Suddenly a wind came up and even before the services were finished the sky was black. Genji?s men rushed about in confusion. Rain came pouring down, completely without warning. Though the obvious course would have been to return straightway to the house, there had been no time to send for umbrellas. The wind was now a howling tempest, everything that had not been tied down was scuttling off across the beach. The surf was biting at their feet. The sea was white, as if spread over with white linen. Fearful every moment of being struck down, they finally made their way back to the house. "I?ve never seen anything like it," said one of the men. "Winds do come up from time to time, but not without warning. It is all very strange and very terrible." The lightning and the thunder seemed to announce the end of the world, and the rain beat its way to the ground...
This is poetic symbolism at its finest. The rain acts as to wash away the "sins" that he is being exiled for. Also, the extent to which it rains is noteworthy. It rains to such a degree that it can be seen as supernatural, telling us that Genji is no ordinary person and that he has the favor of the gods. Even though it is not the end of the world as some more rash might have thought, it is the end of Genji?s world in exile, and it is not surprising that he declares that he is leaving only a few sentences later.
It is now a good time to introduce the seemingly impertinent idea of fractals into the discussion of the structure. I leave you in the capable hands of Michael Chrichtons? Ian Malcom:
"Fractals are a kind of geometry, associated with a man named Mandelbrot. Unlike ordinary Euclidean geometry that everybody learns in school--squares and cubes and spheres--fractal geometry appears to describe real objects in the natural world. Mountains and clouds are fractal shapes. So fractals are probably related to reality. Somehow... "For example," Malcolm said, "a big mountain, seen from far away, has a certain rugged mountain shape. If you get closer, and examine a small peak of the big mountain, it will have the same mountain shape. In fact, you can go all the way down the scale to a tiny speck of rock, seen under a microscope--it will have the same basic fractal shape as the big mountain." (Crichton, 1990 p.170-171)
This relates to the structure of Genji perfectly. When you look at one chapter, such as the Suma chapter, you find that it is dominated by the passing of the seasons, usually one year. Then, if you pull back scale to a section of the text, you find that these two are dominated by their chapters? emphasis of a certain season that grouped together form a "year". For example, take the Rokujion section (Chapters 22-29). The Jeweled Chaplet (Chapter 22), is a flashback covering eighteen years, but dominated by winter in the Rokujion. Then, in The First Warbler, early spring is the chapter?s dominance. Onward we have Butterflies dealing with spring, Fireflies with early summer, Wild Carnations with summer, Flares with early autumn, and finally The Royal Outing returns us to winter. If we step back even further, if we assume that "[Genji] is at once nature incarnate” (Field, 1987 p. 106), then the book begins in the spring of Genji?s life, leading to his growth and development, hardships, and inevitably his death. The example would break down here if the story ended with his death. Only when we see the continuation of the tale through his progeny that we see the cyclical idea come up again. Thus we have a new idea as to the age old mystery of why the story does not end with his death. Normally biographies end with the death of the hero, but since Genji has been elevated to Nature incarnate, then he embodies the spirit of Buddhism that was so prevalent at the time–his story begins again like the souls trying to reach Nirvana.
Thus we begin to see that without properly understanding the use of nature in Genji monogatari, one can throw out any attempt at realizing the full scope of the novel. Not only does Murasaki use nature, and more specifically the seasons, to richly color her characters and give them realism, but she uses the passing of these seasons as a canvas upon which to paint, a frame upon which to build, bones upon which to hang a body, in a way that had never been done before and has never been equaled since.