When her daughter was chosen as the priestess of Ise, the Rokujo Lady resolved to go down to Ise with her, to break off her painful love for Genji. A princess who is to become priestess spends a year purifying herself at Nonomiya on the plain of Saga before going to Ise. The lady was there too.
Around the seventh of the ninth month, with the departure for Ise only a day or two away, Genji, unable to bear parting like this, went to visit Nonomiya.
As he made his way across the wide moor, it was deeply moving. The autumn flowers had all withered, the reed fields were dry, and with the hoarse voices of insects the wind in the pines blew eerily, and the sound of a koto came in snatches, so faint one could not tell what piece it was, most elegant.
The torii of unbarked logs looked truly sacred, and inside an outer fence of brushwood, board-roofed buildings stood here and there like temporary shelters. Priests coughed here and there, and the place seemed somehow empty and lonely.
Genji had broken off a small sprig of sakaki, and he slipped it under the blind, saying, "Led by a heart that does not change, I have crossed even the sacred fence of the gods." The lady answered, "There is no cedar here to mark the way; how did you come to break off sakaki by mistake?"
As they talked through the night, her resentment eased and her heart wavered. But with the dawn they parted. "Partings at dawn are always wet with dew, but this is an autumn sky the world has never known." The lady went down to Ise with her daughter.
At Nonomiya Shrine in Sagano, the torii of unbarked logs and the brushwood fence still stand today, quiet at the end of a path through a bamboo grove.