Genji and Suzaku both die during the eight-year gap between Part Two and Part Three of the tale, rendering perhaps fanciful any idea that the break between them, over the Third Princess, colors the narrative further. Nonetheless, “The Possibility of Ukifune” suggests that it may conceivably do so. The rest of this essay will present some preliminary arguments.
Part Three consists mainly of the Uji chapters, which evoke a mood of gloom, frustration, isolation, and failure in a setting far removed from court and city. The shadow lying over these chapters may have to do with the influence of Suzaku’s angry spirit.
“Hashihime,” the first of the Uji chapters, begins:
There was in those days an aged Prince who no longer mattered to the world. Of extremely distinguished birth on his mother’s side as well, he had seemed destined for great things, but then times changed, and disgrace brought him a downfall so thorough that for one reason and another everyone who upheld his interests renounced the world, leaving him completely alone in both public and private.[59]
This prince (the Eighth Prince) is a younger brother of Genji and Suzaku. He was once destined to become heir apparent, but the attempt to have him appointed failed. This can only have happened during Genji’s exile. The Suzaku faction wanted the Eight Prince to replace the heir apparent (Reizei) appointed by the Kiritsubo Emperor. However, the intervention of this emperor’s spirit on Genji’s behalf, the death of the minister of the right, the Kokiden Consort’s illness, and Genji’s triumphant return then drove him instead into lonely obscurity.
The Uji narrative therefore begins by linking the Eighth Prince’s current plight, hence that of his daughters, to the great power struggle that took place more than forty years ago. In “Hashihime” he is a widower and lives at Uji with two of his daughters, Ōigimi and Nakanokimi. Ukifune, a third, unrecognized daughter of whom the reader will not hear until several chapters later, has grown up in the provinces.
In “Tenarai,” the tale’s next-to-last chapter, a healer attempts to exorcise the spirit that for the past two months or so has possessed Ukifune. Once induced to speak, the spirit says enough to suggest that it is Suzaku’s. (“The Possibility of Ukifune” discusses this subject in detail.) It also talks of having “settled in a house full of pretty women.”[60] These are the Eighth Prince’s two recognized daughters, of whom it then claims to have killed one: Kaoru’s great love, Ōigimi. After Ōigimi’s death, Nakanokimi, whom Kaoru had never courted, married Niou and moved to the capital. Eventually, thanks to Nakanokimi, Kaoru discovered Ukifune, saw how closely she resembled Ōigimi, and moved her to the house at Uji. There the spirit possessed her.
However, the Eighth Prince’s daughters (Suzaku’s nieces) are not the direct objects of the spirit’s animus. The spirit seems instead to want to harm Kaoru through his attachment to them. Kaoru, who is Suzaku’s grandson, also passes for Genji’s son. Apparently the spirit wants to torment Kaoru through Ōigimi and Ukifune, because of his relationship to Genji and because he embodies Genji’s ruin of the Third Princess.
Literarily, Uji makes an appropriate setting for the dark story that these chapters tell, with or without the involvement of Suzaku’s spirit. Its poetic reputation rested on a word play exploited repeatedly in the Uji chapters and found canonically in Kokinshū 983, a poem by Kisen Hōshi. Kisen’s almost untranslatable poem superimposes the adjective ushi (“dreary,” “hateful”) on the place name and suggests that the poet is an embittered man. In “Hashihime” the Eighth Prince uses the same device in his reply to a poem from Retired Emperor Reizei:
It is not, alas, that I am lost forever in enlightenment;
I only deplore this world from here in the Uji hills.
The narrator adds, “To [Reizei]’s regret, his modesty about his accomplishment as a holy man betrayed a lingering bitterness against the world.”[61]
Uji was therefore an obvious refuge for such embittered figures as Kisen Hōshi, the Eighth Prince, or, perhaps, Suzaku’s spirit. Kisen Hōshi being the poetic spirit of the place, the spirit that possesses Ukifune can also be seen as continuous with his, although with a specific role to play in a specific story. Furthermore, the Uji of the tale is itself ushi: a dreary place, especially for anyone who, like the Eighth Prince, lived beside the Uji River. Already forgotten in the city, he had to move there when his city house burned down.
The place was near the weir, and the loud noise of the river ill suited his longing for peace, but there was nothing else to do. Blossoms, autumn leaves, and the flowing river: these were his solace in the gloomy reverie that now more than ever was his only refuge.[62]
The noise of the river is often heard in the succeeding chapters, sometimes in association with the sound of the wind. Endless mists, too, shroud the Uji hills. The place is thoroughly gloomy, as Kaoru observes when he first visits the Eighth Prince there:
It was a sadder place than he had been led to imagine…There are other, quiet mountain villages with an appeal all their own, but here, amid the roar of waters and the clamor of waves, one seemed unlikely ever to forget one’s cares, or, amid the wind’s dreary moan, to dream at night a consoling dream.[63]
Kaoru turns against Uji after Ōigimi’s death, but he remains sufficiently under its spell to install Ukifune there as his mistress. Then he hears that she, too, has died (“Kagerō”). “What a pathetic end!” he exclaims to himself. “And what an awful place it is! There must be a demon living there.”[64] The spirit that speaks in the next chapter confirms his suspicion. The Uji chapters resemble an immense elaboration on Kisen Hōshi’s poem.