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Once we are enemies of court, it will be far too late for regret.
So I am wondering, while I go about restoring calm,
whether to have His Cloistered Eminence move to the Toba Mansion
or even to move him here, to Nishi-Hachij.
If I do that, his guards may well loose an arrow or two.
I shall have to warn my men about that.
Anyway, no more loyal service to this cloistered emperor!
Saddle me my horse! Bring me full-length armor!”
Morikuni rushed to Lord Shigemori and started to describe the turn that things were taking.
“Oh, no!” Shigemori cried. “Lord Narichika’s head must already be off!”
“No, my lord,” Morikuni answered, “but Lord Kiyomori has on full-length armor, and his men are all ready to bear down on the cloistered emperor’s Hjūji residence. He claims that he means to keep the cloistered emperor confined in the Toba Mansion, but secretly he intends to banish him to Kyushu.”
The idea struck Shigemori as preposterous, but his father, in his mood of that morning, seemed quite capable of such insanity. He raced to Nishi-Hachij as fast as his carriage would go. At the gate he alighted and entered.
There was his father, in long armor,
amid dozens of Taira nobles
dressed in robes of every color
and armor to suit each man’s taste,
in two seated rows, in the gallery
adjacent to the middle gate.
Provincial governors, Guards officers,
and such spilled from the veranda
into the court in serried ranks.
Banner poles clustered in order,
girths tightly cinched on the horses,
helmet cords securely fastened;
they seemed ready to leave that instant.
Shigemori’s court hat and dress,
his expansively patterned trousers
swishing and rustling into view,
made a most unusual sight.
Lord Kiyomori lowered his gaze. “Oh, no, not again!” he must have groaned to himself. “Here he comes, looking so high and mighty, as though he were better than anyone else! How I’d like to give him a piece of my mind!”
But Shigemori, son of his father though he might be, within himself honored the five precepts and valued compassion and, without, honored the five virtues64 and upheld propriety. Presumably for that reason, Kiyomori felt ashamed to speak to him in armor, because he partially closed a sliding door and, behind it, hastily threw over his armor a plain silk cassock. The metal of his breastplate still showed, however. He tugged that part of the garment every which way to hide it.
Lord Shigemori seated himself above Munemori, his younger brother.
Kiyomori said not a word. Shigemori said nothing either.
Eventually Kiyomori found his voice.
“Narichika’s rebellion hardly deserves notice,” he said.
“The cloistered emperor is the one who planned it all.
While I go about quieting things down again,
I am considering moving him, either to the Toba Mansion or, even, here.
What would you have to say to that?”
He had hardly finished speaking when Shigemori burst into tears.
“What is the matter with you?” his exasperated father asked.
Struggling to control himself, Shigemori began:
“What I hear in your words, my lord, is the end of your glory.
A man will always turn to evil when fortune no longer smiles.
Seeing you now in this guise, I scarcely credit my senses.
Yes, this land of ours is remote, a few scattered millet grains,
yet here rule the descendants of the Great Sun Goddess,
for whom Ame-no-koyane’s lineage governs the realm.
Never, since the beginning, can it have been right and proper
for a man risen to chancellor to don the trappings of war.
Is that not so, especially for you who have renounced the world?
That a man should put off the robes favored by all the buddhas,
abruptly don helmet and armor, and take up bow and arrows,
amounts, within, to his brazenly breaking the precepts
and, without, to his violating benevolence, righteousness,
fitting conduct, wisdom, good faith: the five cardinal virtues.
It is not for me, I know, to accuse you of doing either,
but I cannot hold back the deep conviction of my heart.
There are in this world, you see, four great obligations:
to heaven and earth, to sovereign, to father and mother,
to sentient beings. That to the sovereign is greatest:
‘Under heaven there is no land that is not the king’s.’
Even the sage who washed his ears in Ying River water
or the one who harvested bracken on Mount Shouyang
knew, they say, that it was wrong to disobey the king.
Still better should you yourself know it, Father, who have achieved
what none of your forebears ever did: the summit of chancellor.
And I, too—talentless and benighted, as everyone knows—
even I have reached the lofty height of minister of state.
Besides, more than half the counties and provinces in the land belong to our house;
every estate is ours to dispose of as we please.
Do we not owe all this to our sovereign’s exceptional favor?
Were you to ignore such great and repeated kindness
in a lawless attempt to bring His Cloistered Eminence low,
you would also offend the Great Sun Goddess and Hachiman.
Japan is the land of the gods,
and the gods do not accept violence against what is right.
Therefore, what His Cloistered Eminence planned did not lack its half share of justice.
In quelling the enemies of the court and calming the waves on the four seas,
our house has certainly rendered the throne peerless service,
but our pride in the rewards that followed can fairly be called arrogance.
Prince Shtoku wrote in his Seventeen-Article Constitution:65
‘Every man has his mind and his predilections.
I may judge another right and myself wrong,
I may judge myself right and another wrong,
but who can truly define where right and wrong lie?
Each is the other’s wisdom or folly.
They go round and round in an endless circle.
Should a man wax wroth against you,
look therefore to your own failings.’
Your great good fortune is not yet over, however, for the plot stands revealed.
Moreover, you have in custody Narichika, one of the conspirators.
Whatever eccentricities His Cloistered Eminence may ponder, you have nothing to fear.
Administer punishment to fit the crime, then modestly report what you have done.
With ever-increasing diligence,
render your sovereign loyal service
and grow in compassion for the people:
Then you will have the gods’ protection
and never offend the Buddha’s will.
Once the gods and buddhas are with you,
the sovereign, too, will see the light.
Sovereign and subject, now at one,
will acknowledge no distance between them.
With justice and error ranged side by side,
how could one not cleave to justice?”
7. The Signal Fires
“To that extent His Cloistered Eminence has right on his side,” Shigemori went on,
“and I must protect his Hjūji residence even at the risk of failure.
After all, I owe him everything, from my entry onto the ladder of rank
to my appointment as palace minister.
That obligation weighs more heavily than a thousand or ten thousand
jewels;
it is deeper in hue than any scarlet dipped once or even twice in the dye.
That is why I should go to his residence to mount patient guard.
A modest number of warriors have given me their word
that they are prepared to die for me should the need arise.
Were I to summon them, however, and guard the residence with them,
dire consequences might easily follow.
Alas! Should I, for my sovereign’s sake,
bend every effort to loyal service,
I would in that same instant forget
the gratitude I owe my father:
gratitude higher than Mount Sumeru.
O sorrow! Should I exert myself
to escape being unfilial,
at that moment I would become
a treacherous, disloyal subject.
I can move neither forward nor back;
right and wrong confound my judgment.
So I have only one request, and it is this: Please, cut off my head.
I cannot possibly go to guard His Cloistered Eminence’s residence,
nor can I accompany you, my father, when you go there yourself.
Of old, Xiao He accrued greater merit than any other
and therefore rose to the highest office in the land,
with permission to enter the palace wearing shoes, with a sword at his side,
but then he incurred the emperor’s displeasure.
Gaozu reproved him severely and imposed harsh punishment on him.
Such examples as his suggest that a man
may reach the pinnacle of wealth, glory, favor, and lofty office
yet still, when he has risen as high as he possibly can,
discover that the greatest good fortune may after all come to an end.
‘Where wealth resides, there prosper privilege and rank;
the tree that fruits twice a year suffers at its root.’66
So I have read. I wish it were not so.
How long am I to go on living amid these endless troubles?
With what dismal karma must I have been born in this latter age,
that these miseries should now face me?
Order one of your men, then, this instant,
to drag me down into the court and there behead me!
There is nothing to it!
Hear me, all of you! That is my wish!”
Weeping such tears as to drench his sleeves,
Shigemori spoke passionately,
and every man of the Taira house,
possessed or not of fine sympathies,
from his own sleeves wrung many a tear.
The chancellor himself, Lord Kiyomori, found himself undone by this speech from a palace minister, his son, whose judgment meant so much to him. “No, no,” he protested, “I would never go that far! I am only concerned that the cloistered emperor might, on evil advice, attempt something unfortunate.”
Shigemori replied, “But even if he did, by what right would you take any measure against him?” He rose, went out to the middle gate, and from there addressed the men. “You heard me just now, did you not?” he said. “My idea this morning was to stay here precisely in order to maintain calm, but the hue and cry was so great that I returned home. If you do accompany Lord Kiyomori to the cloistered emperor’s residence, make sure that you see my head fall first. You who came with me, it is time to leave.” With these words he returned to his residence.
There he summoned Morikuni.
“I have just received word of a disaster that threatens the realm,” he said.
“Tell every man loyal to me to race here, fully armed.” Morikuni did so.
“Cool and collected as he always is,” the men reflected,
“he must have good reason to issue this call.”
All armed themselves and galloped there at top speed.
Warriors gathered, hordes of them,
from Yodo, from Hazukashi,
from Uji, Okaya, Hino, Kanjuji,
from Daigo, Ogurusu, Umezu,
from Katsura, hara, Shizuhara,
and from the village of Sery.
Some, in armor, wore no helmet;
others, with their quiver of arrows,
turned out not to have brought a bow.
One foot or none in the stirrups,
they assembled in frantic haste.
“Lord Shigemori has raised an alarm”:
So the rumor ran through them all.
At Shigemori’s call, warriors rush to his residence (upper right).
The several thousand warriors
stationed at Nishi-Hachij,
without a word to Kiyomori,
rushed to Shigemori’s residence
in one babbling mass of men.
There remained behind not a single man even slightly practiced at arms.
Kiyomori, dumbfounded, summoned Sadayoshi.
“What can Lord Shigemori be up to,” he wondered aloud,
“calling all these men together this way?
Does he mean to send a force against me, as he spoke right here of doing?”
Sadayoshi shed bitter tears. “Every man is what he is,” he said.
“Lord Shigemori would never do that.
He surely regrets everything that he said.”
Kiyomori must have hesitated to quarrel with his son, for then and there he gave up the idea of going after the cloistered emperor. He removed his armor, donned a monk’s stole over his cassock, and—a rare thing indeed for him—sat there fingering his beads and calling the Name.
At Shigemori’s residence Morikuni, by his lord’s order, registered every arrival. He took down the names of more than ten thousand warriors who had rushed to answer the call.
Shigemori looked the list over, then went out to his middle gate and from there addressed them. “It is a wonderful thing,” he said, “that you should have been true to your promise and come.
Allow me to cite you such an example from the Other Realm.
King You of Zhou had a favorite, named Baosi, whom he loved best of all.
She was the greatest beauty in the land.
One thing about her displeased him, though:
She was so solemn that she never smiled.
Now, it was the practice in that realm, whenever war threatened,
to light fires hither and yon, to beat drums, and so to muster the troops.
These fires were called ‘signal fires.’
Once, when an armed rebellion broke out, they indeed lit them.
At the sight the king’s favorite exclaimed,
‘Why, look at all those fires!’ And, for the first time, she smiled.
That single smile sparked a hundred charms.
The king was so pleased that he had signal fires lit often,
even in the absence of any threat.
The local lords assembled their men
but found no enemy to fight.
Lacking an enemy, they left.
The same happened time and again,
until nobody came at all.
Then, in the neighboring state, an evil horde arose
and attacked the capital of King You.
The signal fires were lit, of course,
but—so everybody assumed—
only to amuse the favorite.
Not a single warrior came.
The capital fell, and King You died.
And then that favorite, Baosi,
turned into a fox, scampered off,
and vanished. A frightening tale!
When in the future I have reason
to call all of you together again,
please assemble as you have done.
A disturbing report did reach me,
but when I looked into the matter,
the report turned out to be wrong.
Go now, go home immediately.”
So it was that he dismissed them.
In point of fact, no such report had ever reached
him.
In the spirit of his remonstrance to his father,
it was instead an invention designed to reveal
whether or not the men would follow him, and how many,
and, while he had no real intention of fighting his father,
to dissuade his father from pursuing rebellion against the throne.
“That a lord is no true lord
excuses no subject from being a subject;
a father’s being no true father
excuses no son from being a son.
To your lord be loyal, to your father filial.”
So Confucius wrote; so Shigemori was.
His Cloistered Eminence heard the news.
“I knew this well enough already,”
he said, “but before Shigemori,
the man, one can only feel awe.
He has met anger with kindness.”
The people, too, were impressed, saying,
“No doubt it was fortunate karma
that raised him to minister and commander,
but it is hard to believe that a man
could so excel in conduct and bearing
and, even in wisdom and learning,
tower so over all other men!”
“When a state has a minister
able to remonstrate with the ruler,
that state is settled and secure;
when a household has a son
willing to remonstrate with his father,
that household is properly ordered.”
So it is said. Not in ancient times
or in these latter days of ours
has there ever been any like him.
8. The Exile of Narichika
On the second day of that same sixth month,
they led the grand counselor Narichika to the senior nobles’ hall,
where he was offered a farewell meal,
but despair choked him, and he could not even manage his chopsticks.
They brought the carriage forward and urged him quickly to board it.
He did so with a sinking heart.
Front and rear, left and right, warriors rode all around him.
Not one of his own people was with him.
“I would gladly bid farewell to Lord Shigemori,” he said.
But no, they would not allow it.
He complained from within the carriage, “It is unheard of,
even for a man banished for a grave crime, to be denied a single companion.”