B007V65S44 EBOK

by VIKING ADULT

  when his son and daughter came running,

  took his sleeve, tugged at his armor skirts,

  calling, “But, Father, where are you going?

  Take me with you!” “I want to go, too!”

  Both were crying. “Ah, such are the ties,”

  Koremori lamented to himself,

  “that bind us to this world of sorrow!”

  He seemed less and less able to move.

  Meanwhile his five younger brothers rode through the gate and halted beside him: Sukemori, Kiyotsune, and Arimori of the Palace Guards, the consultant Tadafusa, and Moromori, the governor of Bitchū.

  “Still here?” they said. “What are you up to? The imperial palanquin must be long gone by now.”

  Koremori mounted and started off with them

  but then turned back, rode up to the veranda,

  and lifted the edge of a blind with the tip of his bow.

  “Take a good look, all of you!

  My children were desperate to come with me,

  and while I gave them what comfort I could,

  I forgot for a time how late I was leaving.”

  He burst into tears, and all those present

  wept into their armor’s moistened sleeves.

  Now, there were among his housemen two brothers: Saitgo, in his nineteenth year, and Saitroku, in his seventeenth. These two, on either side, gripped Koremori’s bridle at the bit and declared themselves ready to follow him anywhere.

  Koremori replied, “When Sanemori, your father, went down to the north, you loudly insisted that you would go with him, but for his own reasons he left you here. Then he died on that northern campaign. Seasoned warrior that he was, he no doubt foresaw what has happened. Now I am leaving Rokudai without anyone I trust to look after him. You will oblige me greatly by staying behind.”

  So he spoke. The brothers swallowed their tears and stayed.

  “Never in all our life together

  did I think you could be so callous!”

  weeping, his wife cried where she lay.

  His son, his daughter, the gentlewomen

  tumbled, writhing, through the blinds,

  heedless of any listening presence,

  wailing in full-throated despair.

  Their voices lodged deep in his ears.

  Koremori’s farewell.

  Even in the winds that blew

  across the western ocean waves,

  he must have felt he heard them still.

  Before they fled the capital,

  the Heike set fire to Rokuhara,

  the Ike Mansion, the Komatsu Mansion,

  Hachij, Nishi-Hachij, and so on—

  many a senior noble’s residence,

  many a privy gentleman’s house,

  to the number of twenty and more,

  and those, too, of their retainers,

  as well as forty or fifty thousand

  commoners’ houses throughout the city

  and Shirakawa. They burned them all.

  15. The Honor of the Emperor’s Presence

  Some of these the imperial presence had honored.

  Only foundation stones now marked those phoenix gates,

  mere dents in the earth where his palanquin had stood.

  In some an empress had once entertained her guests,

  where now chill winds moaned over dewy garden wastes.

  Mansions fragrant with incense, hung with green curtains,

  whose woods offered game and whose waters fish—

  mansions where lived the greatest lords of the land,

  built with loving care at the cost of long labor—

  were simply gone, reduced in an instant to ash.

  Imagine, then, the retainers’ modest houses,

  their doors of woven wormwood, their light brushwood gates,

  and the flimsy huts sheltering huddled servants!

  The devouring flames burned out dozens of acres.

  So must it have been, alas, when mighty Wu fell

  and the Gusutai Palace turned to dewy brambles,

  when ruin overtook once-tyrannical Qin

  and smoke shrouded the Xianyang Palace parapet.

  Once the Heike had held the steep Han Valley pass,

  as it were, between the east and west Yao peaks,

  but then the northern barbarians drove them out.

  To the deep current of the Jing and Wei rivers

  they next looked for aid, but the eastern barbarians

  robbed them of that refuge. Could they have imagined

  expulsion from the seat of all noble courtesy,

  weeping, out into loutish, ignorant darkness?

  One day they were godly dragons, above the clouds,

  dispensing rain, the next dried fish in the market.

  Fortune and misfortune both travel the same road;

  glory and decline are the two sides of one hand.

  What happened reveals that truth, plain for all to see.

  Who could not grieve over the fall of the Heike?

  In Hgen, long ago, they bloomed like spring flowers;

  in Juei, the present, they fell like autumn leaves.

  In the seventh month of Jish 4, three men had come up to the capital [1180]

  to take up their tour of duty as guards at the palace.

  Hatakeyama Shigeyoshi, Oyamada Arishige, and Utsunomiya Tomotsuna

  were detained there until Juei. Events then commended their execution.

  Lord Tomomori, however, demurred.

  “Now that the good fortune of your house has run its course,”

  he said to Lord Munemori, “beheading a hundred or a thousand men

  would do nothing to make you again the master of the world.

  They have wives and children at home, and their own followers.

  Imagine, then, how all of these will mourn!

  If by some miracle fate smiles on you again and you return to the capital,

  then they will be grateful for your rare compassion.

  Surely the better course for you, just this once,

  will be to release these men and send them home.”

  “You are quite right,” Munemori replied. He let them go.

  They touched their heads to the ground before him and wept.

  “You have sustained our worthless lives ever since Jish,” they insisted,

  “and we ask only to follow His Majesty with you, wherever his progress may lead.”

  “But I have no doubt that your hearts are in the east,” Munemori answered,

  “and on this westward journey, I have no use for hollow shells of men.

  Go now, as fast as you can.”

  They went down from the capital with tears in their eyes.

  Twenty years and more he had been to them

  lord and master. No wonder, then,

  that on leaving him they should have wept.

  16. Tadanori’s Flight from the Capital

  Tadanori, governor of Satsuma, turned back from wherever he was

  and, with five housemen and a page, rode up to Lord Shunzei’s house on Goj.195

  He found the gate closed. It did not open for him.

  He announced his name. “I am back from among the fleeing Heike,” he added.

  This provoked a commotion within.

  Next he dismounted and declared in a loud voice,

  “I have only one reason for returning: I wish to speak to Lord Shunzei.

  If the gate is to remain shut, so be it,

  but, Lord Shunzei, please come out so that I may talk to you!”

  “I have an idea what this may be about,” Shunzei said.

  “There is nothing to fear from him. Let him in.”

  They opened the gate, and the two met.

  It was in all ways a moving encounter.

  Tadanori said, “I have held you in high regard ever since you gave me my first lesson in poetry, long ago, but the turmoil in the capital these last two or three years and rebell
ion in province after province—all matters affecting the fortunes of my house—have prevented me from calling on you regularly, despite my continuing devotion to the art.

  His Majesty has already left the city, and the days of Heike glory are over.

  There is to be, so I am told,

  a new imperial anthology,

  for which a selection must be made.

  You would do me the greatest honor

  ever to add luster to my life

  if you were, in your great kindness,

  to include just one poem of mine.

  I long entertained that hope,

  until disorder engulfed the world

  and, to my bitter disappointment,

  talk of this great project ceased.

  Surely, though, once peace returns, your work on the anthology will resume.

  Should you find anything suitable in the scroll I have brought you,

  be it a single poem, and favor it with your kindness,

  then the joy of it will reach me even beneath the moss,

  and from afar you shall have my grateful protection.”

  From among his poems over the years,

  he had picked the hundred he thought best

  and written them all out on a scroll

  that he kept with him at the last.

  Now, from where his armor joined,

  he took it and gave it to Lord Shunzei.

  Shunzei opened the scroll and cast his eyes over it.

  “Having received this precious token from you,” he said,

  “I shall not—you may be certain of that—treat it in any way lightly.

  Have no doubt on that score. Why, the way you have come

  shows so deep a devotion to poetry that it brings tears to my eyes.”

  Tadanori replied in great joy,

  “Let the waves of the western ocean swallow me if they will,

  let my corpse lie if it must in the wilderness,

  in this vale of tears I will leave no regrets.

  I bid you farewell.”

  He remounted his horse, tied his helmet cord,

  and started out westward once more.

  Watching him recede into the distance,

  Shunzei heard what must have been his voice,

  loudly singing these Chinese lines:

  “The way that still lies before me stretches far;

  my thoughts race to the evening clouds over Mount Yan.”

  Sorry indeed to see Tadanori go,

  Shunzei all but wept as he went back in.

  Later on, when peace came again,

  he returned to his task of choosing

  poems to go into the Senzaishū,

  The Harvest of a Thousand Years.

  Thinking back to Tadanori’s visit—

  his demeanor, the words he had spoken—

  Shunzei felt still more deeply moved.

  There were in that scroll deserving poems,

  a good many of them, but Tadanori

  was nonetheless under imperial ban

  and Shunzei had to leave out his name.

  The single poem he included,

  on “Blossoms in the Old Capital,”

  appeared only as “author unknown”:

  By rippling waters

  the old Shiga capital

  vanished long ago,

  yet, as then, Mount Nagara

  blossoms with mountain cherries.

  Tadanori was by that time

  a banned enemy of the court,

  so that Shunzei had no choice,

  but the blow was very hard.

  17. Tsunemasa’s Flight from the Capital

  Taira no Tsunemasa, the deputy master of the grand empress’s household,

  was the son of Tsunemori, the director of upkeep.

  In his youth, as a temple page, he had served the prince-abbot of Ninnaji,

  and despite the turmoil he must have looked back fondly on those days,

  for with half a dozen housemen he rode to Ninnaji,

  dismounted at the gate, and sent in these words:

  “The time of the Taira house is past,

  and I leave the capital today.

  Amid all the sorrows of this world,

  I have left only one regret,

  Your Reverence: that I must leave you.

  I first served you in my eighth year

  and remained until I came of age,

  in my thirteenth. During all that time

  I never left you, except when ill,

  and yet today I am bound a thousand leagues westward across the ocean

  and do not know what day or hour will return me to you.

  This so pains me that I have come to call on you a last time.

  Having already donned my armor, however, and taken up bow and arrows,

  I know that I am not in fit guise for you to receive me.”

  Such was his message. The prince-abbot was moved.

  “Come in as you are,” he said.

  Tsunemasa had on that day

  a hitatare robe of purple brocade

  under armor with green, shaded lacing.

  He wore at his waist a sword and scabbard

  gold-trimmed and, on his back, arrows

  fletched with black and white eagle feathers.

  The bow that he clasped beneath his arm

  was rattan-wrapped, lacquered in black.

  He slung his helmet back over his shoulders

  and there, before his old master’s quarters,

  knelt in a posture of deep respect.

  The prince-abbot came out at once

  and had his blinds raised. “Come in, come in!”

  he said. Tsunemasa did so.

  Tsunemasa then summoned Tbye Arinori, one of the men with him.

  Arinori carried a biwa, which he brought to his lord in its red brocade bag.

  Tsunemasa took the instrument and placed it before the prince-abbot.

  “Some years ago,” he began,

  “you kindly entrusted me with Seizan,

  which I have had brought here today.

  Parting with Seizan is painful indeed,

  but the thought that so great a treasure

  might come to grief out in the wilds

  is one that I find I cannot bear.

  Should fortune by some miraculous chance smile on my house again

  and I return to the capital, then I would gladly borrow Seizan once more.”

  He wept as he spoke, and the prince-abbot was moved to make this verse:

  You who go your way

  with such lingering regret:

  In your memory

  you leave behind a token

  that I shall keep wrapped with care.

  Whereupon Tsunemasa begged the use of his inkstone to write:

  Tsunemasa returns Seizan to the prince-abbot of Ninnaji.

  The water that flows

  hither through the bamboo pipe

  is never the same;

  but oh, how I wish that change

  would leave me always with you!

  He bade the prince-abbot farewell

  and was setting out when the others present—

  acolytes, clerics, monk officials—

  clung to his sleeves, mourned his departure,

  and shed many tears. One among them,

  a junior monk during his boyhood,

  was now the distinguished prelate Gykei,

  son of Mitsuyori, the grand counselor.

  Grieving to see Tsunemasa go,

  he went with him to the Katsura River

  but unhappily could go no farther.

  They parted in tears. Gykei gave him:

  So it is, alas:

  Ancient be they or still young,

  mountain cherry trees

  when that time comes, soon or late,

  lose their blossoms, every one.

  To which Tsunemasa replied,

  For the journey dressed,

  I shall spread ni
ght after night

  solitary sleeves

  and travel, as I know full well,

  an interminable road.

  A man of his who carried for him

  a rolled red banner swiftly unfurled it.

  “There it is!” his housemen cried,

  where they awaited him here and there,

  and raced, a hundred strong, to join him.

  Whips raised high, all galloped off

  and soon overtook the imperial train.

  18. Seizan

  In his seventeenth year, Tsunemasa had gone down to Kyushu

  as an imperial envoy to the great Usa Shrine.

  Having been given Seizan, he took the instrument with him

  and, before the main sanctuary, played the secret pieces.

  The shrine priests, who knew little enough of music,

  nonetheless moistened the sleeves of their green robes with tears of emotion.

  Not even the servants, who had never heard music at all,

  can have mistaken those wondrous notes for a shower of rain.

  It was a marvelous moment.

  Now, to speak of the biwa Seizan:

  Of old, in Emperor Ninmy’s reign,

  in the spring of the year Kash 3, [850]

  Fujiwara no Sadatoshi

  made the crossing to Tang China

  and there encountered Lian Chengwu,

  the great Tang master of the biwa,

  who taught him the Three Biwa Pieces.

  Sadatoshi returned to Japan

  with three biwas received from his master:

  Genj, Shishimaru, and Seizan.

  Surely the Dragon God coveted them,

  for on the way so mighty a storm

  beset his ship that Sadatoshi

  dropped Shishimaru in offering

  into the sea but brought the two others

  successfully home and to our emperor

  gave them as treasures for his house.

  During the reign of Murakami,

  one fifteenth night in the wa years, [961–64]

  a new-risen moon shone in the sky

  and a cool, refreshing breeze blew

  while His Majesty played Genj.

  At that moment a shadowy form

  appeared before him and a voice

  light and marvelously distinguished

  sang to the music he had begun.

  The emperor put down the biwa and asked,

  “What manner of man are you, and from where do you come?”