Nearly everyone familiar with Genji in any form (including received folklore) assumes that, between “Ukifune” and “Kagerō,” Ukifune throws herself into the Uji River to drown, but is then swept away by the current, washed ashore downstream, and saved by Yokawa no Sōzu. Relatively a few people, most whom are academic specialists, doubt that Ukifune genuinely attempts jusui: suicide by drowning. “The Possibility of Ukifune” has covered this topic already, but a brief recapitulation will be useful.

In reality, Ukifune never even approaches the water. Yokawa no Sōzu finds her not on the riverbank, but beneath a great tree in a silent wood behind a residence known as the Uji Villa. The text of “Tenarai” provides enough evidence to show how she got there. It allows only one answer: after stepping out onto the veranda of her house, with the intention of going down to the river, Ukifune was possessed by a spirit that transported her supernaturally to the place where she was found.

Being unable to choose between two lovers, Kaoru and Niou, Ukifune decides to drown herself in the river that flows past her house. The ending of “Ukifune” convinces the reader that she is about to act, and at the start of the next chapter, “Kagerō,” she is indeed gone; the entire household is hunting for her. Only some way into “Tenarai,” the chapter after that, does the author provide a consecutive account of the event in the form of Ukifune’s silent reminiscences. Although quoted already in “The Possibility of Ukifune,” the passage deserves renewed attention here.

Motoori Norinaga praised this way of conveying what happened to Ukifune as “a most entertaining manner of writing” (ito omoshiroki kakizama).^[27] In practice, however, so many readers miss, ignore, or dismiss the passage, at least in modern times, that one can perhaps fairly say that it no longer works.

The Asukai no Himegimi of Sagoromo monogatari is a Yūgao-like waif (many writers, starting with Hagiwara Hiromichi in 1854, have noted the parallel) of decent birth but without future prospects. Sagoromo, the hero, discovers her and makes love to her, but he never allows her to find out who he is. In time she becomes pregnant. Meanwhile Michinari, one of his retainers, learns about her as well. Never suspecting her relationship with his lord, he decides when he is posted to Kyushu to abduct her and take her there with him on the ship. Asukai’s nurse, who scorns the frivolous ways of noble youths like Asukai’s still-anonymous lover, supports this plan so effectively that the outraged and astonished Asukai is soon bundled aboard.^[28] Rejecting Michinari’s blandishments, she resolves to throw herself into the sea.^[29]

Surviving manuscripts of Sagoromo monogatari differ significantly among themselves, and so do the published texts. This essay will refer to four: those edited by Mitani Eiichi and Sekine Keiko (NKBT), Suzuki Kazuo (SNKS), Komachiya Teruhiko and Gotō Shōko (SNKBT), and Yoshida Kōichi (Koten bunko). With respect to the closing passage of the first chapter (the one that matters here), the SNKS and Koten bunko texts are equivalent. The SNKBT text adds a sentence, and to this sentence the NKBT text adds a paragraph.

Asukai’s moment comes as the ship approaches Mushiake no Seto, a narrow passage between Nagashima island and the Bizen coast of the Inland Sea. The passengers are asleep. Tormented by memories of Sagoromo, Asukai wants to write a farewell poem on a fan he once gave her, but tears blind her, her hand trembles, and she has difficulty doing so. Before she can finish, she hears someone nearby (hito no kehai no sureba). She therefore

Asukai’s brother then tells her he lost an eye as a boy and became a monk. She feels reassured. They go together to the capital, and he takes her to the house of an aunt, now a nun. When the nun asks Asukai to tell her story, Asukai speaks of having wanted to die anyway, and of having then been taken aboard an ukifune (“drifting boat”), which made her detest life even more. “I feel safer now that I have met you,” she says. “If you would be so kind, please make me a nun.” The nun agrees to do so after Asukai’s baby is born. Asukai’s brother agrees, urging her to remain until then where she is, quiet and unnoticed. He then leaves, saying that he has various pilgrimages to make.

Each of these versions corresponds roughly to a step in the account quoted from “Tenarai.” The SNKS and Koten bunko texts leave Asukai at the stage of Ukifune’s fright when Ukifune actually goes outside and hears the noise of the river; the SNKBZ text leaves her, like Ukifune, overcome by fear; and the NKBT text then has her carried away like Ukifune by a mysterious man. The NKBT text even incorporates the word ukifune and has Asukai ask to be made a nun, as Ukifune eventually did.

Asukai’s disappearance devastates the hero, who early in the second chapter receives an oral report from the abductor’s (Michinari’s) younger brother. The content is the same in all four texts: “Some very strange news has reached me. Michinari’s wife threw herself into the sea. Everything the lady’s nurse told me, weeping, suggests that the lady in question is the very one who has disappeared.” (SNKS 1:129; Koten bunko 1:141; SNKBZ 1:158–9; NKBT, 120) His report leaves Sagoromo in the same position as Kaoru, once Kaoru learns in “Kagerō” of the disappearance and presumed drowning of Ukifune.

However, the different first chapter endings each leave the reader in a different place. The SNKS/KB ending corresponds roughly to the close of “Ukifune”: the reader knows that Asukai plans to drown herself and cannot yet assume that either the presence of someone nearby (hito no kehai) or fear itself guarantees failure. The SNKBZ reader knows that fear has mastered her (as Ukifune recalls it doing in “Tenarai”) and so can reasonably take her failure for granted. However, only the NKBT text actually tells what happens next. Presumably the NKBT narrative is meant to explain a surprise present in all four versions: Sagoromo’s discovery, late in the second chapter, that Asukai is alive and in her brother’s care.^[30] (She dies before he can see her again.) However, what “really happens” to Asukai, as to Ukifune, remains in the end unfathomable, unless one simply accepts in Ukifune’s case that a spirit carried her off bodily, and in Asukai’s that her brother appeared from nowhere, at sea in the middle of the night, to do the same. Regarding Ukifune, readers and scholars in recent times, reluctant to accept supernatural intervention, have tended to replace what the text says with something more intelligible. Confusingly enough, the silent assumption, or the reluctance to deny, that Ukifune somehow threw herself in after all has been encouraged since at least the fifteenth century by ambiguous use of the term jusui and related expressions. Modern insistence on finding source materials for the jusui motif in Heian times may also have played its part.

The earliest of the major commentaries, Shimeishō and Kakaishō, say nothing to suggest that the content of Ukifune’s experience is anything other than self-evident. Later works (Genji kokagami, Kachō yosei, Mōshinshō, Bansui ichiro, Mingō nisso, Kogetsushō) note that she was carried off either by someone she thought was miya (“the prince”), or, more explicitly, by a spirit she believed to be Prince Niou. These two readings amount to the same thing. They refer to Ukifune’s memories—memories that Motoori Norinaga apparently accepted, since he praised the way the author let the reader know what had happened to her. Meanwhile, Genji kokagami and Hikaru Genji ichibu uta (seconded by the Noh play Kodama Ukifune)^[31] say that Ukifune was carried off by a kodama (“tree spirit”), and in 1854 Hagiwara Hiromichi agreed.^[32] Finally, several medieval commentaries or digests identify the place where Ukifune was found as the site of the Byōdō-in, thus tacitly accepting the inevitable conclusion that the spirit carried her bodily across the river.^[33]

The first hint of what looks like ambiguity on the subject occurs in the mid-Muromachi Genji ōkagami, which begins its account of “Kagerō” as follows: “Everyone is distraught that Ukifune should have thrown herself [into the river], but they are wrong. She meant to do so, but once she opened the door and went outside…”^[34] The text then summarizes Ukifune’s later memories. Nonetheless, the “Tenarai” section says that at the Uji Villa the nuns “gathered her up and put her in the carriage. The time when Ukifune threw herself in [mi o nagetarishi toki] was the end of the third month.”^[35] Taken out of context, this passage suggests that the writer believed Ukifune literally threw herself into the river. However, he clearly did not. Perhaps he meant the expression mi o nagu (equivalent to jusui su, “drown oneself”) to acknowledge intention over failed execution. More probably, however, he simply found no more economical way to refer to an otherwise untidily enigmatic event—an event the real content of which no one in his time seemed to doubt.

Kachō yosei and Sairyūshō, followed respectively by Mōshinshō and Rōkashō, do much the same thing. In Kachō yosei, the first gloss on “Kagerō” reminds the reader of Ukifune’s obvious plan to take her own life and goes on, “It would have been pointless to write about her actually throwing herself in, since no one [among the household at Uji] knows she did it.” Further on, however, the writer accepts Ukifune’s memories and explicitly acknowledges her recognition that she had failed.

Similarly, Sairyūshō glosses the first words of “Kagerō” (kashiko ni wa) as meaning “the place [Uji] where Ukifune threw herself in [mi o nage-tamaishi ato],” even though later on it acknowledges the same evidence that she did not. In connection with a mention of heavy rain,^[36] it likewise states that the rain fell “on the day after Ukifune’s jusui.” Interestingly, the linked-verse poet Satomura Jōha (1527–1602) used the same sort of language on the subject at about the same time. In his Sagoromo shitahimo (1590), a short commentary on Sagoromo monogatari, Jōha wrote that the moment when Asukai seems about to throw herself into the water “recalls Ukifune’s jusui in Genji.”^[37] Thus Jōha included under the rubric of jusui two incidents in which no jusui takes place. Modern scholars have often done the same.

In the Edo period, Motoori Norinaga and Hagiwara Hiromichi seem to have recognized, either tacitly or explicitly, that Ukifune was abducted.^[38] In his Kogetsushō (1673), Kitamura Kigin quoted the Kachō yosei and Sairyūshō glosses on the first words of “Kagerō,” but he also glossed Ukifune’s vision of the “beautiful man,” in “Tenarai,” by quoting Mōshinshō: “The spirit [that had possessed Ukifune] appeared to her, and she saw it as Niou.” Regarding Ukifune’s memories of what happened, he wrote nothing at all. Presumably he accepted them. However, if the Confucian thinker Kumazawa Banzan (1619–91) had been able to carry Genji gaiden, his ambitious commentary on the tale, beyond “Fuji no Uraba,” he would probably have rejected both the “beautiful man” and the “kodama.” Banzan’s approach was resolutely historical and rational. He attributed Yūgao’s death not to the phantom woman that Genji saw, but to fear, and he denied that Rokujō’s spirit actually left her body to torment Aoi.^[39] This quasi-psychological view of spirit possession foreshadows an influential line of interpretation put forward in recent decades: one that strives to rationalize and psychologize Ukifune’s experience.

Since scholarly books and articles still refer routinely to Ukifune no jusui, one might assume that their authors and readers nonetheless know what really happened, as people apparently did in medieval times; and perhaps in most cases nowadays they really do. However, it is not clear that they always have. Much evidence suggests that Ukifune’s literal jusui has long been taken for granted not only by the reading public at large, but by academics. How did this happen?

Meiji scholars and readers, caught up in the spirit of enlightenment and progress, and eager to set The Tale of Genji beside the greatest novels of the nineteenth-century West, might easily have rejected the tale’s supernatural elements in favor of rationally modern readings. Patrick Caddeau has suggested that they did so, citing as evidence the headnotes in the first modern, popular edition of Genji: the five-volume Nihon bungaku zensho text published by Hakubunkan in 1890.^[40] The notes at the start of “Kagerō” sound tersely confidant that Ukifune genuinely threw herself in. However, they are based ultimately (via Kogetsushō) on the corresponding Kachō yosei and Sairyūshō glosses, so that their intended meaning is not really obvious. The “Kagerō” and “Tenarai” headnotes in a 1927 edition of Genji say nothing bearing on the question of what happened to Ukifune.^[41]

The source of the confusion therefore remains unclear. Simple convenience may help to explain why articles, chapter titles, and so on still refer to Ukifune no jusui as though it really happened.^[42] However, given the near universality of the misreading, it is striking that some should still have written within the past few years that, “Having thrown herself into the river [jusui shita], bearing her burden of sin, Ukifune is saved by Yokawa no Sōzu”;^[43] that, “Having given herself to two men, [Ukifune] plumbs the depths of suffering and as a result throws herself into the Uji River [Ujigawa ni mi o nagete shimau]”;^[44] and that, caught between two lovers, Kaoru and Niou, Ukifune “soon threw herself into the Uji River [Ujigawa ni mi o tō-ji], was saved, and became a nun.”^[45] Perhaps these writers indeed take intention for achievement, but if they do, their view of the matter little resembles Ukifune’s; for when Ukifune understood her failure, she wept. They also perpetuate an error.

On this subject, current Genji summaries, dictionaries, and manuals are not always helpful. Five representative examples are Genji monogatari no makimaki (1987), Genji monogatari jiten (1993), Genji monogatari o yomu tame no kenkyū jiten (1995), Genji monogatari yōran (1995), and Genji monogatari jiten (2002). Only the 1993 Genji monogatari jiten, edited by Akiyama Ken, clearly recognizes that Ukifune became possessed at all. The article states that she seems to have fainted on the way to the river, that she was possessed by the spirit of a monk, and that “she wandered between dream and reality” until she collapsed behind the Uji Villa.^[46] Unlike such texts as Genji ōkagami, it says nothing about what Ukifune herself remembers happening. A particularly modern touch is the explanation that Ukifune walked to the Uji Villa. Reason demands something similar, but reason in this case is not good enough. At the time, Ukifune’s house was surrounded every night by guards, posted by Kaoru to keep Niou away and severely enjoined by him to be vigilant. They would have noticed her. Moreover, she was found without a mark on her. Her passage to the Uji Villa, like Asukai’s passage from a Kyushu-bound ship to her brother’s care at Kokawa-dera, simply defies reason. Nothing can be done about this.

The first of the other works just mentioned (Genji monogatari no makimaki) treats parallels between Yūgao and Ukifune, and then discusses Ukifune’s state of mind after she recovers.^[47] The second (Genji monogatari o yomu tame no kenkyū jiten) discusses mononoke in Genji without stating that a mononoke possessed Ukifune.^[48] The third (Jōyō Genji monogatari yōran) has Ukifune found “on the bank of the Uji River” (Ujigawaberi de), when she was not.^[49] The fourth (Genji monogatari jiten), the most recent, summarizes Ukifune’s experience without mentioning either spirit possession or her memory of what happened, and a separate article presents “the prototypes of the suicide-by-drowning motif” (jusuitan no genkei) without acknowledging that Ukifune did not commit jusui.^[50]

There are more noteworthy aspects to Ukifune’s story than can be accommodated in a dictionary or manual entry, but considering the prevalence of the error, such works might at least ensure that those who consult them do not make it. Instead, discussions of Ukifune often ignore the subject completely, if possible; or, if they must address it, they may argue in effect that it is irrelevant. Thus Mitani Kuniaki granted the mononoke exorcised by Yokawa no Sōzu no other significance than to reveal the unconscious preoccupations of the Sōzu himself and then of Ukifune when, after the exorcism, she remembers seeing the “beautiful man.”^[51] In a similar mood, Fujimoto Katsuyoshi denied that the man Ukifune remembers seeing has anything to do with the spirit that speaks to Yokawa no Sōzu (claiming once to have been a monk), because Ukifune does not remember ever having been possessed by a monk.^[52] This sort of argument reduces Ukifune’s memories to the fantasies of a young woman suffering a nervous breakdown and the exorcism to a psychotic episode on the part of Yokawa no Sōzu. Meanwhile, Ōasa Yūji presented Ukifune as a steadfast heroine, firm and rational in her resolve to drown herself, whose last-minute fears and hesitations are all quite normal in terms of the “psychology of suicide”; and he presented the spirit as a mere literary device to achieve the author’s aim, which is to save Ukifune by making sure she does not drown.^[53] If the conundrum of Ukifune’s possession amounts to no more than that, then the author could have arranged more simply to have her throw herself into the river and be washed ashore downstream.

Asukai no Himegimi’s experience at Mushiake no Seto is interesting as the earliest surviving post-Genji step toward the anomalous situation just described, unless by any chance Asakura monogatari came first. Like Hamamatsu, this now-lost tale has been attributed to the author of Sarashina nikki. Scholars have reconstructed some notion of it thanks to the many poems from it included in Shūi hyakuban utaawase and Fūyō wakashū. The heroine’s mother is dead, and her father has become a monk and disappeared. Alone in the world, she accepts Sanmi no Chūjō (later, Asakura no Kanpaku) as a lover, but meanwhile she is also courted by Shikibukyō no Miya. Eventually she sets out for Michinoku to find her father, but on the way, at Awazu no Hama, she throws herself into Lake Biwa. Fūyō wakashū 1047 is a poem written by Asakura no Kanpaku on a pilgrimage to Ishiyama “upon hearing that a woman he had loved had thrown herself [into the lake] at Awazu no Hama.” However, the heroine seems actually to have been saved (perhaps by her father). Asakura no Kanpaku takes her in, and she serves the court under the name Kōtaigō no Miya no Dainagon.^[54] Things worked out much better for her (if Asakura really ended on that note) than for Ukifune or Asukai, but otherwise the similarity is obvious.

The Genji author presumably knew the jusui motif well, since it was established in literature and art. The kotobagaki to Yoshinobu shū 389 (Ōnakatomi Yoshinobu, 921–991) describes a painting of a woman looking down from a high bank while a man watches her from below; the poem suggests she is about to drown herself because her lover has stopped coming. Likewise, the kotobagaki to Dōmyō Ajari shū 17 (Dōmyō, 974–1020) evokes a painting in which a woman looks down from a high bank before throwing herself in; the poem has her regretting only the reputation that will survive her. Finally, Yoshinobu shū 389 concerns a scene similar to the one that begins “Kagerō.” The kotobagaki describes a picture illustrating Sumiyoshi monogatari. Jijū (a gentlewoman) stands at the outlet to a pond named Narabi no Ike. She is looking for her mistress, Himegimi, who has thrown herself into the pond. The poem says, “If only she had told me where she went in, I would go in search of her, even if that meant parting the water-weeds myself to do so.”^[55]

However, these poems capture only moments in stories that remain otherwise unknown. As prototypes for the jusui motif, reference works and scholarly studies repeatedly cite two stories from Yamato monogatari. In no. 147, a young woman’s two suitors are so equal in all ways that she cannot decide between them. When a test to set one above the other fails, she drowns herself in despair, and both young men drown while trying to save her.^[56] In no. 150, an uneme (young woman attendant) at the Nara court rejects every suitor and reserves herself for the emperor, who finally summons her. However, he never does so again, and she drowns herself in Sarusawa no Ike.

The similarity between these stories, especially no. 147, and those on the Ukifune “jusui” pattern is self-evident, but it goes only so far. The two Yamato monogatari heroines really throw themselves into the water and genuinely drown, whereas Ukifune, Asukai, and apparently the Asakura heroine do not. In no. 147 the two suitors drown as well, whereas in Genji, Kaoru and Niou live on in good health. Nor does Asukai’s predicament convincingly parallel the dilemma affecting Ukifune and the heroine of Yamato monogatari 147. No doubt two men claim her attention, but she is not caught emotionally between them; she is a kidnap victim. Obvious though all this is, the academic emphasis on prototypes and sources tends to obscure it, and perhaps even to encourage withholding explicit recognition that, in Ukifune-pattern stories, no jusui occurs at all.

While acknowledging a motif from the past, Ukifune’s failure to drown herself thus establishes what amounts to a new monogatari device: the unrealized jusui that serves to move the heroine to a new life situation. The Sagoromo author’s version of it follows that of the Genji author faithfully in the sense that she, too, left her reader unable to picture sensibly how her heroine passed, physically, from her old life to her new one. However, the Sagoromo author removed from this passage the element of the supernatural. (So, apparently, did the author of Asakura.) This change in turn highlights a difference between her tale and Genji. Divine visions, visitations, and oracles certainly figure in Sagoromo, but not possessions or mononoke. The reasons can hardly be the same ones that for most modern scholars cast such a shadow over Ukifune’s possession, but the coincidence is intriguing. Considering that medieval readers seem to have accepted Ukifune’s possession without question, the Sagoromo author’s avoidance of it comments interestingly on an enigmatic Genji issue.

Asukai’s experience dramatically changes her circumstances (as the Asakura heroine’s apparently does hers), but nothing suggests that it changes Asukai herself. The reader never even sees her again. Psychologically, it is flat. Is Ukifune’s? Most writing on her seems to assume that the way she gets from her house to the Uji Villa is immaterial; all that matters is what happens after she gets there. She might just as well have been swept downstream, and nothing is lost if, for the sake of convenience, that notion is allowed to stand. This assumption is debatable. Perhaps the Sagoromo author disagreed with it and, to keep things simple, adjusted her use of the motif accordingly.