Female Bell-Cricket"), who seeks refuge from unjust patriarchal value judgements by gorging herself, Ôigimi takes the opposite tack and refuses all nourishment. In Sharalyn Orbaugh's words: "as the object of the male gaze a woman experiences her physical surface, delimited by the parameters of her body, as the determinant of her meaning in the scopic economy" (122). She therefore decides to protect herself from that gaze by eliminating this "physical surface." The hostility inherent to a patriarchal world leads her to deny her sexuality and attempt to thwart the male by denying even her own physicality. Ôigimi resolves to refuse life because life for a woman in Heian Japan implies surrendering to male invasion and control. Ironically, the less she ingests and the weaker and increasingly fragile she becomes, the more able she is to impose her will. Desperately rejecting food, sexuality, and colonization as symbolizing one and the same thing, Ôigimi is in fact able to escape the clutches of those who would possess her. Interestingly enough, the suggestion of a similar strategy to render oneself unmarriageable can be found in a brief anecdote related in the Muromachi-period (14th-16th century) Japanese classic Tsurezuregusa:

    The daughter of a certain lay priest in the province of Inaba was reputed to be very beautiful, and many suitors asked for her hand, but this girl ate nothing but chestnuts, and refused to touch rice or other grains. Her father therefore declined the men's proposals, saying, "Such a peculiar person is not fit to be married." (Keene 37)

25. A famous use of food to represent an image of forbidden sexual experience with all its innate enticements and dangers is the English poem "Goblin Market" by Christina Rossetti. Sisters Laura and Lizzie are tempted by the delectable fruits being sold by strange little men, with the former seduced into tasting the offerings. The fruit is of course a metaphor for carnal knowledge and sensuality that women partake of at great risk, which message is made explicit in the following lines about another victim:

    She thought of Jeanie in her grave,
    Who should have been a bride;
    But who for joys brides hope to have
    Fell sick and died. (Rossetti 1530)

    Lizzie manages to resist the goblin men even though they "Held her hands and squeezed their fruits / Against her mouth to make her eat" (1532), thereby procuring her sister's freedom and return to chaste security. Herself figuratively fighting off the salacious goblins, not letting "the smallest bit of fruit pass her lips" (861), Ôigimi attains a super-virginal status where not even food is allowed to violate her bodily integrity. By rejecting consumption, Ôigimi is firmly rejecting consummation. Owing to her weak position as a lone female sans male protector, the only way to guarantee that others respect her integrity is via a suicidal denial of a basic physiological need. Orbaugh points out that power relationships are often defined as "who eats and who gets eaten" (138). Ôigimi does not want to be eaten—to be colonized, in other words—and so she simply refuses to eat. The etiology of her wasting away is fundamentally sexual. She communicates her rejection of the male through a discourse of sickness, whose causes are clearly internal rather than external: "Ôigimi's thoughts, indeed, were making her physically ill" (854) and "The prisoner of these anguished thoughts, she quite refused to eat" (855).
    
    
26. If Luce Irigaray is right and "the body is not matter, but metaphor" (qtd. in Orbaugh 120), the tale that unfolds in the first three Uji chapters is clearly about seizing control. The gender-determined patterns of dominance are inverted as Ôigimi simultaneously wastes away and imposes her will on the would-be seducer and his accomplices. Because the oppression she experiences is intimately connected with the female body, Ôigimi's only means of fighting back is by doing away with her corporeal self. This tragic story urges the reader to question the traditional defining characteristics of power, with woman's body as the political battleground. Like Alice in Wonderland, who experiments with growing and shrinking as she seeks her way through a baffling world, Ôigimi chooses to wither away, her body filling even less space than society has grudgingly allotted her. As more than one critic has pointed out, "it is worth noting that many of the original adventures of Alice have to do with the issue of edibility and identity […]" (Orbaugh 160). Our protagonist similarly pushes the envelope of her sovereignty via an exploration of the eat / not-eat motif. She believes chastity is the key to remaining her own mistress, and sees yielding to the male as the epitome of dependence and loss of autonomy. Of course, while Alice eventually awakens from her dream and lives happily ever after, although Ôigimi may temporarily wield power through her act of resistance, she finds no real escape from the patriarchal construct.
    
    
27. Ôigimi wages an increasingly desperate battle to maintain the upper hand in the power struggle with Kaoru, but her defiance of the social codes dooms her to only an equivocal victory. Resisting the role society assigns to women, she remains subject to it, in that she has not gained independence from the male, but rather continues to react to him. The implications of overturning the hierarchies of power are obvious. In Japanese novelist Ôba Minako's own modern parable of dominance, the husband asks his wife: "Do you expect to be able to say whatever is on your mind? If you think you can do that and survive, you are wrong" (35). Ôigimi has naïvely experimented with speaking her mind, or at least rejecting what she does not want, and refused to act the "normal" or "acceptable" woman. Ultimately, there is only one avenue open to her: to impose her will, to reject the role of victim imposed on her by a male-dominated society, she must remove herself from this society by dying.
    
    
28. In many cultures, women have traditionally been denied agency in their own lives. Unable to embark on their own quest for self-fulfillment as men do, they are given only a twofold choice: accept or refuse. The literature of the Heian period offers a plethora of stories of women who have accepted the male's offer of marriage, and their various strategies for dealing with the often emotionally devastating results of that choice. With Ôigimi, Murasaki Shikibu now sheds light on the implications of taking the drastic step of actually refusing the male. The ultimate refusal is, of course, withdrawing from life itself. In Over Her Dead Body, Elisabeth Bronfen addresses the question of "how an aesthetically staged performance of death may […] signify a moment of control and power" (141), explaining how the eponymous heroines of Clarissa and Madame Bovary make use of their own deaths as a conscious act of asserting their personalities. In the "Trefoil Knots" (Agemaki) chapter as well, death, to Ôigimi, serves as an expression of self-determination in opposition to the will of the patriarchy, the one effective act of resistance she herself can choose and perform. As Bronfen puts it:

    Staging disembodiment as a form of escaping personal and social constraints serves to criticize those cultural attitudes that reduce the feminine body to the position of dependency and passivity, to the vulnerable object of sexual incursions. (142)

    The presumed passivity of the self-destructive act actually conceals a latent and, at least on one level, successful revolt against the male and his threatened sexual violence.
    
    
29. Following her father's death, Ôigimi is left with no sources of protection. As an orphan, she has lost what illusory security she had possessed within the patriarchal construct, and the omnipresent threat of societal hostility and judgment becomes an obsessive nightmare. While Tamakazura seeks a solution to her crisis in fiction, Ôigimi cannot escape the reality that reconciling her father's will and her own with Kaoru's demands, and indeed with security of self, is impossible. Almost her only self-expression is manifested as self-accusation for having ignored their father's wishes that the two sisters "resign [them]selves to the fact that it was not meant to be—that [they] are different from other people and were meant to be alone" (806). And yet, as both heroine and reader are fully aware, Ôigimi has in fact tried her best to get Kaoru to leave her alone, and it is due solely to his relentless battering at her defenses that she has allowed him any access at all. She has never acted as the instigator or even deliberately behaved coyly with him, and the failure to remain isolated cannot realistically be taken as her fault. The lady doth protest, but is not this protestation really a sort of subterfuge? Could our author be trying to deflect blame for what was always her actual intent: a description of forthright and very subversive rejection of this or any man? We have shown how Ôigimi's attempt to couch the decision not to marry in terms of filial piety, claiming that she is merely obeying her father and thus bowing to other patriarchal forces, is disingenuous. This heroine is guided from start to finish by her own needs and desires in resisting the male. In any event, with the masculine element belligerently demanding admittance, she sees no compromise possible and finds her only way out of an ever-threatening world is through suicide.
    
    
30. This article has, through a close reading of the tactics and rationales employed by The Tale of Genji's Ôigimi, argued that her story raises important issues of gender and power through its images of violation and forms of retreat and resistance. As well, by juxtaposing this Japanese heroine with others from the Western literary tradition, it has sought to reveal the existence of similarly coded protest, despite incontrovertible differences in society and history, and thus the relevance of the Genji to modern feminist analysis. Ever an insightful author and observer/critic of her society, Murasaki Shikibu takes an abstract power paradigm and exposes its intrinsic violence to the female body and identity by representing it as undeniably physical. Ôigimi appropriates and inverts subject and object, refusing a woman's passive, yielding role. I have demonstrated how this heroine, through a rejection of her own physical self, succeeds in imposing her will to remain virginal. Male power, represented by the impotent Kaoru, is challenged, and men are momentarily displaced from the centre of the universe and forced to defer to a woman's command of the situation. The fictions women compose about the worlds they inhabit are indebted to their day-to-day existence, and it cannot be coincidental that our author portrays women's space as literally a no-man's land where both surrender and resistance are in effect suicidal responses. Faced with these non-alternatives, the best she can hope for is to be master of her own fate, dire as it may be. Fully cognizant that the stalemate must end to her disadvantage, Ôigimi chooses to take her own life rather than suffer what she perceives to be an ineluctable, albeit figurative, death through male colonization of the female self.