by VIKING ADULT
“I am he,” the shadow replied,
“who gave Sadatoshi the Three Biwa Pieces.
I am the great biwa master of Tang:
Lian Chengwu is my name.
I withheld from among those three
one especially secret movement
and sank for that to the demon realm.
Just now I heard the marvelous sound
The shadowy Lian Chengwu teaches the emperor a secret biwa piece.
that your plectrum draws from the strings
and therefore came into your presence.
I should like, if I may, to teach you
the movement I so unwisely omitted
and thus achieve enlightenment.”
With these words he took up Seizan,
which stood there before His Majesty,
tightened the strings, and straightaway
taught the emperor the missing movement
in two parts: Shgen and Sekish.
No one thereafter, sovereign or subject,
dared to touch the strings of Seizan,
which then passed, an imperial gift,
to the prince-abbot of Ninnaji;
who gave it in loan, the story goes,
to Tsunemasa, then a young boy
and the abbot’s favorite acolyte.
The back was of wisteria wood,
and on the front a painting showed
the moon rising into a dawn sky
from between green, summery peaks:
hence the name Seizan, or “Green Hills.”
Genj was a wonder equally rare.
19. The Heike Flight from the Capital
The grand counselor Yorimori, like the others,
started out after setting fire to his residence,
but at the Toba Mansion south gate he paused.
“I forgot something,” he said.
He cut off his red insignia and, with three hundred men, rode back to the city.
The Heike houseman Moritsugi raced to come before Lord Munemori.
“Look, my lord!” he cried. “Lord Yorimori is staying behind,
and many of his men with him. I call this an outrage!
As to Lord Yorimori himself, I of course would not dare,
but I would gladly send an arrow after his men!”
“Scoundrels who forget all they have come to owe this house over the years
and who shy away from sharing our fate to the end,” Munemori replied,
“are not worth the trouble.” Moritsugi was obliged to desist.
“And Shigemori’s sons, where are they?” Munemori continued.
“None has arrived,” came the reply.
Tomomori wept. “Not a day has passed since we left the city,” he said,
“and see already how cruelly men’s hearts change!
This is exactly what I thought would happen,
and that is why I argued for making our last stand in the capital itself.”
He glared angrily at Munemori.
And what had decided Yorimori to stay? The thing is that Yoritomo had always shown him goodwill. “I think very highly of you, you know,” Yoritomo often assured him. “For me, as Great Bodhisattva Hachiman is my witness, Lady Ike still lives in you,” and so on. Indeed, when Yoritomo sent a force up to the capital against the Heike, he carefully enjoined them never to direct their arrows against Yorimori’s men.
“The days of Heike glory are over, and already they have fled the city,” Yorimori said. “For me salvation now lies with Yoritomo.” That seems to be why he went back.
He sought refuge at Ninnaji, at the Tokiwa Mansion of the Hachij Princess.
Saish, his wife, was one of the princess’s gentlewomen and her foster sister.
“Should such a need ever arise,
please,” Yorimori begged Her Highness,
“do what you can to keep me from harm.”
“If only my wishes mattered these days…”
she answered him discouragingly.
He could count on Yoritomo’s goodwill, that much he knew,
but what the other Genji might do, he had no idea.
He felt nagging anxiety at having so cut himself off from his fellows.
Such was his mood that he felt caught
between sharp rocks and the deep blue sea.
Meanwhile Lord Shigemori’s sons, Koremori and his five brothers, with a thousand men,
caught up with the imperial cortege on the Mutsuda riverbank, at Yodo.
Munemori had been expecting them and greeted them with joy.
“What took you so long?” he asked.
“My children wanted desperately to come with me,” Koremori replied,
“and trying to cheer them up delayed my departure.”
“Why did you so unkindly leave Rokudai behind?”
“Because there is no knowing where our journey may take us.”
Munemori’s question drew tears from poor Koremori.
And who were they, then, the Taira
who fled the capital on this day?
These senior nobles:
Munemori, once palace minister;
Tokitada, grand counselor;
Norimori, counselor;
Tomomori, counselor;
Tsunemori, director of upkeep;
Kiyomune, Right Gate Watch commander;
Shigehira, Palace Guards captain;
Koremori, Palace Guards captain;
Sukemori, Palace Guards captain;
Michimori, Echizen governor.
And these privy gentlemen:
Nobumoto, head of the Treasury;
Tokizane, Palace Guards captain;
Kiyotsune, Palace Guards captain;
Arimori, Palace Guards lieutenant;
Tadafusa, adviser;
Tsunemasa, of the grand empress’s household;
Yukimori, chief left equerry;
Tadanori, Satsuma governor;
Noritsune, Noto governor;
Tomoakira, Musashi governor;
Moromori, Bitchū governor;
Kiyofusa, Awaji governor;
Kiyosada, Owari governor;
Tsunetoshi, Wakasa governor;
Masaakira, of the Bureau of War;
Narimori, chamberlain;
Atsumori, fifth rank without office.
And these monks:
Senshin, the great prelate;
Nen, superintendent of Hosshji;
Chūkai, master of discipline;
Yūen, adept.
And housemen, including
provincial governors,
police officials,
guardsmen from the various corps,
in all, one hundred and sixty.
Seven thousand Heike were there:
the small number whom death had spared
over the two or three years just spent
campaigning in east and north.
At the Yamazaki barrier chapel,
they set down His Majesty’s palanquin
and prayed from there to Otokoyama.
This was Tokitada’s poignant prayer:
“All hail, Hachiman, Great Bodhisattva,
return, in your mercy, His Majesty
and all of us here to the capital!”
They looked back the way they had come:
Mist seemed to fill the sky, and desolate plumes of rising smoke.
Lord Norimori made this verse:
All so quickly gone!
A man leaves his house behind,
there beyond the clouds,
and where once he made his home,
smoke rises into the sky.
To which Noritsune added:
Behind us we see
the city that was our home
now a burned-out waste
and, before, an endless road
over wastes of smoking waves.
And so it was: The capital,
once their home, was far away
across smoldering desolation,<
br />
while there lay ahead of them
ten thousand leagues of cloud and wave.
Imagine how they must have felt!
Sadayoshi, the governor of Higo, heard that there were Genji lying in wait at Kawajiri, and he rode there with five hundred men to dispose of them. However, the news turned out to be false, and he started back toward the capital. Near Udono he encountered the imperial cortege.
He dismounted and knelt respectfully before Munemori, his bow under his arm. “Where are you all bound, my lord, in your flight?” he asked. “If to the western provinces, then I fear that you will be harried as fugitives hither and yon, and suffer infamy. I beg you instead to face in the capital itself whatever must be.”
Munemori replied, “But have you not heard? Yoshinaka is already attacking from the north with fifty thousand men. Higashi-Sakamoto, below Mount Hiei, is swarming with them. And the cloistered emperor vanished in the middle of last night. If only our fate were at stake, very well, but it would be too painful to expose His Majesty’s mother and my own to cruel misfortune. For that reason I have preferred to have His Majesty undertake this journey after all, with a suitable escort.”
“Very well,” Sadayoshi answered, “then I request leave to meet my own fate in the capital.” He portioned out his men among Shigemori’s sons and with a small band of thirty riders returned to the city.
There the news reached Yorimori that Sadayoshi was back,
meaning to kill any Taira who had stayed behind.
“He must be thinking of me!” Yorimori reflected in panic.
Sadayoshi curtained off the burned-out Nishi-Hachij Mansion and spent the night there,
but not a single Heike gentleman turned up.
Perhaps somewhat disheartened after all, he made up his mind
that at least no Genji horses should beat their hooves upon Shigemori’s grave.
To this end he had the bones disinterred and, weeping, addressed them:
“O misery and disaster!
See, my lord, the fate of your house!
It has been written since ages past:
‘To all the living shall come death;
upon happiness follows sorrow’;
yet never have I, with my own eyes,
witnessed such a catastrophe.
Surely, my lord, you foresaw all this,
prayed in that spirit to gods and buddhas,
and so hastened the end of your life.
I am lost in admiration.
I should really have gone with you,
still your companion at the last,
but no, my worthless life dragged on,
only to leave me facing this ruin,
mourning everything we have lost.
When I die, come forward, I beg,
to welcome me into paradise.”
In tears he addressed his distant lord,
sent the bones off to Mount Kya,
dug up the earth surrounding the grave,
and let the Kamo River take it.
Perhaps by now he felt only despair,
for he then fled quite the other way,
eastward, to Utsunomiya—
a man he had once had in his care
and treated well. In that goodwill
he apparently placed his trust,
and Utsunomiya did indeed,
they say, show him great kindness.
20. The Flight from Fukuhara
All the senior Heike present—
Munemori first among them,
and excepting only Koremori—
were there with their wives and children,
but not so their juniors in rank,
who would have brought too many.
To flee, these had left their families
without the slightest indication
when they might be reunited.
Separation seems painfully long
even to those who know the day,
the hour of their assured return.
Imagine, then, the greater sorrow
when this day is the last together,
and good-bye is a final farewell.
Those leaving and those who stayed
could only wring tears from their sleeves.
Long-standing Heike retainers
remembered many and weighty favors
they could not dismiss; yet young and old
glanced back over and over again,
and made very slow progress forward.
Some slept by waves on rocky shores,
spending their days on the heaving sea;
some found their way to far distances,
braving precipitous slopes and crags.
Some whipped horses, some poled boats.
All of them fled as best they could.
When the Heike reached Fukuhara, their capital in times gone by,
Lord Munemori called together the best of his housemen, young or old,
several hundred in all, and addressed them in these words:
“This house, once rich in the stored benefit of good deeds, has none left;
accrued evil now casts its shadow over us and blights our lives.
Therefore the gods have abandoned us, and so, too, the cloistered emperor.
Now that we have left the imperial city to wander the world, where is our refuge?
And yet to seek shelter with a stranger under the same tree confirms a bond from past lives;
to drink with another from the same stream likewise reveals a tie from earlier births.
Consider, then, all of you, that yours is no passing deference to this house,
but that generation after generation you have been our retainers.
Some among you are close relatives, hence indissolubly bound to us;
others are beholden to us for liberal favor over the generations.
Then, when we prospered, you lived off our bounty.
Now, how could you fail to requite the debt you owe?
Besides, our most noble and sovereign lord is with us, bearing the three regalia.
Will you not follow him into any wilderness, be it ever so remote?”
So he spoke, and old and young wept.
“They say that the least bird or beast shows gratitude for kindness,” they replied.
“How, then, could we as human beings not honor that principle?
For twenty years and more, we have owed all to our lord,
all that we have needed to care for our wives and children,
all that we have required in our own lives.
It is to our lord that we owe everything.
To the man of bow and arrow,
the man who fights astride his steed,
divided loyalty means shame.
Therefore we are resolved to go
anywhere our sovereign leads,
be it even beyond Japan,
to Silla, Paekche, Koguryŏ,
to the grasslands of the Khitans,
to any region of the earth.”
So all of them spoke, with one voice,
greatly reassuring their leaders.
That night they spent in the Fukuhara of old,
the early-autumn moon a waning crescent.
In the deep night silence, under an empty sky,
heads laid, as travelers’ are, on grassy pillows,
they mingled a flood of tears with gathering dews
and gave themselves to growing melancholy.
Well knowing they would never come here again,
they gazed on all that Lord Kiyomori had built:
the hilltop retreat, looking out over spring blossoms;
the seaside retreat for watching the autumn moon;
the running spring, pine grove, and riding-ground pavilions;
the two-story viewing stand, the snow-view retreat;
the rustic thatched retreat; the great lords’ houses;
the palace proper, erected for His Majesty
by Kunitsuna, on Kiyomori�
�s orders,
with mandarin-duck tiles and smooth stone walkways.
Every one of these, after only three years,
betrayed invading ruin. Mosses choked the paths,
autumn weeds blocked gates, roof tiles sprouted ferns,
vines weighed fences down, while moss-grown lookouts leaned,
deserted but for wind through the pines. Their blinds gone,
sleeping chambers gaped, open only to moonlight.
Dawn broke. They set the Fukuhara palace on fire;
then all, with the emperor, boarded their ships.
This, too, was a wrench, if one somewhat less painful
than when they abandoned the capital proper.
Smoke from seafolk fires at dusk, boiling down seaweed,
the stag on the hillside, belling into the dawn,
the noise of waves breaking, down long stretches of coast,
the moon gleaming back from teardrop-strewn sleeves,
cricket voices singing among wastes of grasses—
not a sight, not a sound that reached them did not hurt.
Yesterday they stood at the gates of the Kanto,
bridle to bridle, a full hundred thousand men;
today their seven thousand loosed hawsers to sail
the waves of western seas calm under distant cloud,
with the sun already sinking in a clear sky.
Beyond a mist-shrouded island, the moon rose.
Following the tides past ever-farther shores,
their ships seemed to mount to the clouded heavens.
“How far we have come!” they thought, shedding endless tears.
On the waves they saw gathered a flock of white birds.
“Why, there they are! That Ariwara, back then,
put a question to them by the Sumida River!
These must be”—they sighed—“his dear ‘capital birds’!”196
In Juei 2, the seventh month and twenty-fifth day, [1183]
the Heike vanished from the capital for good.
184. Lake Biwa. Chikubushima, a small, steep-sided island at its north end, is still sacred.
185. The uguisu warbler sings best earlier in the spring.
186. Daibenkudoku-ten, just mentioned, incorporates both. Of the two, the better known is Benzai-ten, the goddess of music, eloquence, and wisdom.
187. These seven lines are adapted from a poem by Bo Juyi.
188. The academy, founded in the capital in 821, for the sons of the Fujiwara nobility.
189. The tomb of the heir apparent to Sujin, the semimythical tenth emperor.
190. A Chinese saying, urging a man to display success when he returns home.