About six years after the scene in “Wakamurasaki,” political and personal difficulties force Genji into self-imposed exile at Suma. There, a companion reminds him one day, “My lord, this is the day for someone with troubles like yours to seek purification.”^[22] He refers to a purification performed by a yin-yang master (onmyōji) beside the sea. It is unclear which of Genji’s troubles the companion has in mind, but at any rate, Genji agrees to go. There on the shore he is engulfed by the great storm that eventually brings about his move to Akashi.

The plot importance of Genji’s move is obvious. He would not otherwise meet the Novice’s daughter, whose daughter by him is to become empress. However, the significance of the storm is less clear. It strikes suddenly, after Genji protests in a poem (quoted in “The Disaster of the Third Princess”) his innocence before all the gods. The narrative never explains what he means, how the gods might take his words, or why they provoke the storm. For that reason the storm’s significance has long been debated. The earlier essay acknowledges various views but argues among other things that Genji really is innocent in the gods’ eyes. The different material presented below suggests the same conclusion.

Dawn is near, after the first night of the storm.

Genji’s understanding matches widely known legend and folklore. The dragon king, continuous in a Buddhist world with the sea god (watatsumi, “ocean,” written with the characters “sea” and “god”) mentioned in Kojiki and Nihon shoki, represents the most generalized conception of the deity of the sea. He inhabits an undersea palace, and when agitated, causes storms. The Kakaishō author listed another Nihon shoki example immediately after citing the more directly relevant Hikohohodemi story: that of the hero Yamato Takeru. When Yamato Takeru’s ship was assailed by a violent storm, a concubine of his threw herself into the sea to save him, and the storm ceased.^[24]

Taketori monogatari (ninth century) provides another example. Kaguya-hime, the heroine, sends a suitor off to slay “the dragon” and steal the priceless jewel from its head. When a storm threatens the suitor’s ship, the helmsman attributes it to the enraged dragon and urges the suitor to pray to “the deity” (kami). The suitor therefore addresses the “helmsman god” (kajitori no on-kami) and promises to desist; whereupon the thunder stops and a stiff wind finally drives the ship ashore at Akashi.^[25] The dragon and the helmsman god seem to be continuous with each other, and this helmsman, himself a generalized sort of divinity, merges easily in turn with the Sumiyoshi deity, as a passage from Tosa nikki (ca. 935) suggests.^[26]

In Tosa nikki the author and his party, returning to the capital from Shikoku, are off the Sumiyoshi coast when a storm arises. The helmsman suggests that the Sumiyoshi deity wants something. When minor offerings fail, the author’s party throws the most precious object aboard, a bronze mirror, into the sea. The storm ceases immediately, as it did when Yamato Takeru’s concubine offered her beauty to the sea.^[27] Such concupiscence is typical of the dragon king, who in other stories, too, creates a storm in order to get a treasure that he covets.^[28] In Genji’s case, that treasure is Genji himself. In other words, the Genji narrative suggests that the dragon king (the sea god, Sumiyoshi) created the storm in order to acquire him. Since he would not have done so if Genji had been flawed, he must have considered him innocent of any significant crime.

Although “the same being [keeps] haunting [Genji’s] dreams,”^[29] he ignores the dragon king’s summons, and the storm rages on. How, indeed, could he respond? The Kakaishō author remarked that the dragon king wants Genji for his daughter;^[30] but Genji, being only human, cannot travel like Hikohohodemi to the sea god’s palace. Instead he can accept the Akashi Novice’s hospitality and marry his daughter. The fabulously wealthy Novice, in his seaside domain across the Kinai–Kigai border, acts on this accessible earth as the dragon king of the sea. Where Genji is concerned, he therefore also shares in the power and will of Sumiyoshi.

Genji recognizes the continuity of nature and will between the dragon king and Sumiyoshi, for when the storm redoubles in fury he prays to Sumiyoshi,^[31] as the suitor in Taketori prays to the divine helmsman, to help him. However it is his father who disposes him at last to heed the call of the deep by putting it in terms of plausible action. As the storm subsides and dawn approaches, the late emperor appears to Genji in a dream. “What are you doing in this terrible place?” he admonishes him. “Hasten to sail away from this coast, as the God of Sumiyoshi would have you do.”^[32] He explains that, finding his favorite son’s plight unbearable, “I dove into the sea, emerged on the strand, and despite my fatigue am now hurrying to the palace to have a word with His Majesty [Suzaku] on the matter.” Being in league with the dragon king and Sumiyoshi, he actually went to consult with them in the depths of the sea.

Soon, still well before dawn, the Novice’s boat arrives from Akashi. Genji remembers his dream and wonders that the man should have set sail so quickly through such tumultuous seas. And the Novice, too, has dreamed. Early in the same month, a “strange being” commanded him to prepare a boat for the journey to Suma, and on the supernaturally appointed day he therefore set off, propelled by an “eerie wind.” Genji considers the Novice’s invitation to Akashi, recalls his father’s admonition, and accepts. On the way there, “The same wind blew, and the boat fairly flew…One could only marvel at the will of the wind.” The boat reaches Akashi at daybreak, and at the sight of his guest the Novice “felt age dissolve and the years stretch out before him; he bowed at once to the God of Sumiyoshi, wreathed in smiles. The light of sun and moon seemed to him now to lie in his hand.”^[33]