by VIKING ADULT
They recorded a careful count
of all those who had died in the flames:
on the Great Buddha Hall’s upper floor,
one thousand seven hundred people;
eight hundred at Kfukuji,
five hundred here, three hundred there:
three thousand five hundred in all.
One thousand monks had died on the battlefield. The victors hung a few of their heads at the gate of Hannyaji and took a few more back to the city. On the twenty-ninth, having destroyed the southern capital, Shigehira returned northward. Lord Kiyomori alone indulged in vengeful rejoicing. The empress, Cloistered Emperor Go-Shirakawa, Retired Emperor Takakura, the regent and all below him lamented, saying, “Suppressing the warrior-monks was all very well, but did they really have to destroy the temples, too?”
The original plan had been to parade the monks’ heads through the avenues,
then hang them on the trees in front of the prison, but that was unthinkable now.
The destruction of Tdaiji and Kfukuji was too great a disaster.
They just tossed the heads here and there into gutters and ditches.
Emperor Shmu had written in his own hand,
“As long as my temple flourishes,
so shall the realm, in equal measure.
Should my temple fall into decline,
so, too, will the realm.” Sure enough,
the realm’s decline was quite obvious.
So this terrible year ended,
and the fifth year of Jish began. [1181]
143. An ancient, noble name for Japan.
144. The chronicles that cover these times call the residences of these early emperors miya, which in medieval Japanese meant either “shrine” or “prince” (or “princess”). As the word for an emperor’s residence it is thoroughly archaic, hence the translation “fane.”
145. Their reign dates, being more mythical than historical, are omitted.
146. Respectively, the Ryukyu Islands, an ancient Korean kingdom, and the vaguely conceived kingdom of a Mongolic people in far northern China. All this is myth.
147. The fifteenth emperor, largely mythical despite his enormous Konda tomb, which still rises near Osaka. Deified after his death, he is the central figure in the triad known collectively as Hachiman (Great Bodhisattva Hachiman), the tutelary deity of the Genji.
148. Ancient Chinese directional deities seen painted on the walls of some kofun tumulus tombs. The emperor and the gate of his palace faced south.
149. The Shgun-zuka is at the summit of Mount Kach east of Kyoto (Yamashina-ku).
150. Local divinities who represent the “tempered light” of the eternal, universal buddhas.
151. Emperor Konoe’s empress and the sister of Sanesada.
152. A scene from chapter 45 (“The Maiden of the Bridge”) of The Tale of Genji.
153. A “whistling arrow” (hikime) ended in a hollow wooden bulb pierced with holes that made it emit a sharp whistle in flight. The sole purpose of the hikime, which had no metal head, was to inspire fear and awe by means of sound—especially in noxious supernatural powers like these mischievous tengu. A hikime’s whistle seems to have been pitched higher than the hum of the kaburaya, described in note 46.
154. Takeuchi no Sukune, the deity of a subsidiary sanctuary at Iwashimizu.
155. Fujiwara no Kamatari (616–69), the founder of the Fujiwara line.
156. Jinmu, the first emperor of Japan, is said to have come to the throne in 660 B.C.
157. The First Emperor of Qin (Qin Shi Huangdi, 259–210 B.C), mentioned repeatedly hereafter, is a towering figure in Chinese history. After unifying China in 221 B.C, he built a huge palace, undertook other vast projects, and left a colossal mausoleum, including the famous Terra-Cotta Army. He also burned all existing books.
158. The Buddha, his teaching, and the community of monks.
159. A fretless Chinese relative of the koto. Its use in Japan lapsed in the late tenth century.
160. The second daughter of Emperor Toba.
161. A darani is a formula or spell transliterated through Chinese from Sanskrit, hence unintelligible as language. Fud (note 93), a deity ubiquitous in the Japanese mountains, is blue-black in color and surrounded by flames. Around his sword coils the black dragon Kurikara (the Hiryū Gongen of 2:15), the deity of flowing water, for which Kurikara Ravine (7:6) is named. His two canonical followers, Kongara and Seitaka, appear below.
162. The waterfall is about four hundred feet high.
163. Saibara, a kind of song popular at the Heian court, is often mentioned in The Tale of Genji, as is the wagon, or “Japanese koto.” The gentlemen are playing very elegant music.
164. The Chinese name for the underworld.
165. Karakawa (“Chinese Leather”) because it was laced with tiger-skin leather.
166. The legendary Chinese sage perhaps more familiar to many readers as Lao-tzu (an older romanized spelling).
167. Just as the Mount Hiei monks carried the sacred palanquins of their deities down into the capital in order to press a grievance (1:15), the monks of Kfukuji invaded the city carrying the tree (sakaki, a broadleaf evergreen) sacred to the Kasuga Deity.
168. The ball used in the game of kemari (“kickball”). A circle of players kept the ball in the air as long as possible by kicking it high in the air.
169. Roshana, the cosmic buddha associated with Kegon Buddhism and honored at Tdaiji, corresponds to Mahāvairochana (Japanese: Dainichi), the cosmic buddha of Shingon (esoteric) Buddhism.
170. The Hoss and Sanron schools of Buddhism entered Japan from China in the eighth century, well before Shingon (Mount Kya) and Tendai (Mount Hiei). The first was associated with Kfukuji, the second with Tdaiji.
BOOK SIX
1. The Death of Retired Emperor Takakura
(recitative)
The first of the first month of Jish 5 dawned. At the palace,
armed rebellion to the east and, to the south, Nara destroyed by fire
put a stop to the morning salutation. His Majesty went nowhere.
No music played, no dancers danced; no Kuzu villagers came from Yoshino,171
nor any senior Fujiwara nobles, since their ancestral temple had burned.
On the second day, none gathered for wine in the privy chamber.
Subdued as the ladies and gentlemen were, a pall seemed to shroud the palace.
The Buddha’s and the Sovereign’s Ways had come to a dreadful end.
His Cloistered Eminence Go-Shirakawa lamented,
(song)
“Fidelity to the ten precepts
won me supreme command beyond price,
and four emperors after me
have been my sons or grandsons.
How, then, can it be possible
so to rob me of authority
as to make my life meaningless?”
(speech)
On the fifth of the month, the Nara monks were stripped of their ranks and barred from all imperially sponsored ceremonies. Their appointments were terminated.
Most temple monks had perished by arrow or sword,
had failed to emerge from the smoke or been lost to the flames.
The few left fled to mountains and forests; not one remained.
For the Kfukuji abbot, Yen, the sight of images and scriptures burning
proved too great a shock. Heart pounding in horror, he collapsed and soon died.
Surpassing elegance and delicacy of feeling had been typical of him.
Once when he heard a cuckoo call:
Whenever you call,
cuckoo, a wondrous pleasure
thrills me yet again,
as though each and every note
were your first song of the year.
This poem gained him a new name:
“Reverend First Song,” they called him.
At any rate, the court had no choice
but somehow to hold the Gosai Rite.172
The sen
ior nobles, met in council,
vetted the name of every monk
on whom they might call to preside.
Alas, every Nara prelate’s post
now lay vacant, so they discussed
bringing a prelate down from the city;
but no, Nara was still essential.
Their choice therefore fell at last
on the past lecturer Jh,
now in hiding at Kanjuji.
They called upon him to appear,
and the rite in token fashion
limped forward after all.
Heartbroken by his father’s confinement to the Toba Mansion two years earlier,
by the slaying of Prince Mochihito the previous year,
and by the ghastly upheaval attendant upon the moving of the capital,
the retired emperor lapsed into enduring poor health.
The news that Tdaiji and Kfukuji were gone struck the final blow.
To his father the cloistered emperor’s intense distress,
on the fourteenth of the first month, in the Ikedono Mansion at Rokuhara,
Retired Emperor Takakura passed away.
Twelve years he had reigned, his government
replete with virtue, giving new life
to benevolence and righteousness,
long forgotten but sagely enjoined
in The Songs and The Book of History,
restoring the people to peace and ease.
Not even an arhat who has achieved
the triple wisdom, the sixfold powers,
escapes the end that awaits us all;
nor does the manifest avatar,
master of every transformation.
Yet ineluctable transience
still seemed excessive in its zeal.
That night they moved him without delay
to Seiganji, in the eastern foothills,
and there, like evening smoke, he rose
heavenward as do spring mists.
In great haste the prelate Chken
made his way down from Mount Hiei
to join the funeral cortege
but came too late. By that time
the departed was merely smoke.
The sight moved Chken to say,
“Whither bound today?”—
the lord I have often seen
venture far abroad.
“To a place whence none returns,”
they tell me, to my sorrow.
There was a gentlewoman, too,
who, upon learning of his passing,
lost herself in this sad musing:
The moon I once saw
ride so far into the sky,
high above the clouds,
now, they tell me, shines no more;
and all I can do is mourn.
This had been his twenty-first year.
Inwardly he had kept the ten precepts
and outwardly had never strayed
from the five exemplary virtues,
never swerved from flawless conduct.
A sage king in these latter days,
his people mourned him as though robbed
suddenly of the sun and moon.
So it is that in our world
hopes are thwarted at every turn
and the people’s lot is always pain.
2. Autumn Leaves
The late retired emperor, people often said, was mild, elegant, and attractive—
surely no less so, indeed, than the Engi and Tenryaku sovereigns.
Widely known as a sage king, he followed benevolence and virtue
once ripening years unveiled for him the distinction between good and evil,
but even in his earliest youth he displayed kind, gentle ways.
At the start of his reign, in the Shan era, when he was still in his tenth year, [1171–75]
he loved autumn leaves so much that he ordered a knoll
raised near the Sakuhei Gate, to the north of the palace compound,
and on it were planted, by his command,
the sumacs and maples that turn color so beautifully in fall.
Brightleaf Hill, he called that knoll, and he watched it untiringly all day.
One night, though, a pitiless gale
scattered those bright leaves far and wide,
dashing them pell-mell to the ground.
In the morning the groundskeepers
came to clean and swept them all up.
Fallen branches, the last of the leaves,
they gathered in the bitter wind
at the nearby guardhouse and burned them,
to warm themselves a drink of wine.
The chamberlain on duty that day hurried ahead of His Majesty
to see what had become of the leaves. They were gone.
The groundskeepers’ party under the autumn leaves.
“What happened to them?” he asked. They told him.
“Oh, no!” he exclaimed in dismay.
“How could you, when His Majesty is so fond of them?
Prison or exile—for all I know, that may be what you face now.
As for me, I can only guess how angry His Majesty will be.”
While he voiced this bitter complaint, the emperor arose unusually early
and came forth to view his leaves. There were none.
“What is this?” he inquired.
The chamberlain had nothing to add to the plain, unfortunate truth.
His Majesty laughed merrily, in high good humor.
“There is that Chinese line,” he said:
“‘In the woods I burn fallen leaves to warm my wine.’
Who can ever have taught them that?
Fancy them being so elegant!”
Actually, he was delighted
and never issued a reprimand.
Another time, in the Angen years, [1175–77]
he moved somewhere unfamiliar
to avoid an unlucky direction.173
Even at the best of times,
“The watchman’s call announcing dawn
woke the sovereign from his slumber,”
and, he, always so light a sleeper,
got no rest at all that night—
which, moreover, was freezing cold.
He recalled the hallowed reign
of Emperor Daigo, who, well aware
how cold all his subjects must be,
threw off the covers where he lay.
No, he sorrowfully reflected,
I am not worthy of the throne.
A little later in the night, distant cries reached him, although his attendants heard nothing. He summoned them. “What is all that noise over there?” he asked. “Go and find out.”
The privy gentleman on watch passed the order to the duty guards, who rushed to investigate. At a crossroads they discovered a commoner girl clutching the lid of a clothing chest and weeping. They asked her what was the matter.
“My mistress is a gentlewoman in the service of His Eminence,” she explained. “I was taking her a robe that was finally ready when, just a moment ago, two or three men turned up, robbed me of it, and ran off. My mistress cannot appear in His Eminence’s residence without it, and she has no one close to her to give her proper lodging. That is what is making me cry.”
They took the girl back with them and reported the matter.
His Majesty listened. “How awful!” he said.
“What kind of brutes could have done that?
People in the reign of Yao
were honest, for Yao at heart
put honesty before all else;
but such, in the present reign,
is my own heart, that warped men
roam abroad and commit crimes.
Am I not to blush with shame?”
So he spoke. Then he inquired,
“What color was the robe they took?”
The girl named the color.
This happened in the days when Kenreimon-in was still empress.
&n
bsp; His Majesty asked her whether she had a robe of that color,
and she sent back one far more beautiful than the first.
He had it given to the girl.
“It is still the dead of night.
That might happen to you again,”
he said, and assigned a guard
to see her to her mistress’s.
Such was his imperial kindness.
That is why his meanest subject,
man or woman, prayed for him
to live on ten thousand years.
3. Aoi
The most touching of all the stories about him
involved the maid of a gentlewoman in the empress’s service.
This young woman became unusually intimate with her sovereign.
Theirs was no common, fleeting affair.
His Majesty called on her constantly to be with him.
So serious was his feeling for her that her mistress, the gentlewoman,
less employed her than honored her as though the maid were she.
“There used to be a song that ran,
‘Do not lament the birth of a daughter;
do not applaud the birth of a son.
A son may never gain a fief;
a daughter may rise to be empress.’”
The subject of these lines, they say, did precisely that.
“Consort or even empress, yes,
she may be in time, that one;
and then, perhaps, revered—who knows?—
as dowager, mother of the realm!
What incredible good fortune!”
So people were fond of saying,
and, her name being Aoi-no-mae,
they secretly dubbed her “Empress Aoi.”
The emperor gave up calling her to his side when he heard. Not that he no longer loved her; he only wished to avoid evil talk. Thereafter he spent all his time in his bedroom, lost in melancholy.
Lord Motofusa, the current regent, pitied him and hastened to the palace to lighten his mood. “If she means this much to you, Your Majesty, then there is a perfectly good solution,” he said. “In my opinion you should summon her immediately. Never mind her rank. I undertake to adopt her without delay.”
The emperor replied, “I wonder. That is a good idea, but as far as I can see, there is no precedent for it until I have retired from the throne. For me to summon her while I still reign would ruin my reputation for generations to come.” He declined to summon her. The regent could only restrain his tears and withdraw.