"Because I go alone": Murasaki Shikibu breaks a courtly vow in The Tale of Genji

Passage

In the summer of that year the lady became very downcast. She repeatedly asked for leave to go to her home, but it was not granted. For a year she continued in the same state. The Emperor to all her entreaties answered only ‘Try for a little while longer.’ But she was getting worse every day, and when for five or six days she had been growing steadily weaker her mother sent to the Palace a tearful plea for her release. Fearing even now that her enemies might contrive to put some unimaginable shame upon her, the sick lady left her son behind and prepared to quit the Palace in secret. The Emperor knew that the time had come when, little as he liked it, he must let her go. But that she should slip away without a word of farewell was more than he could bear, and he hastened to her side. He found her still charming and beautiful, but her face very thin and wan. She looked at him tenderly, saying nothing. Was she alive? So faint was the dwindling spark that she scarcely seemed so. Suddenly forgetting all that had happened and all that was to come, he called her by a hundred pretty names and weeping showered upon her a thousand caresses; but she made no answer. For sounds and sights reached her but faintly, and she seemed dazed, as one that scarcely remembered she lay upon a bed. Seeing her thus he knew not what to do. In great trouble and perplexity he sent for a hand litter. But when they would have laid her in it, he forbad them, saying ‘There was an oath between us that neither should go alone upon the road that all at last must tread. How can I now let her go from me?’ The lady heard him and ‘At last!’ she said; ‘Though that desired at last be come, because I go alone how gladly would I live!’

— Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji, c. 1008 (translated by Arthur Waley, 1925), Chapter I, "Kiritsubo" 1

Gloss

• Hand litter: The enclosed portable conveyance (Japanese koshi) used by Heian aristocrats to travel through the city. Within palace protocol, crossing into a litter marked a decisive ritual transition. Heian religious practice strictly forbade dying inside the imperial residential quarters, as the ritual impurity of death (kegare) would contaminate the sacred palace precincts. Summoning the litter represents the sovereign's formal surrender to this ritual reality, signaling that his palace has ceased to be a home and has become an uninhabitable sanctuary.
• The road that all at last must tread: Arthur Waley's rendering of the classical Buddhist and poetic figure shide no yama (the mountains of death) or the unavoidable journey through the afterworld. In Heian verse, this crossing serves as the universal equalizer that eventually claims emperor and servant alike. The Emperor invokes their romantic vow to face this crossing together, attempting to impose poetic balance upon an experience that remains an individual ordeal.
• That desired at last: A poignant double meaning playing upon the Heian idiom of release (tsui ni). Throughout her prolonged illness, the Kiritsubo lady prayed for an end to her suffering, seeking refuge from court spite in her family home. Her dying whisper recognizes the bitter irony of the word: the final release she desired arrives as physical extinction rather than peaceful retirement.

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