One scholar writing on spirits (mononoke) in the tale speculated that Ukifune must have walked in a trance-like state to the spot where she was found, or that she was perhaps kidnapped and abandoned by someone like a passing yamabushi.^[18] Another, recognizing that a spirit took her, assumed that the spirit carried her in its arms, or that she walked beside it.^[19] Still others have agreed with Nagai Kazuko that Ukifune never regained her memory of what happened while she was possessed and that “the author does not describe exactly what happened.”^[20] The different descriptions of the agent involved seem to compound the difficulty. When exorcised by the Sōzu, the spirit declares itself to have been once “a practicing monk” (okonai seshi hōshi). Next, Ukifune herself recalls “a very beautiful man” approaching her, inviting her to come to his home and taking her in his arms. Later on, however, she remembers a demon (oni) making off with her, and later still the Sōzu tells Kaoru that “a goblin [tengu] or a tree spirit [kodama] must have taken her to the spot by deceit.”^[21] The narrative therefore proposes six seemingly conflicting appearances or identities for the spirit: a former monk, a beautiful man, a demon, a tengu, a tree spirit, and the fox mentioned when the monks first find her. These seem to cancel each other out, leaving the issue imponderable.

Several medieval documents resolve this difficulty. The fourteenth-century Genji commentary Kakaishō provides the first clue. In connection with the spirit’s speech to the Sōzu, in the exorcism scene, Kakaishō quotes Kojidan 211 in full.^[22] This anecdote tells how a high-ranking monk conceived lust for a woman (the Somedono Empress, 829–900), died, and became a tengu that then possessed her. Next, Kakaishō cites another version of the same story, according to which a holy monk was called in to heal the same empress and desired her so intensely that he vowed to die and become an oni in order to possess her, which he did.^[23]

These stories suggest that a ranking monk who succumbs to temptation because of a woman can become after death either an oni or a tengu. The spirit’s self-description (“Once I was a practicing monk”) therefore agrees both with Ukifune’s memory of it as an oni and the Sōzu’s belief that it may have been a tengu.

The Sōzu’s other suggestion, a kodama, is equally plausible. Japanese folklore has long associated tengu with tall trees, and the narrative amusingly emphasizes the tree-spirit aspect of Ukifune’s abductor. Ukifune is found lying under a tree that, according to the villa’s caretaker, is often haunted by supernatural creatures.

The monks’ discovery is old hat to the caretaker, who takes the material mischief of spirits for granted. However, his idea of a supernatural being that moves someone from one place to another is a fox (kitsune). Despite possible differences in degree of mischief, these entities are all continuous with one another.

The linked verse (renga) manual Renju gappeki shū, by Ichijō Kanera (1402–81), confirms this continuity. Kanera listed both kitsune and oni as linking words for kodama, specifying that they refer to Genji, together with the place name Uji and the chapter name “Tenarai.”^[25] For the author as for the users of this manual, the key word associated with this episode in the tale—one that included the possibility of all the rest mentioned—was therefore kodama.

Ukifune’s perception of the beautiful man belongs under the same heading. She first recalls him this way:

He has long been identified as Niou, although in recent times some have suggested Kaoru^[27] or even Ukifune’s father.^[28] However, these conjectures do not help because the figure is an illusion in the first place. Soon after recalling him, Ukifune says to the Sōzu’s sister:

She associates the figure explicitly with a tree. Tengu (to say nothing of foxes) are famous masters of illusion, and setsuwa literature contains many anecdotes about the elaborate hallucinations they create. An example is Konjaku monogatari shū 20/3 (also Uji shūi monogatari 2/14), in which a tengu appears as a buddha among the branches of a persimmon tree, shining and scattering flowers. When a suspicious minister’s relentless gaze finally breaks the spell, the buddha suddenly vanishes, and a large kestrel with a broken wing falls out of the tree. Ukifune’s beautiful man is a tengu-kodama trick that reveals nothing about the spirit’s nature or identity. It shows only that the spirit knows what form will appeal to her.^[30]

According to Janet Goff, medieval renga manuals devoted to The Tale of Genji (as Renju gappeki shū is not, being general in coverage) ignore Ukifune’s exorcism scene.^[31] However, at the end of their section on the “Ukifune” chapter they attribute her disappearance to a kodama, which they then specify as a linking word for “Uji.” An example is Hikaru Genji ichibu renga yoriai no koto, by Nijō Yoshimoto (1320–88), which states explicitly that the man Ukifune saw was a kodama.^[32] The much larger manual entitled Hikaru Genji ichibu uta (1453) not only makes the same connection with a kodama but also has the spirit in the exorcism scene describe itself as a kodama rather than as a former “practicing monk.”^[33]

Goff examined renga manuals in connection with her study of nō plays based on The Tale of Genji. Two plays, both of which exploit these manuals extensively, concern Ukifune.^[34] One is Ukifune, which Zeami (1363?–1443?) praised in Sarugaku dangi even though it is not by him. (Although still in the repertoire, it is rarely performed.) The maeshite is a nameless woman of Uji, and the nochijite is Ukifune. The text sheds little light on the matter under discussion, but it is noteworthy that, at the end of the first part, the maeshite describes herself as still possessed by an evil spirit (nao mononoke no mi ni soite).^[35] The discussion will return below to the idea that Ukifune remains at least partially possessed even after the exorcism.

The second play, Kodama Ukifune,^[36] is not in the repertoire and appears to date from the early sixteenth century. The maeshite is a nameless woman at Ono. The identity of the nochijite is confusing, but it seems to be above all the possessing spirit itself, as the Genji reader knows it from the exorcism scene in “Tenarai.”

Muromachi-period readers, including such authoritative literary figures as Nijō Yoshimoto and Ichijō Kanera, therefore gathered from the Genji narrative that a spirit transported Ukifune. The same understanding presumably underlies the gloss in most medieval commentaries, to the effect that the Uji Villa occupied the site of the Byōdō-in.^[37] The tale makes it clear where the house was, and the commentary authors must have known that the Byōdō-in site was directly across from it. The river itself could not have carried Ukifune there, nor could a living person with a boat, since the boat would have landed further downstream. The only possibility left is a spirit.

If medieval readers were more or less agreed on the subject, when did the controversy about it arise? Perhaps Edo-period Confucians like Kumazawa Banzan (1619–91) were the first skeptics. No one will ever know what Banzan might have written about Ukifune, since he never took his Genji commentary (Genji gaiden) past “Fuji no uraba.” However, he believed that the tale was “written throughout with the basic purpose of the transformation of the style [of society] [fūka],” and his approach to it was thoroughly historicist and rationalist.^[38] James McMullen wrote, “Banzan provided rational, again sometimes psychological, explanations of the flourishing world of spirits in the novel.” For example, Banzan attributed Yūgao’s death to a psychological cause (fear) rather than to a supernatural one (the phantom woman seen by Genji), and he denied that Rokujō’s living spirit actually left her body to torment Aoi.^[39]

Banzan’s emphasis on rationality and psychology is certainly visible in modern discussions of the spirit that speaks in Ukifune’s exorcism scene. Perhaps the most authoritative of these now is the one proposed by Mitani Kuniaki and adopted by Fujimoto Katsuyoshi.^[40]

Mitani began by citing from Murasaki Shikibu’s personal collection a poem (Murasaki Shikibu shū 44) that comments on a painting. According to the kotobagaki, the painting showed a possessed woman with a demon behind her. The exorcist held the demon bound, while a man chanted a sutra. According to the poem, the man was the husband, the possessed woman was his second wife, and the demon (the possessing spirit) was his first wife, now deceased. The poem suggests that although the husband attributes his present wife’s suffering to the resentment of his first, this suffering is really due to his own “heart demon” (kokoro no oni), his bad conscience. Mitani concluded from this that although Murasaki Shikibu accepted the phenomena associated with spirit possession, she did not attribute them to the operations of an autonomous, external power. Instead, she saw the afflicting spirit as an expression of the guilt of the person whom its rantings addressed: in this case, the husband.

Mitani linked this view to the psychology of the unconscious and then interpreted in this light the various possession events attributed in the tale to the spirit of Rokujō. Since in these cases Genji is the living person addressed, the spirit is a manifestation of Genji’s own guilt and fear, whether or not he is conscious of them. The same principle therefore applies to the possession scene in “Tenarai.” Since the spirit addresses the Sōzu (the exorcist), it is a manifestation of the Sōzu’s guilt and fear.

The Sōzu is indeed nervous about having come down to Ono from Mt. Hiei to exorcise a young woman, since his action could suggest that he is attracted to her in an unseemly way, hence that he has broken his vows and discredited Buddhism and his fellow monks. However, these misgivings do not adequately support Mitani’s argument. As noted also in the Introduction to this book, Murasaki Shikibu’s poem cannot reliably explain every possession scene in The Tale of Genji, since one cannot be certain in what spirit she wrote it or how generally applicable she took this example to be, and especially since there is no reason to assume that, through her narrator, she wrote her personal understanding into her fiction. Moreover, it is impossible to understand how a power that has carried Ukifune from one place to another and possessed her by this time for two months could be no more than a manifestation of this exorcist’s guilty feelings. Mitani accorded the spirit no significance other than to reveal the unconscious preoccupations of the Sōzu and then of Ukifune, who, after the exorcism, remembers seeing the “very beautiful man,” while Fujimoto denied that what Ukifune sees has anything to do with what the Sōzu hears because Ukifune does not remember ever having been possessed by a monk.

Apart from the circumstances of Ukifune’s disappearance and her own memories of what happened to her, the narrative repeatedly hints at possession and spirit abduction. When the women of the household see Ukifune so depressed (“Ukifune”), they immediately wonder whether a spirit is troubling her, and her nurse exclaims a little later, “The way you keep lying about, for some reason, there must be some spirit trying to spoil everything!”^[41] At the end of the chapter Ukon lies down beside Ukifune and says, “They say the soul of anyone with such cares as yours may go wandering far away. Perhaps that is why your mother had those [alarming] dreams [of you].”^[42] The hints grow broader in “Kagerō,” which begins with a remark that Ukifune’s disappearance resembles a maiden’s abduction in a tale—presumably one about a maiden being taken by a demon. Ukifune’s nurse is heard crying, “Whoever you are who took my darling, human or demon, oh, give her back!”; Ukifune’s mother “could only suppose that a demon had devoured her or that some fox-like creature had made off with her”; and Kaoru sighs about what an awful place Uji is, speculating that “[t]here must be a demon living there.”^[43]

Late in “Tenarai” the narrator actually tells the reader that a spirit took Ukifune. Having been called to the palace to exorcise the First Princess,^[44] the Sōzu stays on to chat with the empress and tells her about the young woman found at Uji. All the empress’s gentlewomen are asleep except one Kozaishō, who listens eagerly. When the Sōzu’s story is over she asks, “But why did the spirit take a well-born girl to a place like that?”^[45] The Sōzu, whose power and experience qualify him to know spirits, must have told the empress how Ukifune got to the Uji Villa.