“Sumiyoshi” (also “Suminoe”) is first of all a place name. The Tale of Genji and many other documents sum up the sacred presence there in such expressions as Sumiyoshi no kami, which translates most easily as “the Sumiyoshi deity.” However, this presence is really composite. The Sumiyoshi Shrine at Naniwa had, and still has, four major sanctuaries. The first three enshrine Sokotsutsu-no-o, Nakatsutsu-no-o, and Uwatsutsu-no-o, the male deities of the bottom, middle depths, and surface of the sea. The fourth, according to Jindaiki as well as to shrine literature today, enshrines Jingū Kōgō. However, according to the canonical Engi shiki, two other important Sumiyoshi shrines, in Kyushu and in western Honshu, lacked this fourth sanctuary (as they still do) and so honor only the triple deity of the sea.^[43] Moreover, after Murasaki Shikibu’s time the Sumiyoshi priest Tsumori Kunimoto (1026–1102), an active and successful poet, redefined the fourth sanctuary as the canonical poetess Sotōri-hime,^[44] under the name Tamatsushima Myōjin. Thereafter Sumiyoshi was regarded as a great patron of poetry. Thus the close link at Sumiyoshi between the triple sea deity and Jingū Kōgō was not, strictly speaking, inevitable. It represents the perspective of Kojiki, Nihon shoki and Jindaiki. Murasaki Shikibu could have known no other.

According to Kojiki and Nihon shoki, the three Tsutsu deities were born when Izanagi escaped from the underworld and purified himself in the sea at a place in Kyushu called Tachibana no Odo.^[45] Both sources identify them as the triple deity of Suminoe and the ancestor of the Azumi,^[46] a major seafaring (ama) clan based in northern Kyushu. The Azumi supplied the priests of an important Sumiyoshi shrine there, but they also spread far along both coasts of Honshu.^[47]

The Sumiyoshi deity (Sokotsutsu-no-o, Nakatsutsu-no-o, Uwatsutsu-no-o) first came to the attention of the Yamato court thanks to a dramatic oracle delivered to Emperor Chūai through Chūai’s empress, Jingū Kōgō. The oracle announced a land of riches across the sea (Korea), one given to the emperor for his taking. However, Chūai refused to believe it. Enraged, the power addressing him declared that he would therefore not rule that land; no, the son that his empress was to bear would rule it instead. In Nihon shoki, Chūai sickened and died nearly five months later, but in Kojiki and Jindaiki he died on the spot. As for the son, Kojiki and Nihon shoki allow the reader to assume that the empress was already pregnant and that the child was Chūai’s. However, Mishina Shōei gathered from both accounts that the possessing deity (at this point still unidentified) had impregnated the empress and that the child was his.^[48] Jindaiki makes this reading explicit. The deity utters his reproach, and “That night the emperor sickened and died. Thereupon secret commerce occurred [hisokagoto ari] between the empress and the great deity.” An ancient gloss now included in the text states, “This means that they engaged in the intimate intercourse of husband and wife.”^[49] Soon, in a further possession, the possessing powers identified themselves. Jindaiki mentions the triple Tsutsu deity (Sumiyoshi); Kojiki adds Amaterasu; and Nihon shoki, which names all four, adds others as well.^[50] Jingū Kōgō’s story, and especially her presence in the fourth Sumiyoshi sanctuary at Naniwa, suggests that Sumiyoshi is paramount among these. Jingū Kōgō had indeed become the wife of Sumiyoshi, as she continued to be in Usa Hachimangū takusenshū, a fundamental document of the medieval Hachiman cult.^[51]

Mishina Shōei characterized this union as a sacred marriage between a deity and a divine woman of the sea, like the one between Hikohohodemi and Toyotama-hime, the sea god’s daughter. Toyotama-hime gave birth on the shore to Ugayafukiaezu-no-mikoto, the father of Jinmu, the founder of the imperial line; and it is also on the shore that Jingū Kōgō bore the future Emperor Ōjin, whose enormous tomb mound (kofun) at Konda, near Osaka, is the largest in Japan. Mishina described her story and her son’s as one of the kunitsukuri (“realm-making”) that celebrates a new era.^[52] This association of renewal with the birth and reign of Ōjin recalls the renewal brought about by Genji’s triumphant return to the capital from Akashi and his shadow-reign through Reizei, his son.^[53]

Kojiki (although not Nihon shoki) states that Jingū Kōgō’s distant ancestor was Ame-no-hihoko (“Celestial Sun Spear”), a legendary prince from the Korean kingdom of Silla, who arrived in Japan bearing treasures associated with mastery of wind and sea. Ame-no-hihoko’s descendants settled in Chikuzen province (northern Kyushu), where Jingū Kōgō’s career began. Thus she came ultimately from the same land across the sea that the possessing deity invited her earthly husband, Chūai, to take, and that she then set out to conquer herself.

While she prepared her campaign, the triple Tsutsu deity promised in another oracle to protect her person and to assure her success in war. Indeed, she carried her conquest through thanks above all to supernatural control of the tide, which overwhelmed the Silla army. Therefore Jingū Kōgō first enshrined her protector not in Japan, but in Silla.^[54] After returning to Japan and bearing her son, she founded the deity’s first shrine in Japan at “Anato no Yamada-mura.” This is the Sumiyoshi Shrine in Shimonoseki. Then she sailed eastward on a path that would lead her and her son, via Naniwa and Ōmi province, to Tsuruga on the Japan Sea, where the Kehi Shrine honors Ame-no-hihoko’s sword. In other words, she followed the route that her ancestor had taken long before.^[55]

On the way, the triple Tsutsu deity declared his desire to reside at “Ōtsu no Nunakura no Nagao,” so that he might watch the ships passing back and forth.^[56] Jindaiki and Settsu fudoki confirm that this spot was in Suminoe (Sumiyoshi) county of Settsu province. It belonged to Tamomi no Sukune, whom Toyoshima Hidenori likened to the Akashi Novice.^[57] Jingū Kōgō wished at first to become the deity’s priestess, but the deity refused to accept her service, appointing instead Tamomi no Sukune and his descendants in perpetuity.^[58] According to Jindaiki, she then declared her wish to reside together with the deity; hence the fourth sanctuary of the shrine. Tamomi’s descendants constituted the Tsumori clan, whose members appear repeatedly in the records not only as priests of the Sumiyoshi Shrine, but also as envoys to the continent.^[59] As priests, too, they participated in overseas voyages, being entrusted with shipboard rites to ensure safe ocean passage.^[60] In this way the Sumiyoshi deity continued to support relations with the continent. Tsumori power seems to have followed the westward spread of Yamato sovereignty and so to have absorbed the sea deity of the Azumi clan of northern Kyushu.^[61]

When the deity refused Jingū Kōgō’s offer of service, he promised to guard the emperor, the imperial realm, and the people. Later, he repeated his undertaking to defend the emperor and the realm as pervasively as “mists rising in the morning and in the evening.”^[62] Jingū Kōgō’s fidelity to Sumiyoshi, her triumphs, and her long reign had won this pledge of divine protection. The word “reign” is used here advisedly. From the standpoint of later, accepted history Jingū Kōgō was never more than a regent for her son, but Jindaiki is not alone in referring to her repeatedly as tennō (emperor). Other examples occur in the fudoki and elsewhere.^[63] Such early documents, especially Jindaiki, therefore evoke a figure, historical for Murasaki Shikibu if not for modern scholars, who so dominated her time that she commanded the title tennō, even though no enthronement rite had ever conferred it on her.^[64] They therefore provide a model of imperial ambiguity—that of someone both in and out of the imperial line—that recalls Genji as well.