B007V65S44 EBOK

by VIKING ADULT

  The warriors guarding him wet the sleeves of their armor with tears.

  Westward to Suzaku they went,

  then turned south. The palace, behind them,

  dwindled slowly into the distance.

  The servants tending the carriage, the groom

  so long familiar—each one of them

  weeping, wringing tears from his sleeves;

  and his wife, then, and his children at home—

  just imagine their misery!

  The Toba Mansion now: As they passed,

  he thought of His Cloistered Eminence

  and the many progresses he had made there,

  always with Narichika beside him.

  There was the Suhama Villa, his own—

  but he could only watch it go by.

  The carriage rolled on, out the south gate.

  “Boatman, you’re late!” impatiently

  the warriors called, while Narichika

  asked only, “Where are you taking me?

  If I am to die, oh, please, let it be

  here where we are now, near the city!”

  That, at least, he felt he could expect.

  “Who are you?” he inquired of a warrior near him.

  “Nanba no Jir Tsunet,” the man replied.

  “Could there be, by chance, anyone of mine close by?

  I have a message to leave him, before I board the boat. Please ask.”

  The man went running about to look but found not a soul

  who would admit to any connection with Narichika.

  “All those men I had, in the good times—

  one or two thousand of them, surely!

  And to think that now not a single one

  has come, even at a safe distance,

  to watch me go! Oh, it is too hard!”

  So thought Narichika, weeping,

  and the sturdy warriors beside him,

  as before, moistened their sleeves.

  In the way of trusty companions,

  he now had only unending tears.

  On his pilgrimages to Kumano

  or to Tennji, he had then sailed

  in double-keeled ships, with triple cabins,

  followed by twenty or thirty more;

  now here he was in this miserable boat—

  one flimsy cabin, closed by a curtain—

  in alien, warrior company,

  leaving the city for the last time

  to venture far, far over the waves.

  Anyone can imagine his grief.

  That day the boat reached Daimotsu,

  a harbor in the province of Settsu.

  Death was the sentence that Narichika almost certainly faced. Only Lord Shigemori’s intercession had successfully reduced it to exile.

  When still a counselor, Narichika had enjoyed title to revenue raised from the province of Mino. In the winter of Ka 1, [1169] Masatomo, the deputy who governed for him, had visitors: shrine servants from the Hirano estate, which belonged to Mount Hiei. They had come to sell their kudzu-fiber cloth. Masatomo, drunk at the time, spilled ink on the cloth. When they protested loudly, he barked at them to shut their mouths and trampled them in contempt. Soon enough several hundred shrine servants burst into his house. Masatomo defended himself as the law allowed and killed a dozen of them.

  On the third day of the eleventh month of that year, the infuriated monks of Mount Hiei therefore formally demanded exile for Narichika, the titular governor, and jail for Masatomo. Ordered accordingly into exile in the province of Bitchū, Narichika was duly escorted along Shichij as far as the western part of the city, but five days later the cloistered emperor, for his own reasons, commanded his return. Despite the Hiei monks’ rumored curses, on the fifth of the first month in the new year Narichika was named concurrently intendant of the Right Gate Watch and chief of the police.

  These appointments came to him over the heads of Lords Sukekata and Kanemasa. Sukekata was an old man. Kanemasa was then riding high, and it galled him, as the heir to his house, to be passed over that way. The truth was that Narichika had received his reward for building the Sanj Palace. On the thirteenth of the fourth month of Ka 3, he was promoted to the senior second rank, this time over the head of the Naka-no-mikado counselor Muneie.

  In Angen 1, [1175] on the twenty-seventh of the tenth month, he rose to supernumerary grand counselor. People laughed. “The monks of the Mountain were supposed to have laid a curse on him!” they said. But that curse may well explain, after all, what happened to him in due course. The punishment of the gods and the curses of men may strike sooner or strike later; there is no knowing when.

  On the third of the sixth month, a messenger from the capital reached the harbor of Daimotsu. A great commotion greeted him. “Have you brought the order to execute me?” Narichika asked. No, the messenger had not. He had come to announce the place of Narichika’s exile: the island of Kojima, off the coast of Bizen.67

  There was also a letter from Lord Shigemori.

  “I did all I could,” Shigemori had written,

  “to have you sent somewhere isolated, near the capital, but my appeal failed.

  I am thoroughly ashamed of myself.

  However, he did at least honor my plea for your life.”

  And, to Tsunet, “See to it that you serve him well. Do not disappoint him.”

  He added detailed instructions on how to prepare for the voyage.

  So Narichika was torn away

  from the sovereign whom he revered,

  from the wife and children he so loved

  that each moment without them hurt.

  “But where, oh, where am I going?”

  he wondered. “Never, never again

  shall I see my dear family.

  A few years ago, the Hiei monks

  had me exiled, but my sovereign,

  in his regret at losing me,

  called me back from west Shichij.

  No, this rebuke is not from him.

  But how can any of this have happened?”

  He looked to the heavens, fell prostrate,

  wept, but nothing brought him solace.

  At dawn the boat sailed, distances lengthened,

  and choking tears never ceased to flow.

  For him life was already over,

  and yet, though a dewdrop, he lingered on.

  The boat’s white wake stretched out astern,

  the city slipped farther and farther away,

  day after day after day went by,

  and at last that far destination

  loomed ahead. They rowed the boat in

  to Kojima Island in Bizen

  and left him in a dismal hovel

  good only for the local peasants.

  Behind it, as on many an island,

  rose a hill; the sea spread before it.

  Wind through the pines on the rocky shore,

  the clamor of waves: All was misery.

  9. The Akoya Pine

  Narichika was not the only one to be banished. Many were:

  Renj to the province of Sado, Motokane to Hki, Masatsuna to Harima,

  Nobufusa to Awa, Sukeyuki to Mimasaka.

  Lord Kiyomori was on his Fukuhara estate at the time.

  On the twentieth he had Settsu no Saemon Morizumi take Norimori this message:

  “I have a plan. Send Naritsune here at once.”

  “It would be one thing if this command had come that very day,” Norimori reflected,

  “but it is too bad of him to stir up new worries now.”

  He let Naritsune know that he was ordered down to Fukuhara.

  Naritsune set off in tears.

  “Oh please, put in another plea for him,” the women begged,

  “even if it is unlikely to do any good.”

  “I have already tried every argument possible,” Norimori replied.

  “There is not a word more I can say, short of actually leaving the world.

  But whatever desolate coast he ends up o
n,

  I will go there and assist him while I still have life and breath.”

  Naritsune had a little son, now in his third year.

  Being young, Naritsune usually showed no great interest in children,

  but this moment of parting must have brought his son vividly to mind.

  “I would gladly see him a last time,” he said. The nurse brought him in.

  Naritsune took him on his lap, stroked his hair, and wept.

  “Ah,” he sighed, “in your seventh year,

  I was going to have you come of age

  and serve His Cloistered Eminence,

  but now all hope of that is gone.

  If you live and in due course grow up,

  become a monk and pray for me,

  pray for me in my lives to come.”

  The little boy was much too young

  to understand what all this meant,

  but he nodded sagely nonetheless,

  and at this his father and mother,

  the women, and all the others present,

  whether or not tender of heart,

  moistened their sleeves with tears.

  The Fukuhara messenger informed Naritsune that he was to lodge at Toba that night. “I should much prefer to spend tonight, just tonight, in the capital,” Naritsune replied. “The delay would hardly matter.” But the messenger made it clear that that was impossible.

  That night Naritsune therefore reached Toba. This time Norimori was so angry that he did not ride in the carriage with him.

  On the twenty-second, Naritsune arrived at Fukuhara. Lord Kiyomori ordered Kaneyasu to escort him into exile in the province of Bitchū. Nervous that talk of the journey might reach Norimori, Kaneyasu treated him with great consideration all the way. However, Naritsune was not to be comforted. He spent day and night calling the Name and sighing for his father.

  There on Kojima Island in Bizen,

  Tsunet, Narichika’s warden, felt that the harbor was too near to be safe;

  so he moved Narichika to the mainland and installed him at Ariki,

  a monastic community at Niwase on the Bizen-Bitchū border.

  From Ariki in Bizen to Seno-o in Bitchū, Naritsune’s location,

  the distance was barely three and a half miles,

  and perhaps Naritsune felt some tenderness in the breeze from that direction,

  for one day he summoned Kaneyasu to ask,

  “How far is it from here to Ariki, where I gather my father is?”

  Kaneyasu apparently hesitated to tell him the truth, for he answered,

  “About twelve or thirteen days, one way.”

  Naritsune wept bitterly.

  “Japan,” he said, “in times gone by,

  had just thirty-three provinces;

  but these were split more recently

  into sixty-six. And what this means

  is that Bizen, Bitchū, and Bingo

  were in those days all one province.

  They say that in the east as well

  both Dewa and Michinoku,

  with all their sixty-six counties,

  constituted a single province—

  one then partitioned, so that twelve

  stood alone as a new one: Dewa.

  That is what confused Captain Sanekata.

  When banished to Michinoku, he roamed the whole province,

  hoping to see the Akoya Pine, one of its famous sights; but he never found it.

  On his way back, he met an old man.

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ he said, ‘but you must have lived here a long time.

  Do you know the Akoya Pine, which is one of the sights of Michinoku?’

  ‘There is no Akoya Pine in Michinoku,’ the old man replied.

  ‘Perhaps there is one in Dewa.’

  ‘So even you do not know where it is!’ Sanekata cried.

  ‘What is the world coming to,

  that everyone here should have forgotten something that is the pride of the province?’

  He was about to pass by, disappointed, when the old man caught his sleeve.

  ‘Dear me, sir, it must be this old poem—

  In Michinoku,

  the mighty Akoya Pine

  so blots out the sky

  that the moon, which should be out,

  never seems to rise at all.

  —this poem that you have in mind.

  The Akoya Pine in Michinoku:

  is that the one you are thinking of?

  That poem was composed, you see,

  when the two provinces were one.

  They split off twelve counties, I believe,

  to make the province now called Dewa.’

  Very well, then: Sanekata

  crossed the border into Dewa,

  and there he saw the Akoya Pine.

  From Dazaifu, down in Kyushu,

  all the way to the capital,

  it officially takes the envoy

  charged with bringing the new-year trout

  fifteen days, so twelve or thirteen

  should bring a man almost to Kyushu!

  Travel between Bizen and Bitchū

  could never take more than two or three.

  You claim that somewhere so near is far

  only in order to keep from me

  knowledge of where my father is!”

  Despite missing his father intensely,

  he never asked that question again.

  10. The Death of Narichika

  Soon Shunkan of Hosshji, Yasuyori, and Naritsune

  were banished to Kikai-ga-shima, off the Satsuma coast.68

  To reach this island, the traveler from the capital must make a long sea journey.

  Ships seldom call there, and the inhabitants are few.

  Of course, there are people on the island, but they are not like us.

  They are dark, oxlike, and very hairy, and they do not understand human speech.

  The men wear no eboshi hat; the women do not let their hair hang loose.

  Going unclothed as they do, they little resemble people.

  Having no food, they think only of slaughtering living beings.

  The peasants till no hillside paddies,

  and so it is that they have no rice;

  since they lack mulberry trees and leaves,

  they have nothing resembling silk.

  A peak at the center of the island

  smolders with everlasting fire,

  and stuff called “sulfur” lies everywhere;

  some even call this “Sulfur Island.”

  Thunder constantly crashes and booms.

  Lower down, it just rains and rains.

  No, not for one miserable moment

  does human life seem possible here.

  Narichika had been looking forward to some peace at last

  when he learned that Naritsune, his son, had been banished to Kikai-ga-shima.

  That was that, then. He lost all hope and resolved to renounce the world,

  as he let Lord Shigemori know in a letter.

  Shigemori in turn informed the cloistered emperor, who gave his approval.

  Narichika became a monk at once.

  Putting off the bright sleeves he had worn in his glory days,

  he clothed himself instead in the black of one who has left the world.

  Narichika’s wife was in hiding

  at Unrin-in, north of the city.

  Life is hard at the best of times

  somewhere wholly new; and for her,

  assailed by a flood of memories,

  each day was a trial, each night misery.

  Once she had had in her service

  many gentlewomen and housemen,

  but some now feared worldly censure,

  and others strove to keep out of sight.

  Not a soul came to call on her.

  Just one houseman, though, a man of exceptional kindness,

  did after all visit regularly. His name was Genzaemon-no-J Nobutoshi.

&
nbsp; One day she asked him to come to her.

  “Is it true?” she inquired. “I had heard that he was at Kojima in Bizen,

  but the news lately mentions instead somewhere named, I believe, Ariki.

  How I wish I could send him one more little note, to ask how he is!”

  Nobutoshi fought back his tears.

  “I have enjoyed his kindness ever since my boyhood,” he said,

  “and I have never been far from him.

  When Lord Narichika went down,

  I told him I would do anything

  to go there with him, but Rokuhara

  said no, and I had to give up.

  I can still hear his voice when he called me to him.

  His words of reproof are graven in my heart. I cannot forget them.

  Never mind what may happen to me.

  I shall take him your letter as fast as I can.”

  The lady was very happy. She wrote the letter at once and gave it to him.

  Each of the children wrote one, too.

  Nobutoshi took them with him all the way to Ariki in Bizen.

  He first announced his arrival to Tsunet, the warden.

  Impressed by Nobutoshi’s devotion, Tsunet admitted him to see his lord.

  Narichika’s only talk was still of the capital, and his spirits were very low. Then word reached him: “Nobutoshi is here from the city.”

  “Am I dreaming?” he wondered, straightening himself in haste. “Have him enter,” he said.

  Nobutoshi came in and forgot at a glance the sadness of this poor dwelling, for the figure before him was in a monk’s black robes. His eyes darkened, and he felt his heart fail.

  He carefully conveyed all that his lord’s wife had said.

  Then he took out the letters. Narichika examined them.

  The wandering traces of the brush

  melted before his blinding tears

  until he could make nothing of them.

  “The children miss you so terribly

  that my grief is unbearable, too.”

  So she had written. And now he knew

  that these past days of longing for her,

  to his sorrow, had been nothing yet.

  So four or five days passed. “I should like to stay on here, to witness his end,” Nobutoshi said to Tsunet, but time and again Tsunet refused. Nobutoshi could do no more.

  “Very well,” Narichika told him, “go home now to the city.” He added, “I will be dead soon. When I am gone, please, make sure that you pray for me.” He wrote his answering letter.