by VIKING ADULT
There were no villages, no hamlets.
People there were, yes, but to him
their speech made no sense at all.
He wondered whether one of them might know the fate of his master.
“Pardon me,” he said. The answer came, “Whaddaya want?”
“The superintendent of Hosshji was exiled here from the capital.
Do you know what has become of him?”
But “Hosshji” and “superintendent” clearly meant nothing to the man,
who shook his head. “Nope,” he said.
Another one, though, did a little better. “Yes,” he replied,
“there were three of those people here. Two were called back to the capital,
and off they went. That left the third—he just wanders around.
I have no idea where he is.”
Perhaps he is in the mountains, then,
the anxious Ari surmised.
Far into their depths he made his way,
scaling peaks, descending ravines,
but white clouds obscured every sign,
and where the path led was never clear.
Not even dreams showed his master’s form:
Wind gusting through the trees shattered them.
Failing to find him in the mountains,
Ari went down to search by the sea.
Gulls printing bird tracks in the sand,
plovers clustering on offshore bars—
no other living thing met his gaze.
Then one morning, from the stony beach,
a figure came lurching into view,
gaunt and as thin as a dragonfly.
He might perhaps have once been a monk,
but the hair grew skyward from his head,
tangled with myriad scraps of seaweed,
as though he wore a wreath of thorns.
Bony joints stuck out, skin hung loose,
and the clothes—there was no way to tell
whether they were silk or common cloth.
In one hand he held a strip of kelp;
from the other hand dangled a fish.
Visibly his will was to walk,
but actually he only staggered.
In the capital, Ari thought,
I have seen beggars by the score,
but never one in the least like this!
“The ashuras dwell beside the ocean,”
the Buddha says. Indeed, the three,
the four evil realms that they inhabit
lie high in the mountain wilderness
and along the margin of the sea.
Could it then be, this place I have reached,
the realm haunted by Hungry Ghosts?
Perhaps this creature knows what has become of my master.
“Beg your pardon,” Ari said, and got the reply, “What do you want?”
“Have you any idea what became of someone in exile here from the capital—
a man known as the superintendent of Hosshji?”
Ari did not know his master, but how could his master not have known him?
“I am he,” Shunkan answered, dropped his burden, collapsed on the sand.
Now Ari knew his master’s fate!
Shunkan had fainted. Ari rested his master’s head on his lap. “I am here,” he said. “Oh, how can you do this to me, after all I went through for so long at sea? How can you make me feel as though I have come all this way for nothing?” He was weeping.
Soon Shunkan recovered his senses somewhat, and Ari helped him to his feet. “I can hardly believe,” Shunkan said, “that you cared enough to come all the way here to find me.
Day and night my every thought goes to the capital,
and the faces of those I love
appear to me sometimes in dreams, sometimes in waking vision.
Now I am so terribly weak and wasted
I can no longer tell what is a dream and what is real.
So, you see, to me your coming
can be nothing but a dream.
But if it is, then what will I do
once I am awake again?”
“I am real,” answered Ari.
“That I find you still alive,
in this terrible condition,
strikes me as a miracle.”
“Yes, and me, too. Just imagine
how I felt when those two others,
last year, left me alone and helpless.
I would have chosen drowning,
were it not that Naritsune
did what he could to console me,
telling me that I should await
more news from the capital.
So I decided to stay alive, foolishly believing that that news might really come.
But there is nothing to eat on this island. While I was strong enough,
I went into the mountains to collect this stuff they call sulfur,
which I traded for food with merchants from Kyushu,
but I grew weaker daily, and now I have given that up.
So it is that in fine weather
I make my way out to the shore,
where they fish with nets and lines,
there to beg on bended knee
for whatever fish they give me.
At low tide I gather shellfish,
collect kelp, or, from the rocks,
seaweed that keeps me alive
one dewdrop moment longer:
That is how I have survived.
What other choice did I have?
I would like to tell you everything, right here—but no, first come to my house.”
“Even now,” thought Ari, “looking that way, he still has a house? I cannot believe it!”
They went on until they came to a grove of pines. Within it stood a hut.
Shunkan had built it from bamboo pillars and beams of bundled reeds
and had covered it thickly, above and below, with pine needles.
It could not possibly keep out either wind or rain.
Once the superintendent of Hosshji had controlled more than eighty estates
and had lived within his gates amid servants, family, and retainers
a full four or five hundred strong.
He now made a strange sight, so disastrously reduced.
There are several kinds of karma:
One has consequences in this life,
one in the next, and one thereafter.
Everything that Shunkan had turned
in his life to personal use
had been the Buddha’s property
or else that of his own great temple.
His habit of appropriating
offerings made with true devotion
seems therefore to have provoked,
in this very life, disaster.
9. The Death of Shunkan
Shunkan now grasped that Ari was real. “When they came last year for Naritsune and Yasuyori,” he said, “even then there was no letter from anyone of mine, and you have brought none either. Did you not tell them you were coming?”
Sobbing, Ari collapsed on the ground and for a time remained silent. Then he rose again and, fighting back tears, began: “After you left for Nishi-Hachij, officers came and arrested the whole household. They questioned them about the rebellion and then put them all to death. Your wife, who was desperate somehow to hide the children, moved them to a remote spot on Mount Kurama. I am the only one who went there sometimes to help them. They were all in a state of despair, but your son, who missed you terribly, used to beg me whenever I went there to take him to Kikai-ga-shima. But then, this second month past, he caught smallpox and died. This, after everything else, was too much for his mother, who fell into a decline and weakened daily, until on the second of the third month she passed away.
Now only your daughter is left; she lives with her aunt in Nara.
And here is a letter from her.” He took out the letter and gave it to Shunkan.
Shunkan unfolded and read it. It said exactly
what he had just heard from Ari.
“Why is it,” his daughter had written,
“that the two others have been recalled
but you have not come up here yet?
It is so hard, being a girl!
If I were a boy, nothing at all
could stop me from going to find you
on the island where you are now.
Please, please come straight back up to the capital with Ari.”
Her father pressed the letter to his face and for a moment said nothing.
“Look at that, Ari!” he then cried. “Look what foolishness she has written!
She wants me to go back up with you! I cannot bear it!
Would I have spent three years here if I were my own master?
This is her twelfth year, I believe.
How, if she must be this silly,
can she possibly get married,
go out into decent service,
or look after herself in life?”
His tears revealed all too plainly
how, even if not in darkness,
a father’s heart may yet wander,
lost, on the path of parental love.
“During banishment on this island,
for lack of any calendar
I have lost track of months and days.
I merely see the flowers open
or the leaves fall and thereby know
the season to be spring or autumn.
When cicada voices bid farewell
to the last of the barley harvest,
then I know that summer has come;
and winter I judge by falling snow.
By keeping an eye on the moon
waxing fifteen nights, waning the same,
I follow the month’s thirty days;
by crooking my fingers to keep count,
I know that this is his sixth year—
the little boy who, I now learn,
has already gone on before me.
When I started for Nishi-Hachij, he desperately wanted to come with me, and I put him off by promising that I would be back soon. The memory is so clear it could be yesterday. How could I not have stayed to watch him longer, if only I had known that I would never see him again? The tie from parent to child or child to parent, the bond between husband and wife—no, these are not for one life only. But if so, why did no dream or vision ever tell me that they were gone? I resolved to stay alive by any means, whatever others might think of me, only because I longed to see my family again. I feel for my daughter, but she is alive, after all, and she will survive the hardships that come her way. For me to go on living now, at the cost of much trouble to you, would only be selfish.” He stopped taking even the rare food that came his way, devoted himself to calling the Name, and prayed for right thoughts at the last. On the twenty-third day after Ari’s coming, he passed away in his hut. This was his thirty-seventh year.
Ari clung to the lifeless remains, rolled his eyes to the heavens,
writhed on the ground, wept and mourned, but nothing changed.
And after he had wept his fill,
“I should really accompany you into the next life,” he said,
“but in this one only your daughter survives, no one else, to pray for you.
So I will live on a while in this one, to offer prayers for you in the next.”
Without ever touching his master,
he broke up the hut and laid its parts
over the body, added pine boughs
and that thick blanket of pine needles,
and of the pyre made salt-fire smoke.
When at last the cremation was done,
he gathered the white bones together,
hung them in a pouch around his neck,
and boarded a merchant vessel
that took him at last to Kyushu.
Ari went on from there to visit Shunkan’s daughter,
to whom he related in full all he had seen.
“I fear that your letter only made him feel worse,” he explained.
“Having no paper or inkstone, he could not write you an answer.
The despair he felt lasted until he died.
No, never again, not through aeons of future births and lives,
will you hear your father’s voice or see his form.”
The girl, in her twelfth year, very soon
became a nun and gave herself up
to devout practice at Hokkeji109
in Nara, where her every prayer
went to securing happiness
for her parents in their next life.
Ari hung around his neck
his master’s bones, climbed Mount Kya,
and laid them in the Oku-no-in.
Then he repaired to Rengedani,
became a monk there, and set out
on holy pilgrimage through the land,
praying likewise for his master.
Having heaped such grief on so many,
the Heike faced a frightening end.
10. The Whirlwind
It was the fifth month of that year, on the twelfth, at midday, [1179]
when a great whirlwind swept through the city.
Many houses collapsed.
It started where Naka-no-mikado and Kygoku cross,
thence to travel southwestward,
demolishing gates great and small,
sending them flying four or five hundred yards and more,
filling the air with rafters, sill beams, pillars, and other debris.
Roofing bark and shingles raced through the air
like leaves in a winter gale, and the deafening roar
matched the roar of the winds of karma in hell.
Not only buildings were lost, but many lives, too.
Oxen and horses died in vast numbers.
No, this was no common event. It called for divination
performed by the Bureau of Shrines:
“Within the next hundred days,
a richly rewarded minister
will need to exercise caution.
Further, perils will threaten the realm.
The Buddha’s and the Sovereign’s Ways
will both lapse into decline,
and armed clashes will follow.”
So divined the Bureau of Shrines,
and likewise the Yin-Yang Office.
11. To Consult or Not the Chinese Physician
Lord Shigemori must have felt profoundly downcast when he learned what had happened,
for he went in those days on pilgrimage to Kumano.
Before the Shjden of the main shrine,
he spent the night addressing the divine presence in these terms:
“I observe that my father, the novice and chief minister,
conducts himself evilly and unjustly, persecuting at times the sovereign himself.
As his eldest son, I remonstrate with him often, but I lack the wit to change his ways.
Such is his behavior that I fear even for his own glory,
and I cannot imagine his successors adding luster to either his name or theirs.
Unworthy as I am, these, then, are my thoughts:
Should I, like any mediocrity, merely follow the prevailing tide,
I would stray from the ways proper to a good official and a filial son.
Far better, then, to forsake thoughts of greatness, to withdraw,
abandoning glory for this life, and instead to seek enlightenment.
Being a man as weak and benighted as any other, and as confused about right and wrong,
I have never done what I truly aspire to do.
Hail, O Mighty Divinity!
Hail, O Guardian Kong Dji!
If the descendants of our house
are long to enjoy prosperity,
mingling with the great at court
and serving His Majesty,
cause my father to restrain
the evil leanings of his heart!
Assure the realm en
during peace!
But if our glory cannot outlast him
and shame awaits those who follow,
O then put an end to my life,
and save me from pain in lives to come!
Between these, my two entreaties,
grant me, I beg you, divine aid!”
So he prayed in bitter earnest,
and what seemed a lantern flame
then flew from his body and went out.
Many saw it, but fear silenced them.
On his way back, his party was crossing the Iwada River
when Lieutenant Koremori, his firstborn, in the company of his other sons,
all of them wearing pale gray-violet under pilgrim white,
began sporting merrily in the water, for it was summer,
and through the white, once wet, the color showed precisely as mourning gray.
Sadayoshi, the governor of Chikugo, noticed.
“You know,” he remarked, “your pilgrim garb now looks extremely ill-omened.
Perhaps you should consider changing it”; whereupon Lord Shigemori:
“My prayer is answered. No, you are not to change your clothes.”
From the Iwada River, he sent a special offering of thanks to Kumano.
This puzzled the people with him.
They failed to understand his meaning.
Strangely enough, however, Lord Shigemori’s sons would soon be wearing true mourning. Only a few days after his return to the capital, he fell ill. He commissioned no healing rites, being certain that the god of Kumano had accepted his prayer.
A great physician from Song China was then visiting Japan. Lord Kiyomori, who happened to be at his Fukuhara villa, sent Moritoshi, the governor of Etchū, to Shigemori with this message: “I gather that you are ill and getting worse. By chance a first-class physician from Song is present among us. That is great good luck. I want you to summon him and have him treat you.”
Shigemori listened. Then, with help, he sat up and called Moritoshi before him.
“Tell my father,” he said, “that I have respectfully heeded his words
regarding medical intervention. Now I ask you to hear mine.
Wise sovereign though he surely was,
he who reigned in the Engi years [Daigo, r. 897–930]
admitted to our imperial city
a physiognomist from overseas;
ever since, this has been considered
a lapse of judgment on his part