Having decided to leave the capital in advance of the decree of exile soon to be issued against him (“Suma”), Genji visits his late father’s tomb. There he reports his departure and, before leaving, “shiver[s] to behold a vision of his father as he had seen him in life.” However, the figure remains silent. This eerie moment foreshadows the Kiritsubo Emperor’s active intervention later on. At last, near the end of “Suma,” the great drama of Genji’s exile begins: the storm that seems to threaten the whole world and that will bring about his move to Akashi.
The storm begins when, at his companions’ urging, Genji goes to the shore to commission a purification rite from a visiting yin-yang master (onmyōji). The rite involves infusing evil influences into a doll that is then sent drifting out to sea, or, if the purification takes places inland, down a river or stream. Genji feels kinship with the doll and likens himself to it in a poem:
I, sent running down to the vastness of a sea I had never known,
as a doll runs, can but know an overwhelming sorrow.
The plight of the doll, intrinsically innocent but made to bear off the evil of others, reminds him of his own. The narrative continues,
The ocean stretched unruffled into the distance, and his thoughts wandered over what had been and what might be.
“Myriads of gods must feel pity in their hearts when they look on me:
there is nothing I have done anyone could call a crime,”he said. Suddenly the wind began to blow, and the sky darkened. The purification broke off in the ensuing confusion.[17]
The storm certainly begins in response to Genji’s declaration before the gods that he has done nothing that deserves to be called a crime, but his words remain hard to interpret. Is he lying, is he deluded, or is he right? Perhaps he is even quibbling: no, he has never been guilty of sedition, the crime with which Kokiden charges him, and his intercourse with Fujitsubo can have nothing to do with his exile since it remains unknown. However, the gods must know what happened even if the humans do not, and the latter issue is probably what interests them most. Perhaps his false claim to innocence provokes the powers of sea and rain to chastise him on the spot, but if so, it is unclear why the storm should launch him in the end toward a triumphal rise.
In The Bridge of Dreams, Haruo Shirane discussed various responses to the problem of Genji’s poem and the consequent storm. A common approach is to see the storm as punishment and purification for Genji’s misconduct, and his poem as lying about it; but some have suggested a rite of passage from youth to adulthood or even a sort of death and resurrection.[18] So wide a range of readings highlights the difficulty of the issue, but one possible interpretation is consistent with this essay. The storm is indeed a purification, but punishment is a minor issue. While the higher powers sanction Genji’s lovemaking with Fujitsubo, that lovemaking is still a transgression that must be cleansed before Genji can follow his destiny. More importantly, the ordeal purges Genji of evil heaped unjustly on him, as upon a purificatory doll, by others (the Suzaku faction) of warped intent. Perhaps that is why Genji likens himself in his poem to the purificatory doll (hitokata) before him and insists that he himself is guilty of no crime. The real crime is that of the people who have driven him out of the city so as to be able to enjoy, undisturbed, power and prosperity never granted them by the gods. Their intent is warped because it violates, in particular, the will of the Sumiyoshi deity.
The storm rages on through the night, until at last Genji’s companions rest.
When Genji, too, briefly dropped off to sleep, a being he did not recognize came to him, saying, “You have been summoned to the palace. Why do you not come?” He woke up and understood that the Dragon King of the sea, a great lover of beauty, must have his eye on him. So eerie a menace made the place where he was now living intolerable.[19]
This dream suggests that the powers of the sea are intensely interested in Genji’s fate and mean to guide it. The dragon king’s call “to the palace” foreshadows the Akashi Novice’s divinely inspired invitation to his magnificent establishment at Akashi, as the author of Kakaishō (1367) seems to have recognized when he observed in this connection that the dragon king desires Genji as a beautiful son-in-law.[20] The dragon king’s desire for Genji is related to his well-attested appetite for priceless jewels. Apparently he sees Genji as such a jewel. In the supernatural realm, Genji’s conduct with Fujitsubo was therefore no crime. Instead it endowed him with new potency.
After the storm has raged for days, Genji prays to Sumiyoshi, the dragon king, and other divinities for help, and his companions pray on his behalf; whereupon “the heavens redoubled their thunder and a bolt struck a gallery off his own rooms.” Only then, after a few more hours of terror, does the sky clear at last. Genji contemplates his narrow escape and expresses in a poem his gratitude to the divinities of the sea.
Had I not enjoyed divine aid from those great gods who live in the sea,
I would now be wandering the vastness of the ocean. [21]
He then dozes off and has another vision of his father.
He was so exhausted after the endless turmoil of the storm that without meaning to he dropped off to sleep. While he sat there, propped upright…[his father] stood before him as he had been in life, took his hand, and drew him up, saying, “What are you doing in this terrible place? Hasten to sail away from this coast, as the God of Sumiyoshi would have you do.”
Genji was overjoyed. “Since you and I parted, Your Majesty, I have known so many sorrows that I would gladly cast my life away here on this shore.”
“No, you must not do that. All this is simply a little karmic retribution. I myself committed no offense during my reign, but of course I erred nevertheless, and expiation of those sins now so absorbs me that I had given no thought to the world;[22] but it was too painful to see you in such distress. I dove into the sea, emerged on the strand, and despite my fatigue I am now hurrying to the palace to have a word with [Suzaku] on the matter.” Then he was gone.[23]
The Kiritsubo Emperor’s words, too, suggest that Genji did no wrong with Fujitsubo. He comments on Genji’s plight and compares it with his own, distinguishing between personal karma (in life he acted in some matters as a man among other men should not) and right conduct for an emperor. For a man subject to considerations of common morality, certain of his deeds require expiation, but these do not concern the powers that protect the imperial line. As an emperor he was blameless. So, too, is Genji, who likewise bears an imperial responsibility.
In urging Genji to leave Suma, the Kiritsubo Emperor repeats the dragon king’s invitation to the undersea palace, although in terms more practically intelligible to a living person. He also speaks for the Sumiyoshi deity, since he presumably “dove into the sea” to consult with its deities and then “emerged on the strand” to represent them to Genji. His “word with [Suzaku] on the matter” goes as follows.
On the thirteenth of the third month, the night when lightning flashed and the wind roared, His Majesty dreamed that [his father] stood below the palace steps, glaring balefully at him while he himself cowered before him in awe. His [father] had much to say, and no doubt he spoke of Genji. His Majesty described his dream in fear and sorrow to [his mother, Kokiden]. “One imagines all sorts of things on a night when it is pouring and the skies are in tumult,” she said. “You must not allow it to disturb you unduly.”
Something now went wrong with His Majesty’s eyes, perhaps because he had met his father’s furious gaze, and he suffered unbearably.[24]
The Kiritsubo Emperor’s personal intervention on Genji’s behalf takes time to succeed because Kokiden continues to resist. Unbowed by this demonstration that her son, the elder brother, is no more than an obstacle in the way of his own father’s will, she silences Suzaku as before, whenever he suggested pardoning Genji. Next her father dies and she becomes ill herself, but still Suzaku is prevented from recalling Genji to the city until he is gravely ill himself.
In the meantime, the Akashi Novice gives the Kiritsubo Emperor’s injunction “to sail away from this coast” immediately realizable expression when he arrives by boat through the last of the storm to invite Genji to Akashi. The dream that prompts him to do so matches Genji’s own, and the narrative leaves no doubt that he, too, speaks for Sumiyoshi.[25] His successful passage to Suma suggests divine aid, and his return journey, with Genji aboard, goes so swiftly that “one could only marvel at the will of the wind.”[26] Sumiyoshi has taken control of Genji’s fate.
“Genji and the Luck of the Sea” discusses the nature and history of the Sumiyoshi deity in detail. It will be enough to write here that the origins of Sumiyoshi have to do with Jingū Kōgō and her son Emperor Ōjin, the deity of the Usa Hachiman shrine. In time the Minamoto (Genji) claimed Ōjin as their patron. The figure of Hikaru Genji therefore evokes a sacred lineage that goes back through Ōjin to Jingū Kōgō and Sumiyoshi. Perhaps this explains why Ashikaga Yoshimitsu (1358–1408) looked to Genji as the founding head of the Minamoto (Genji no chōja)[27] and claimed the same title himself. He also coveted Genji’s title of daijō daijin (honorary retired emperor) and sought to emulate Genji in his repeated assumption of a retired emperor’s prerogatives. Just after Yoshimitsu’s death, Emperor Gokomatsu (r. 1382–1412) finally awarded him the title daijō hōō (cloistered retired emperor), thus completing Yoshimitsu’s assimilation of himself to Genji.[28] The Genji author seems therefore to have derived from the story of Jingū Kōgō and Ōjin an ideal Minamoto, at once commoner and imperial, whose secret kingship, conferred on him by Sumiyoshi, lifts him to a height beyond the reach of any mere Fujiwara like his friend Tō no Chūjō.
The succeeding chapters of the tale bear out this understanding of the Sumiyoshi deity’s intention. In response to the Akashi Novice’s prayers for his daughter’s future and to the Kiritsubo Emperor’s hopes for Genji, and in agreement with his own purpose, he spirits Genji away to Akashi, where the Novice’s establishment corresponds in the tangible world to the palace of the dragon king. If Sumiyoshi had not done so—if the Kiritsubo Emperor’s glare had not forced Genji’s immediate recall to the city—Genji would never have met the lady from Akashi, never had a daughter by her, and never become the father of a future empress. The astrologer’s prediction reported in “Miotsukushi,” just after his daughter’s birth, could not have come true:
“An astrologer had foretold that Genji would have three children, of whom one would be Emperor and another Empress, while the third and least among them would reach the highest civil rank of Chancellor.”[29]
Genji’s first two children (Reizei and Yūgiri, his son by Aoi) already meet the prediction, and he therefore knows from the start what this, his third and last child, will be.
One may wonder whether Genji himself understands his exceptional destiny. In the course of the tale he sees specters and hears spirits speak, but such things seem generally to engage his thoughts—at least the ones to which the reader is privy—only when they are directly before him. He is a man of this world, not another: an enterprising lover, an accomplished artist, and a master politician. However, dreams, prophesies, his father’s blessing, and his own faith in himself give him reason to believe in a special destiny, one upheld by the power of the sea.
Genji’s father wanted to see him come into his own, and during Genji’s exile, if not before, Sumiyoshi joins the Kiritsubo Emperor as a patron to assure that outcome. Their success yields a dual triumph, one aspect of which is common and one imperial, one bright and one in shadow. Genji’s Akashi daughter makes him the grandfather of an emperor in the female line, while secretly Genji is also the next emperor’s father, hence the potential grandfather of an emperor in the male line as well. Three years after his accession (“Usugumo”), Reizei learns whose son he really is, and his first thought is to abdicate in Genji’s favor. Genji forbids him to do so, but Reizei’s wish to honor his father moves him to award Genji the title of honorary retired emperor (“Fuji no uraba”).[30] Thus Genji attains heights never reached before and, properly speaking, impossible, thanks above all to two irregular episodes in his life (his affair with Fujitsubo and his exile) and to the supernatural powers, associated with the imperial line, who support him in his struggle against the Suzaku faction. At his peak he comes to enjoy what one might even call supra-imperial power and prestige.
[17] TTG, 252–3; GM 2:217–18.
[18] Shirane, The Bridge of Dreams, 14–16.
[19] TTG, 253; GM 2:219.
[20] Tamagami, Shimeishō, Kakaishō, 320. See also the discussion of this topic in Shirane, The Bridge of Dreams, 77–80, as well as the beginning of “Genji and the Luck of the Sea.”
[21] TTG, 259; GM 2:228.
[22] Emperor Daigo, to whom Genji’s father corresponds, was reputed to have suffered in hell for his misdeeds, which included exiling Sugawara no Michizane in 901. In a famous vision recorded in 941, the monk Nichizō saw him there, “squatting on glowing coals” (Tyler, Japanese Tales, 148).
[23] TTG, 259; GM 2:230.
[24] TTG, 267; GM 2:251.
[25] The “strange being” who speaks in the Akashi Novice’s dream (TTG, 260) represents Sumiyoshi, as the Novice knows, since he thanks Sumiyoshi as soon as Genji disembarks at Akashi; and the being who speaks in Genji’s counterpart dream (TTG, 253) therefore does so, too.
[26] TTG, 260; GM 2:233.
[27] By the Kamakura period the Genji no chōja was indeed a senior Minamoto, but for Murasaki Shikibu the notion of “Genji” seems to have included, at least under some circumstances, any high-ranking non-Fujiwara, even an emperor’s daughter (TTG, 631; GM 4:166).
[28] Hyōdō, Heike monogatari no rekishi to geinō, 89–90. Kakaishō, completed in 1367 by a member of the entourage of Yoshimitsu’s father (the shogun Ashikaga Yoshiakira), interprets many matters in the tale as precedent for later practice, and it particularly highlights Genji’s standing as honorary retired emperor (Yoshimori, “Kakaishō no Hikaru Genji”).
[29] TTG, 283; GM 2:285.
[30] This extraordinary honor amounts almost to a public declaration that Genji is Reizei’s father. Together with the Sagoromo author’s adoption of the pattern of Genji’s rise (see n. 17), it suggests that the issue of Reizei’s paternity itself, hence the idea of a perturbation on the imperial line of succession, may not have been as serious for the author and her original audience as it came to seem later.