by VIKING ADULT
which Lieutenant Takafusa accepted.
And then the mirror: Dame Shnagon, first called on to bear it,
heard that if this night she so much as touched it or the jewel,
she would never in all her life serve the new emperor as a dame of the palace,
and she therefore refused to do so.
She was no longer young, and people remarked with disdain
that she could hardly expect a second spell of imperial favor.
Dame Bitchū, however, in the youth of her sixteenth year,
came to the rescue and volunteered. It was a fine gesture.
One by one, officials took charge of each imperial treasure
and conveyed it to the new emperor’s Goj residence.
At Emperor Takakura’s Kan’in Mansion, the lamps burned low,
the crier of the hours fell silent, and no guards declared themselves on duty.
Those long close to him, desolate, wept with sorrow amid the rejoicing.
The left minister appeared in the senior nobles’ council chamber
to announce the abdication, and men of heart shed tears that wet their sleeves.
(song)
The mere prospect of years to come
spent in quiet retirement,
for an emperor who, on his own,
cedes the throne to his heir apparent,
surely stirs melancholy thoughts.
Then imagine his growing despair
when in truth he has been deposed!
No words can convey such feelings.
The new emperor was in his third year.
“Dear me, this abdication came awfully early,” people muttered at the time.
The Taira grand counselor Tokitada was the husband of Sotsu-no-suke, His Majesty’s nurse.
“How,” he demanded to know, “could anyone call this abdication premature?
In the Other Realm, King Cheng of Zhou
acceded in his third year; Emperor Mu
of the land of Jin in his second.
In our own, Emperor Konoe
did so in his third and Rokuj
in his second year. In baby clothes
it was, not in ceremonial dress,
that each presided over the court,
borne on the regent’s back when enthroned,
in council cradled in his mother’s arms.
So we learn from records of the past.
Emperor Xiao Shang of Later Han
acceded on only his one-hundredth day.
Such enthronement precedents as these
appear in both China and Japan.”
Those well versed in established ways
whispered nonetheless among themselves,
“It’s frightening! Keep your lips sealed!
So he really thinks those examples valid?”
Thanks to the heir apparent’s accession, Lord Kiyomori and his wife
became an emperor’s maternal grandfather and grandmother.
Accordingly they received a decree raising their rank to match that of an empress,
income from diverse annual appointments, and service from those on duty at the palace.
Housemen in robes bearing painted scenes or embroidered with flowers
frequented their home as they might have a retired emperor’s residence.
Even after renouncing the world as a novice monk,
Lord Kiyomori seemed to enjoy unending glory.
Only one decree had in the past granted empress rank to such a figure:
that accorded long ago to the Hoko-in novice Lord Kaneie.
It transpired early in the third month of the year
that the new retired emperor planned a progress to the Itsukushima Shrine in Aki.
A recently retired sovereign might certainly make a first pilgrimage
to Yawata, for example, or to Kamo or Kasuga—but a progress all the way to Aki?
People hardly knew what to make of it. Someone remarked,
“Retired Emperor Shirakawa
made his progress to Kumano,
Go-Shirakawa to the Hiyoshi Shrine.
Plainly the choice is up to him.
He has a solemn vow in mind.
And Itsukushima, you know,
receives intense Heike devotion.
On the surface he is with them,
but underneath he means to pray,
so I gather, that the deity
soothe Kiyomori’s rebel spirit,
which keeps His Cloistered Eminence
shut up in the Toba Mansion,
as it seems, forever and a day.”
The monks of Mount Hiei waxed wroth.
“If he’s not going to Iwashimizu, or to Kamo or Kasuga either,
he should make his progress to Sann, on our own Mountain.
What custom, pray tell, sanctions a pilgrimage to Aki?
Very well then, down we go with our shrine palanquins,
to put a stop to this progress of his!”
Such was their decision.
(speech)
The progress was therefore postponed. Lord Kiyomori eventually persuaded the monks to calm down. On the eighteenth, before setting out for Itsukushima, Retired Emperor Takakura called at Kiyomori’s Nishi-Hachij residence to say good-bye. Toward evening on that day, he summoned Lord Munemori. “On my way out of the city tomorrow, I should like to stop at the Toba Mansion and call on His Cloistered Eminence. Would that be possible, do you think? It might be best not to do so without informing Lord Kiyomori.”
His words drew tears from Lord Munemori, who replied, “How could he possibly object?”
“Very well then, Munemori,” His Eminence answered, “please inform the Toba Mansion tonight.” Lord Munemori hurried there with the news. The cloistered emperor had so longed to hear it that he said, “I must be dreaming.”
On the nineteenth, well before dawn, Takasue, the miya grand counselor,
went to rouse Takakura for his journey.
So it was that this long-anticipated progress began from Nishi-Hachij.
With the third month more than half over,
a misty moon yet hung, pale, in the dawn sky.
Geese, homeward bound for northern lands,
passed high aloft among the clouds,
their cries touching him with melancholy.
The night was still dark when he set out
on his journey to the Toba Mansion.
At the gate he stepped down from his carriage,
entered, and found nobody about.
Shadows gathered under the great trees.
“Ah, what a sad, sad place to live!”—
the words sprang unbidden to his mind.
These days were the very last of spring,
and summer had come to the tall groves.
Blossoms on the bough were fading fast,
and time had cracked the warbler’s song.
On the sixth of the first month last year,
at his father’s Hjūji residence
when he arrived for his new-year greeting,
music had rung out in brilliant welcome;
all the lords had stood in reverent line,
every corps of guards in serried ranks.
The senior nobles who administered
His Cloistered Eminence’s household
came forward when his carriage drew up
and threw open the curtained gate,
while household staff spread his path with mats,
and no detail of protocol was missed.
Now he felt that he must be dreaming.
Shigenori announced his arrival,
and the cloistered emperor, to await him,
moved to the inner room behind the steps.
This year was Takakura’s twentieth,
and with dawn moonlight full upon him
he looked very beautiful indeed.
He so resembled his late mother, Kenshunmon-in,
that memories of her overwhelme
d the cloistered sovereign, and he wept.
Seats had been prepared nearby for both retired emperors,
and no one heard a word of what they said to each other;
the only other person with them was the nun. They talked for a good while,
and the sun was high in the sky when the visitor took his leave.
He went on to the harbor of Kusazu, in Toba, where he boarded his boat.
Retired Emperor Takakura
looked his last with a heavy heart
on the decrepit old residence,
now his father’s desolate home,
while His Cloistered Eminence
pictured in mind his son at sea,
aboard a ship tossed by the waves,
and felt profound anxiety.
In truth, now that the pilgrim
had set aside his ancestral shrine,
the great Ise sanctuary,
as well as Yawata and Kamo,
to journey all the way to Aki,
how could the divine presence there
fail to respond to his petition?
It seemed impossible to doubt
the fulfillment of all his prayers.
2. The Return
That same month, on the twenty-sixth, Takakura reached Itsukushima,
where he lodged with Lord Kiyomori’s beloved shrine maiden.
During his two-day stay, he dedicated sacred texts and commissioned bugaku dances.
The officiant, they say, was Kken, the great prelate of Miidera,
who mounted the high seat, rang the bell, and in a great voice addressed the sacred presence,
extolling His Eminence’s magnificently humble devotion
in quitting the ninefold glories of his palace to brave the eightfold tide roads of the sea,
at which sovereign and subject alike shed tears of deep emotion.
His pilgrimage took him first of all
to the main shrine, then to Marto125
as well as the many others on his way.
Five hundred yards or so from the main shrine,
on the other side of the mountain,
he reached the Shrine of the Cascade.
Kken composed a poem there,
which he fixed to a pillar of the hall:
From celestial heights
streams in supple strands of white,
the noble cascade
pouring down before my eyes,
yielding me unending joy.
The chief priest, Saiki Kagehiro, was promoted to upper fifth rank, junior grade,
while the provincial governor, Fujiwara no Aritsuna, rose to lower fourth, junior,
with authorization to frequent the retired emperor’s privy chamber.
Son’ei, the abbot of the temple linked to the shrine, likewise gained a higher title.
The divinity was clearly pleased, and no doubt Lord Kiyomori, too.
On the twenty-ninth, the retired emperor boarded his waiting ship and set out for home,
but the wind was too strong. The ship had to row back
and put in once more to the Itsukushima harbor of Ari-no-ura.
His Eminence said, “The deity does not wish us to leave. Present a poem.”
Lieutenant Takafusa therefore:
Nor is our own wish
to go away: We would stay on
at Ari-no-ura,
to receive from the white waves
the blessings of the divine.
In the middle of the night, the sea calmed and the wind dropped. The ship rowed out again, and that same day the retired emperor reached the harbor of Shikina in the province of Bingo. In the h years, [1161–63] his father, too, had made a progress here, and the governor, Fujiwara no Tamenari, had built him a residence. Lord Kiyomori had had it refurbished to accommodate the imperial pilgrim, but the retired emperor dispensed with its comforts.
“Why, it’s the first of the fourth month,” his people were saying, “the day of the costume change!” They were roaming about here and there, their thoughts on the capital, when their sovereign lord spied wisteria near the shore, blooming in intense color and twined around a pine.
He summoned the grand counselor Takasue. “Send a man to fetch me some of those flowers,” he said.
Takasue called over the clerk Nakahara no Yasusada, who happened to be rowing past in a small boat, and sent him for them. Yasusada picked some and delivered them with the stem still wound round a pine branch. His Eminence expressed pleasure in Yasusada’s wit. He was impressed.
“They should have a poem with them,” he continued, whereupon Takasue:
Eager to embrace
a sovereign lord sure to live
a thousand long years,
these billowing blossoms cling
to the branches of a pine.
Then many of the company gathered around him.
Amid the friendly banter, His Eminence remarked with a smile,
“That shrine maiden in white seems to have fallen for Lord Kunitsuna.”
Kunitsuna was vigorously disputing this
when a messenger girl turned up with a letter for him.
Sure enough! They gleefully nodded to one another.
Kunitsuna accepted the letter and read:
White the fading wake,
the robe white, and wringing wet
these sleeves with my tears:
All because of you, my lord,
I have lost the heart to dance.
“I like that one. You’ll have to answer her,” His Eminence said,
giving Kunitsuna his inkstone. The grand counselor replied,
Just imagine, then,
with visions of you rising
from the ocean waves,
how each oncoming billow
drenches my sleeves with salt drops.
Yasusada presents the wisteria.
From there the retired emperor
arrived in the province of Bizen,
at the harbor of Kojima.
On the fifth the weather was fine,
the breeze mild, the sea so calm
that the imperial ship set forth
with those of his gentlemen,
cleaving the cloudy, vaporous waves
to reach that day, at the hour of the cock, [ca. 6 P.M.]
the Yamata coast in Harima.
Thereafter he boarded a palanquin
and went on to Fukuhara.
On the sixth, with his whole entourage desperate to hurry on to the city,
he nonetheless lingered to see every sight of Fukuhara.
He even viewed Lord Yorimori’s country villa at Arata.
On the seventh, upon his departure from Fukuhara,
the grand counselor Takasue conferred by his order
promotions on two of Lord Kiyomori’s family members:
his adopted son Kiyokuni, the governor of Tanba, to senior fifth rank, lower,
and his grandson the lieutenant Sukemori, governor of Echizen, to junior fourth, upper.
That day Takakura reached Terai, and on the eighth he entered the capital.
Senior nobles and privy gentlemen came to welcome him at Kusazu in Toba.
When at last he was back again,
he did not call at the Toba Mansion
but rather at Nishi-Hachij,
and there he saw Lord Kiyomori.
In the fourth month, on the twenty-second day,
the new emperor formally assumed the dignity of his office.
The ceremony should properly have been held in the Great Hall of State,
but that had burned down a year earlier and had not yet been rebuilt.
The decision was to hold it in the hall of the Council of State,
but Lord Kuj Kanezane objected. “That location,” he said,
“corresponds to a common nobleman’s household office.
Without a Great Hall of State, the correct venue for the accession is the Shishinden.”
In the Shishinden, therefore, it was
done.
“Back in Kh 4,” people complained, “on the first day of the eleventh month, [967]
Emperor Reizei’s accession occurred in the Shishinden
because an indisposition prevented him from repairing to the Great Hall of State.
This precedent is dubious at best.
A far better one is that of Emperor Go-Sanj, in the Enkyū era: [1069–74]
It sanctions accession in the quarters of the Council of State.”
Lord Kanezane had spoken, however, and his word was final.
From the Kkiden the empress
had moved to the Ninjuden.
As she approached the tiered dais,126
she made a lovely sight indeed.
The gentlemen of the Taira house
were all in attendance on that day,
except for the sons of Shigemori,
deceased just the year before.
Mourning confined each to his home.
3. The Roster of Genji
The chamberlain Sadanaga recorded on ten sheets of sturdy paper
the flawless and felicitous accomplishment of the accession rite
and presented them to Lady Nii, the wife of Lord Kiyomori. She smiled with pleasure.
The world was still restless, however, despite this happy brilliance.
Prince Mochihito, the cloistered emperor’s second son
and a maternal grandson of the grand counselor Suenari,
lived then near the Takakura-Sanj crossing; people called him the Takakura Prince.
Back in Eiman 1, on the sixteenth of the twelfth month, [1165]
he had secretly come of age at the Kawara residence of Emperor Konoe’s empress.
He was then in his fifteenth year.
So beautifully did he write and such scholarly talent did he display
that by rights he should have assumed the throne,
but the late Kenshunmon-in’s jealousy kept him confined at home.
At spring parties beneath the blossoms,
he wielded the brush to set down his poems;
at moonlit autumn gatherings,
he drew lovely music from his flute.
Such was the style in which he lived.
Meanwhile Jish 4 came round. [1180]
It was his thirtieth year.
The third-rank novice Minamoto no Yorimasa, then living at Konoe-kawara, turned up clandestinely one night at the prince’s with a frightening proposal. “Your Highness,” he said, “you stand in the forty-eighth generation from the Great Sun Goddess and in the seventy-eighth reign from Emperor Jinmu. You should have been elevated to heir apparent and then reigned in turn, but here you are, in your thirtieth year and still only a prince. Does this not distress you? The way the world is now, everyone feigns meek obedience, but is there really out there a single soul who does not secretly envy the Heike?