His secret meetings with Oborozukiyo were discovered, and as pressure from the family of the Minister of the Right grew, Genji was stripped of his rank; before he could be exiled, he resolved to leave the capital himself. The place he chose was the shore of Suma, on the border of Settsu and Harima, where Ariwara no Yukihira too had once taken refuge. He parted from Murasaki in tears.
At Suma the autumn wind blew, bringing every kind of sorrow, and though the sea was a little distance off, the waves of the bay that Counselor Yukihira had sung of, "the wind blowing across the barrier," sounded night after night as if right beside him. Nothing in the world sinks more deeply into the heart than autumn in such a place.
Only a few people attended Genji, and they were all asleep. Alone awake, Genji raised his head from his pillow and listened to the fierce wind on every side; it seemed the waves were breaking right there, and before he knew he was weeping, his pillow was nearly afloat in tears. He plucked the koto a little, but it sounded so desolate even to himself that he stopped, and composed:
"The waves of the bay sound like my weeping in my longing: is it because the wind blows from where my thoughts go?" (The waves of the bay sound like my voice crying with longing; is it because the wind is blowing from the capital I long for?)
The others woke, and though they thought it beautiful, they could not hold back, sat up for no reason, and quietly blew their noses.
Looking at the moon of the fifteenth night, he remembered the music at the palace, said, "Tonight is the fifteenth night," and wept, gazing at the sky of the faraway capital. In the third month of the next year, on the day of the spring purification, as he was performing the rite on the shore, the sky suddenly went dark, and a violent storm and thunder fell upon them.