Japanese scholars have discussed Genji’s extraordinary rise under the heading of “kingship” (ōken). Kawazoe Fusae, for example, argued that Genji’s exile at Suma, his move to Akashi, and his triumphal return follow the ritual pattern of the Daijōsai (the imperial enthronement ceremony)^[31] and therefore amount to an assumption of hidden kingship. This approach rightly highlights Genji’s quasi-sovereign standing, but it does not account fully for the process of Genji’s rise as the tale conveys it. In particular, it does not recognize the motif of transgression. Several myths or legends give this motif a central role, in a context compatible with what is at issue in Genji’s case. The material falls into two categories. The first, which includes two stories involving the boundary between land and sea, relates to the birth of Genji’s daughter, while the second consists of two stories that underlie esoteric initiations given a new emperor. In the former case the “transgression” crosses a line between physical realms, but in the latter it is sexual.

The Kakaishō gloss about the dragon king desiring a beautiful son-in-law also links the dragon king’s call to the myth of Hikohohodemi, which is widely acknowledged to underlie the story of Genji’s exile. “Genji and the Luck of the Sea” will discuss it in detail. The aspects of the myth most relevant here are the hero’s crossing of the land–sea boundary (approximated for Genji, a mortal man, by descent to the sea’s edge); his union with a sea-woman who bears him a child; the sea-woman’s disappearance from the main line of the story; and the child’s rise. The significance of this pattern in Japan can be gathered from its presence also in a legend that explains the rise of the Fujiwara.^[32] According to Sanshū Shido Dōjō engi, Fujiwara no Fuhito’s (659–720) younger sister was so beautiful that the Chinese emperor sent for her and gave Japan great gifts in return. However, he withheld his most precious treasure a jewel imbued with the Buddha’s full presence. His wife wheedled it out of him on behalf of her native land, but during a great storm off the north coast of Shikoku the dragon king, who coveted it, too, stole it from the ship carrying it to Japan. Fuhito went down to the nearby shore to get it back, stayed three years, married a sea-woman, and had a son by her. He then persuaded her to dive for the jewel, which she retrieved from the dragon palace at the cost of her life. Fuhito returned to the capital, where his son, Fusazaki (681–737), became the founder of the dominant “northern house” of the Fujiwara. Meanwhile, the jewel went to Kōfukuji in Nara, where it magically guaranteed Fujiwara power. The author of The Tale of Genji may not have known this story, which Abe Yasurō dated speculatively to the mid-Kamakura period,^[33] but it is in the same vein as her own.

However, the pattern of these stories accounts only for Genji’s daughter. It sheds no light on the transgression that makes Genji an emperor’s father. That matter can be viewed in the light of two stories that purport to explain the origin of esoteric Shingon and Tendai enthronement rites (sokui hō). The Tendai rite is particularly suggestive.

The Shingon story says that when Fujiwara no Kamatari (614–669) was still a baby the Kashima deity came to him in the form of a fox (Dakini); took him round the four directions; put him on its belly, where, according to variant texts it “enjoyed” or “violated” him; and returned him to his parents with a wisteria-wrapped sickle (fuji, kama), saying, “With this you will rise to be the emperor’s teacher.”^[34] The story of Genji and Fujitsubo is plain in comparison, but both share the motif of a transgressive sexual encounter followed by the acquisition of extraordinary power and prestige.

The Tendai story is the so-called Jidō setsuwa (“The Story of the Youth”), which tells how the Buddha on Vulture Peak personally transmitted to the line of Chinese and then Japanese emperors two empowering verses from the Lotus Sutra. In time these verses, the substance of the Tendai accession rite,^[35] passed to Jidō, the favorite of the First Emperor of China. According to the treatise Tendai-gata go-sokui hō, Jidō “crossed the emperor’s pillow” (mikado no on-makura no ue o koetari), which presumably means that he made love to the empress. The court demanded Jidō’s death for this offense, but the emperor merely exiled him and, before he left, taught him the two verses. The exiled Jidō then wrote them on chrysanthemum leaves, from which dew flowed into a nearby stream and changed the water to an elixir that made Jidō immortal. Eight hundred years later he taught his secret to Emperor Wen of Wei. “Forever after,” the treatise says, “the heir apparent has received [these verses] when he receives the imperial dignity from Heaven.”^[36] The text calls this initiation “the rite of sovereignty over the four seas” (shikai ryōshō no hō): a sovereignty therefore founded ultimately on violation of an empress, to which the injured emperor responds by complying with the court’s demand in such a manner as to favor the offender. Whether or not the Genji author could have known the Jidō story, its resemblance to Genji’s experience needs no emphasis. Perhaps Genji’s transgression with Fujitsubo sounded more familiar, more acceptable, and more intelligible to the author’s original audience than it did to later readers. They might have understood that it assured his later glory.