B007V65S44 EBOK

by VIKING ADULT

  a daughter of the Iyo governor Morinori and a gentlewoman to the Hachij Princess.141

  She had given him a boy, now in his seventh year, and girl in her fifth.

  Lord Kiyomori sent the princess his younger brother Yorimori, with this message:

  “It has come to my attention that Prince Mochihito has children.

  The girl is not a concern, but you will oblige me by producing the boy at once.”

  The Hachij Princess replied,

  “Early this morning, when word came

  that your order was on its way,

  his nurse foolishly fled with him,

  and where he is we do not know.

  He certainly is not here with us.”

  Lord Yorimori could only convey this reply to his brother. “Not there?” Lord Kiyomori exclaimed. “Where else could he possibly be? Very well then, have warriors go and search the place.”

  Now, one Lady Saish, to Her Highness a foster sister and gentlewoman,

  was also Yorimori’s wife. He kept this lady constant company there,

  and Her Highness thought very well of him, until he arrived with this order

  to surrender the prince’s son. She treated him after that as though he did not exist.

  The little boy addressed her in these words:

  “At so desperate a time,

  there can be no hope of escape.

  You must give me up right away.”

  So he spoke, and she, shedding tears:

  “No boy in his seventh or eighth year

  is of an age to understand,

  and yet, faced with this disaster—

  one your mere existence has caused—

  you feel yourself responsible

  and so speak to me in these words.

  Oh, it is simply too pitiful!

  Here I have brought you up for years,

  only to have it end this way,

  with you under terrible threat!”

  She could not stop crying.

  Lord Yorimori repeated the order to surrender the prince’s son, and in the end she could only comply. Sanmi-no-tsubone must have been heartbroken to know that she would never see him again. Weeping, she dressed him, smoothed his hair, and led him forth. It all seemed a dream.

  The princess and her women, even to the little girls in her service,

  wept until they wrung the tears from their sleeves.

  Lord Yorimori took charge of the boy, boarded a carriage with him,

  and delivered him to Rokuhara. Upon seeing him there,

  Lord Munemori went to his father and said,

  “Why I cannot exactly say, but the sight of this young prince fills me with pity for him.

  Please make an exception, allow him to live. I will look after him.”

  “Very well,” said Lord Kiyomori, “but see that he enters religion immediately.”

  Munemori reported his decision to the Hachij Princess.

  “I could not possibly object. Do so immediately,” she replied.

  Therefore they made a little monk of him and, once that was done,

  gave him as a disciple to the abbot of Ninnaji.

  In time he rose to head Tji: Prince-Abbot Dson was his title then.

  14. Tj

  Prince Mochihito had one more son, in Nara.

  His guardian, Shigehide, the governor of Sanuki,

  made a monk of him and took him down to the provinces of the north.

  Kiso no Yoshinaka brought him along on his march to the capital,

  thinking perhaps to put him on the throne, and there had him come of age.

  Some knew him as the Kiso Prince, others as the Defrocked Prince,

  still others as the Noyori Prince, because later on he lived in Saga, at Noyori.

  Of old, a physiognomist

  whom people knew as Tj foretold

  that Fujiwara no Yorimichi

  and Norimichi would both serve

  as regent to three emperors

  and live on into their eighties.

  He was right. He also saw

  in Korechika all the marks

  of a man destined for exile.

  In that, too, he was correct.

  Prince Shtoku was heard to say

  that Emperor Sushun displayed, [r. 587–92]

  to his eye, the traits of one

  bound to suffer violent death.

  And so it was: Sushun was killed

  by Soga no Umako.

  Indeed, this highly gifted man,

  although no physiognomist,

  could still show brilliant insight.

  How sadly wrong he got it,

  that minor counselor Korenaga!

  Not all that many reigns ago,

  two princes, Genmei and Guhei,

  first one and then the other

  lord of the Central Bureau

  and both a sage sovereign’s sons,

  still failed to ascend the throne.

  Did they, though, ever rebel?

  And then there was Prince Sukehito, the third son of Emperor Go-Sanj. [r. 1068–72] He, too, excelled in talent and learning. Emperor Shirakawa was still heir apparent when Emperor Go-Sanj left a testament ordaining that Prince Sukehito should succeed him, but, for reasons of his own, Emperor Shirakawa ignored it. He only awarded Prince Sukehito’s son the Minamoto surname and raised him in one leap from having no rank to holding the third, with a captain’s post in the Palace Guards. They say that apart from the grand counselor Sadamu, a son of Emperor Saga, no first-generation Genji had ever before risen from having no rank at all to the third.

  This son of Prince Sukehito was Arihito, the Hanazono left minister.

  The distinguished monks commissioned to subdue with their rites

  Prince Mochihito’s rebellion were all granted rewards.

  Lord Munemori’s son Kiyomune, an adviser, received the third rank,

  and as the Third Rank Adviser he was known thereafter.

  He was then only in his twelfth year,

  at which age his father had been a mere junior officer of the Watch.

  So sudden a leap to senior noble was unheard of, except for a regent’s son.

  The occasion for this honor

  appeared thus in the formal record:

  “In recognition of the rout

  of Minamoto no Mochihito

  and a monk known as Yorimasa,

  together with all his sons.”

  Minamoto no Mochihito—

  this referred to the prince himself.

  It was bad enough to have killed

  the son of a cloistered emperor,

  but to give him a commoner name—

  ah, that was a singularly low blow!

  15. The Nightbird

  Now, Minamoto no Yorimasa descended in the fifth generation from Yorimitsu,

  the governor of Settsu. His grandfather was Yoritsuna, governor of Mikawa,

  and his father Nakamasa, the head of the Armory.

  During the Hgen Conflict, he galloped before the imperial troops into battle,

  but no great reward came his way.

  During the Heiji Conflict, he abandoned all his relations to take that side again,

  for only the slenderest recompense.

  For years he served among the guards responsible for securing the palace

  but was never granted access to the privy chamber.

  Only after old age came upon him did a poem of his win him this privilege at last:

  Utterly unknown,

  the watchman assigned to guard

  our sovereign’s high hall

  catches glimpses of the moon

  only through obscuring trees.

  This poem gained Yorimasa

  entry to the privy chamber

  and for a good while the fourth rank,

  but he still longed to reach the third.

  Lacking any way

  to climb higher up the tree,

  here I stay, below,

  passing m
y days in this world

  gathering mere fallen fruit.

  So he got his third rank after all. Immediately after that he entered religion as a novice. This was his seventy-fifth year.

  The greatest of all his exploits came in the Ninpei years, [1151–54] during the reign of Emperor Konoe. Night after night His Majesty was assailed by crushing fear. By his order, great monks and mighty healers worked the most powerful and most secret rites, but to no effect. His suffering came on him at the hour of the ox. [ca. 2 A.M.] From the direction of the Tsanj grove, a black cloud would rise, approach, and settle over His Majesty’s dwelling. Then his agony always set in.

  The senior nobles therefore met in council.

  Yes, back in the Kanji years, when Emperor Horikawa reigned, [1087–95]

  His Majesty night after night had suffered in just this way.

  Commander of imperial forces Lord Yoshiie

  then stationed himself on the veranda of the imperial residence.

  When the time came, he twanged his bowstring three times

  and in a great voice declared his name,

  “Former governor of Mutsu,

  Minamoto no Yoshiie!”

  The hair rose on all who heard him,

  and His Majesty’s suffering ceased.

  So it was that the council decided, following precedent, to have a warrior mount guard, and among those of the Genji and the Heike, the choice, so the story goes, fell on Yorimasa. He was still head of the Armory at the time.

  “Warriors have always served the court to put down rebellion,” he observed, “or to destroy those who flout the imperial will. Never have I heard of an order to suppress a specter that no eye can see.” Still, the emperor had spoken, and he therefore repaired to the palace.

  He took with him only one man—

  a retainer, deeply trusted,

  from the province of Ttmi:

  I no Hayata, who carried,

  by his lord’s command, arrows

  fletched from under the bird’s wing.

  Yorimasa mounted guard

  on the emperor’s veranda

  in a hunting cloak of a single color,

  holding two well-sharpened arrows

  fletched with pheasant tail feathers

  and a black, rattan-wrapped bow.

  He grasped both arrows at once.

  Lord Masayori, then left controller,

  had loudly recommended him—

  “If you wish to quell a specter,

  Yorimasa is your man!”—

  and his words settled the choice;

  so if by chance that first arrow

  missed, he would shoot the second

  straight through the wretched fellow’s neck.

  At the hour foreseen for His Majesty’s torment,

  a black cloud moved, as those who knew said it would,

  from toward the grove at Tsanj, then settled over where the emperor lay.

  Yorimasa, glancing up sharply, saw in it a strange shape.

  He knew he was finished if he missed.

  Nonetheless he took an arrow,

  fitted it carefully to the string,

  called in the secret depths of his heart,

  “Hail, Great Bodhisattva Hachiman!,”

  drew to the full, and let fly.

  He had a hit; his arm felt it.

  “Got him!” He gave the archer’s yell.

  I no Hayata swiftly approached,

  found where the thing had fallen,

  and ran it through nine times with his sword.

  Everyone there brought up light

  for a good look at whatever it was:

  a monkey’s head, a badger’s body,

  a snake’s tail, the limbs of a tiger,

  and a cry like that of a thrush.

  “Frightening” is hardly the word.

  Deeply grateful, the emperor bestowed on Yorimasa a sword named Lion King.

  The left minister from Uji received it from His Majesty’s hands

  and had come halfway down the steps to make the presentation

  when—for this day was the tenth of the fourth month—

  a cuckoo high in the sky called two or three times as it passed.

  The minister exclaimed:

  How well, O cuckoo,

  you lift your name to the skies

  of the cloud dwelling!

  At these words Yorimasa

  dropped to his right knee,

  spread his left sleeve wide,

  glanced sidelong at the moon, and said,

  Thanks to a fine parting shot

  from the crescent moon’s drawn bow!

  With this he accepted the sword.

  “Not only is he incomparable at arms, but as a poet, too, he is outstanding!” So sovereign and minister alike gave voice to their admiration. As for the creature, it was stuffed into a hollow log and sent down the river to the sea.

  Then in the h years during Emperor Nij’s reign, [1161–63]

  a werethrush calling in the palace compound

  often troubled the imperial mood.

  As precedent suggested, His Majesty called on Yorimasa.

  The fifth month was nearly over,

  and nighttime was coming on.

  The thrush called a single time;

  no second cry ever came.

  In the dark he could not see

  the target or make out its shape.

  Where to shoot, he could not tell.

  So to the string he fitted first

  an outsize humming arrow,

  which he shot into the air

  above the emperor’s palace

  where, that once, the thrush had called.

  Startled by the whizzing roar,

  the thrush gave little high-pitched cries.

  Yorimasa’s second arrow,

  still a humming one but smaller,

  whistled upward, hit its mark.

  Thrush and arrow fell to earth

  there at Yorimasa’s feet.

  The palace rang with cries of amazement, and the emperor was deeply moved.

  He commanded that Yorimasa should be awarded a robe.

  The one who presented it this time was Kin’yoshi, the minister of the right.

  As he laid it across the warrior’s shoulders, he said in admiration,

  “Of old, Yang You shot a goose through cloud;

  Yorimasa has now shot a thrush through rain.”

  Black the fifth-month night

  when, before our very eyes,

  you made your name blaze!

  So he spoke, and Yorimasa:

  And I who thought twilight past,

  and the night too dark to shine!

  The robe now across his shoulders,

  he withdrew. A little later

  Izu province became his,

  and his first son, Nakatsuna,

  he named the new governor.

  Risen now to the third rank,

  he acquired great estates:

  Goka-no-sh in Tanba,

  Tmiyagawa in Wakasa.

  By rights he should have lived,

  but no: Instead he raised

  futile revolt and brought perdition

  on his prince, himself, his sons.

  His was a very bitter fate.

  16. The Burning of Miidera

  In the past, the monks of Mount Hiei had always been quick to outrageous protest,

  but this time they lay low and said not a word.

  Kfukuji and Miidera had sheltered the prince or come forward to welcome him,

  and this made them enemies of the court. Both had invited attack.

  On the twenty-seventh of that month, a corps of over ten thousand horse

  commanded by Lord Kiyomori’s fourth son, Shigehira,

  and, under him, by Tadanori, governor of Satsuma,

  set out toward Miidera.

  At Miidera they dug a moat,

  put up a defensive wall of shields,

  assembled
an abatis, and waited.

  At the hour of the hare, the first arrows flew [ca. 6 A.M.]

  to start the battle. It lasted all day.

  On the defenders’ side, three hundred

  and more of the temple monks lay dead.

  Then came the night clash, when, in the dark,

  government forces burst into the grounds

  and loosed fire. All these buildings burned:

  Hongaku-in, Jki-in, Shinnyo-in,

  Keon-in, Fugen-d, Daih-in,

  Shryū-in, and the abbot’s lodge

  with its sacred statue of Abbot Kydai.

  The temple’s Miroku, among others,

  went up in flames, and the Great Lecture Hall,

  an equal eight bays in length and width;

  the bell tower; the sutra repository;

  the hall for holy initiations;

  the shrine to the guardians of the teaching;

  the sanctuary of Imagumano:

  in all, six hundred and thirty-seven

  halls, chapels, pagodas, mausoleums;

  one thousand eight hundred fifty-three

  laymen’s houses in nearby tsu;

  the Tripitaka brought to Japan142

  from distant China by Chish Daishi.

  Over two thousand buddha images

  went up in smoke. One can only mourn.

  Wondrous music would fill no more

  the celestial realm of the devas,

  and the three grievous afflictions

  would torment still more the Dragon Gods.

  Now, Miidera began as a private temple

  whose owner hoped to rule mi province.

  When he gave it to Emperor Tenmu, it gained [r. 673–86]

  imperial recognition and sponsorship.

  Its central buddha was His Majesty’s own:

  Miroku. Abbot Kydai, whom all men called

  a living Miroku, for a hundred and sixty years

  pursued his practice there, till at last

  he passed the temple on to Chish Daishi.

  On his jewel seat in the high Tosotsu Heaven,

  Miroku awaits, so they say, the far-off dawn

  when, descending to earth, he will be born

  under the dragon-flower tree; but, if so,

  how could this disaster have struck?

  Chish Daishi established this sacred spot

  as a haven for study of the true teaching,

  and since he drew holy water there each morning,

  he called it Mi-i-dera, Temple of the Three Wells.