Akashi first appears in “Wakamurasaki.” At the risk of covering ground already familiar to many, it will be worth discussing consecutively, from the present perspective, this passage and the later ones on Genji’s experience there and at Suma.

In “Wakamurasaki” Genji visits a healer at a temple in the mountains north of the capital. Never having left the city before, he marvels at everything he sees along the way. Soon he and his companions are gazing out over vistas more picturesque than he has ever seen. His companions, who rank below him and so travel more, tell him about still greater wonders in distant regions, and one chimes in to praise the more accessible coast at Akashi in the province of Harima. “Not that any single feature of it is so extraordinary,” he says, “but the view over the sea there is somehow more peaceful than elsewhere.”^[9]

The young men have just mentioned Mt. Fuji and “another peak,” perhaps Mt. Asama: two great volcanoes that Genji will never see. With Akashi, the conversation returns to a spot less remote, but still just barely within the same class of beautiful, far-off places that Genji is unlikely ever to visit in person. Akashi (now a city in Hyōgo Prefecture) is situated on the coast of the Inland Sea, seven or eight kilometers west of Suma (now a seaside park within the city of Kobe), which Genji chose in time as his place of exile. His choice rests on literary precedent (that of the historical Ariwara no Yukihira), but it probably has to do also with Suma’s location. Suma and Akashi were then in different provinces, despite the short distance between them. Suma was near the western edge of Settsu, while Akashi was just across the border in Harima. Settsu was one of the Kinai (“Inner”) provinces immediately surrounding the capital and therefore nominally under direct imperial rule, while Harima was one of the Kigai (“Outer”) provinces, beyond the emperor’s direct domain.^[10] For this reason, Akashi was not properly accessible to Genji, an emperor’s son. A regulation issued in 853 prohibited even an imperial grandson from leaving the Kinai.^[11] Genji may have found Suma painfully unfamiliar, but Akashi was legally alien to him.

If the view from Akashi “is somehow more peaceful than elsewhere,” that may be because it includes the mountainous northern tip of Awaji, a large island only three or four kilometers away across the Inland Sea. A passage in “Akashi” describes “the island of Awaji looming in the distance” under a bright moon while, for Genji, “an ineffable yearning seem[s] to fill all the world.”^[12] Set as it was on the mainland side of the strait, Akashi also marked the point at which the homeward-bound traveler, sailing in from the west, first glimpsed far ahead the hills of Yamato, and the traveler outward bound from the port of Naniwa (now Osaka) finally lost sight of those same hills.^[13] Like Suma, it was a post station on the coast road toward the west, but the number of post horses cited for each in Engi shiki (927) suggests that Akashi was by far the larger of the two.^[14] Sure enough, in “Suma” Genji imagines Suma as isolated and only barely inhabited (just the kind of place he has in mind), while on arriving at Akashi he finds “the coast there…indeed exceptional, its only flaw being the presence of so many people.”^[15] Fortunately, the magnificence of his reception makes up for the lack of melancholy solitude.

After praising Akashi, Genji’s retainer Yoshikiyo (the speaker in “Wakamurasaki”) describes the unusual gentleman who has established himself there. He is not only a minister’s son, but (as the reader discovers later) a cousin of Genji’s mother.^[16] Eccentric and unsociable, he resigned a high post in the palace guards and personally requested appointment as governor of Harima. This extraordinary step meant a steep drop in rank. “He became a bit of a laughingstock in his province even so,” Yoshikiyo says, “and being too embarrassed to return to the City, he shaved his head instead.”^[17] Thus the gentleman became a nyūdō (“novice”), a monk who has taken simple religious vows and continues to live at home.

So far the Akashi Novice sounds like something of a crank, but there is more to him than that. First, he is fabulously rich. As Yoshikiyo tells it, “He may never have made a name for himself in the City, but the sheer scale of the tract he has claimed for himself makes it obvious that he has arranged things…so as to spend the rest of his life in luxury.”^[18] In “Akashi,” Genji is amazed to find that the opulence of this eccentric’s establishment rivals anything in the capital. The narrative makes no serious attempt to explain how an incompetent laughing-stock managed to come by all this. The Akashi Novice’s mysterious wealth is simply an attribute of his.

The second striking thing about him is his affinity with the sea. Yoshikiyo reports with perplexity that, instead of retiring to a sheltered spot in the hills, the Akashi Novice “put himself right on the sea.”^[19] Yoshikiyo goes on to rationalize this choice, but the impression of strangeness remains, especially when he describes the old man’s habitual injunction to his daughter:

One of Genji’s companions remarks with a laugh, “She must be a rare treasure then, if her father means the Dragon King of the Sea to have her as his queen!” Intrigued, Genji reflects, “I wonder what it means that his ambitions for her reach all the way to the bottom of the sea.”

Just as the Akashi Novice’s wealth defies comprehension, his daughter’s personal quality defies again and again, when at last Genji comes to know her, every conception of what is proper for the daughter of a provincial governor. Her music, near the end of “Akashi,” moves Genji to compare her with Fujitsubo, his late father’s empress, and with age he seems to find her vast dignity, boundless forbearance, and perfect judgment increasingly baffling. In “Wakana Two,” twenty-eight years after first hearing about her, he says of her while reflecting on the women he has known, “I looked down at first on [her] as being unworthy of me, and I assumed that she was a passing amusement, but her heart is an abyss beyond sounding [nao kokoro no soko miezu]. She has immeasurable depth [kiwa naku fukaki tokoro aru hito ni nan].”^[21] His words echo the deep-sea imagery of “Wakamurasaki” to describe a low-ranking woman whose qualities, taken together, all but transcend the human.