If Genji can be thought to achieve “kingship,” however veiled, the narrative should hint, however discreetly, at accession to it. In practice, this means looking for the shadow of a Daijōsai (the imperial accession rite). In recent decades scholars have done so. In 1989, Abe Yoshitomi argued that every major step of the Daijōsai is obliquely encoded in a series of events that take place in “Momiji no ga,” “Sakaki,” “Suma,” and “Akashi.”^[69] Major examples are Genji’s transgressive (according to Abe) affair with the aging Dame of Staff, his transgression with Oborozukiyo, and the great storm, which functions as a ritual purification. However, others have preferred to pursue the possibility offered by the Yasoshima matsuri.

Ichijō Kanera first raised this possibility in his Genji commentary, Kachō yosei (1472). Genji returns to the capital at the end of “Akashi.” In the next chapter (“Miotsukushi”) he makes a formal pilgrimage to the Sumiyoshi Shrine, accompanied by the whole court, “to give thanks for many answered prayers,”^[70] and on his way back “he under[goes] the most solemn purification” at Naniwa.^[71] Kanera linked this purification to the Yasoshima matsuri, an imperial purification rite once performed in the year after a Daijōsai.

In 1989, Mitani Kuniaki published an influential development of Kanera’s remark. More recently, Kawazoe Fusae developed both his thesis and Abe’s to argue that Genji’s exile to Suma, his passage to Akashi, and his subsequent return to the capital constitute a shadow-Daijōsai, which is then followed, as indeed it once was in history, by a (shadow) Yasoshima matsuri.^[72]

The Yasoshima matsuri (literally, “ritual of the eighty [that is, many] islands”) appears twenty-two times in historical records, as well as in a good many waka poems. It probably originated in the fifth century, and it died out soon after the beginning of the Kamakura period (1185–1333).^[73] The rite took place at Naniwa, in an area dominated by the Sumiyoshi Shrine, and all speculative lists of the deities invoked include Sumiyoshi.^[74] Its name suggests that it involved several now-vanished islands near the mouth of the Yodo River, but by the mid-Heian period only the one called Tamino seems to have mattered. Jindaiki mentions the “deity of Tamino island” as a “child deity of Sumiyoshi.”^[75] The shrine there, Tamino-shima Jinja, was built in 869.^[76] In “Miotsukushi” an exchange of poems between Genji and the lady from Akashi suggests that both, separately, underwent purification on Tamino. A poem by the Sumiyoshi priest Tsumori Tsunekuni, written on the occasion of the Yasoshima matsuri of 1191, also celebrates the purification there.^[77]

Between 699 and 771, five emperors went to Naniwa in the year after their Daijōsai; presumably the Yasoshima matsuri was performed on these occasions.^[78] However, Kanmu (r. 781–806), who moved the capital to Heian-kyō, instituted another purification ritual at the more convenient Karasaki, near Ōtsu, at the southern end of Lake Biwa. No emperor ever went again in person to Naniwa.^[79] Instead, the ritual manual Gōke shidai (late eleventh century) describes how, in the year after a Daijōsai, a naishi (female court official), properly the emperor’s nurse, carried a box containing one of the emperor’s robes to Naniwa. A master of the wagon, the “Japanese koto,” went with her. An altar was then erected on the shore, probably on Tamino. To the sound of the wagon, the naishi opened the box and, facing the sea, shook the robe. This was the heart of the rite.^[80]

The first Yasoshima matsuri mentioned explicitly in the records is that of Emperor Montoku (r. 850–858), in 850. Many later emperors had it performed as well, although not all. Those of interest in connection with The Tale of Genji include Daigo, Suzaku (r. 930–946), Murakami (r. 946–967), Reizei (r. 967–969), and Sanjō (r. 1011–16). The last was Go-Horikawa (r. 1221–32).^[81] Murasaki Shikibu set the early part of her tale precisely in the time during which the Heian period Yasoshima matsuri was done most faithfully.

However, whether or not the Genji of “Miotsukushi” has just been through a shadow-Daijōsai, he is not on the face of it an emperor, and for that reason he cannot be imagined going through a Yasoshima matsuri proper.^[82] In any case, he visits Naniwa in person, unlike any Heian emperor. Some have therefore suggested that his purification at Naniwa consisted in practice of a rite known as Nanase no harae (literally, “purification on the seven shoals,” but perhaps, more simply, “sevenfold purification”). This rite would therefore have had, in Genji’s case, the value of a shadow-Yasoshima matsuri.^[83] Indeed, some authoritative versions of the text (for example, SNKBT 2:115) mention nanase, although others (for example, GM 2:306) have instead nado (“and so on”). The Tyler translation, which relied on the latter, reads, “At Naniwa he underwent the most solemn purification.” Adding the nanase might yield, “At Naniwa he underwent the most solemn sevenfold purification.” The Nanase no harae therefore sounds possible. However, Yoshikai Naoto showed that, although this purification could be done at Naniwa (as at Karasaki and in Heian-kyō itself, on the banks of the Kamo River), it could not have been, even there, a reduced version of the Yasoshima matsuri because it was not a shrine rite at all, conducted by Shinto priests. Instead it was an Onmyōdō rite, conducted by yin-yang practitioners,^[84] and was therefore akin to the Onmyōdō purification rite that precedes the great storm in “Suma.” Yoshikai found no evidence to support the proposition that Genji’s purification at Naniwa was a Nanase no harae.^[85]

Two other items have been cited to argue that Genji’s purification at Naniwa acts out a sort of latent kingship. One is the location of the ceremony: the island of Tamino. The Yasoshima matsuri hypothesis requires that access to Tamino should have been restricted to a very great lord seeking purification at that level, but no evidence to that effect exists. Since the lady from Akashi goes there for the same purpose, anyone of some standing could apparently do so. The second has to do with the Yasoshima envoy’s departure. Gōke shidai states that when the naishi envoy started back toward the capital, the singing girls of Eguchi (at the mouth of the Yodo River) gathered to her train, from which they received largesse. Similarly, when Genji started home, “Singing girls crowded to his procession, and all the young gallants with him, even senior nobles, seemed to look favorably on them.”^[86] However, this does not mean that the singing girls (asobi) treated Genji’s train as an imperial envoy’s. Documents of the time show that they sought to derive whatever benefit they could from the passage of every wealthy lord or lady.^[87]

The Yasoshima matsuri hypothesis therefore dissolves, and with it the hope of finding veiled evidence of a Daijōsai. However, Kawazoe Fusae advanced an intricate argument to support another line of reasoning. She suggested that Genji’s night in the “kitchen” after lightning had struck his part of the Suma house, and his vision of his father there, corresponds to the practice of the Daijōsai, during which the new emperor eats and sleeps with the ancestral spirits;^[88] and that the province of Harima had a special place in the development of the dual Yuki-no-kuni, Suki-no-kuni structure of the Daijōsai.^[89] In order to connect Genji’s experience to the agricultural, celestial sun-deity cult underlying the historical Daijōsai, she found herself obliged to argue that the Akashi Novice’s Sumiyoshi is a deity not only of the sea, but of rice. She therefore characterized the lady from Akashi as a “water woman” (mizu no onna), meaning a “paddy woman” (ta no onna), a woman associated with the fresh water that nourishes the crops. In this way she argued that Genji’s marriage to the Novice’s daughter shadows the Daijōsai marriage between the new emperor and the fructifying source of plenty for his realm.^[90] In reality, however, nothing associates this lady with any water but that of the sea.