B007V65S44 EBOK
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left her nothing to ward off rain.
Moon and stars shining through her roof
gleamed back, reflected in her tears.
Green shoots rife in the meadows,
seri parsley thick in the swales—
she picked these to sustain her life.
Her Highness said, “He must have an answer.”
Graciously she called for an inkstone
and wrote Kozaish’s reply herself.
Nonetheless, have faith,
for that simple log of yours,
laid across the brook,
turns again and gives footing.
Step forth: It is time to cross.
In Michimori’s breast the fire of love
rose as smoke soars above Mount Fuji;
tears drenched his sleeves as ocean waves
break on Kiyomi-ga-seki shore.
Beauty flowers from happy fortune:
Michimori made Kozaish his wife,
and they loved each other deeply.
So it was that he took her with him,
even onto a wave-borne ship
westward bound toward distant skies.
Norimori had lost two sons,
Michimori and Narimori,
elder and younger; all he had left
were Noritsune and the monk Chūkai.
That is why Kozaish, to him,
had meant the memory of his son.
Now that he had lost her as well,
he sank into bottomless despair.
211. From a Wakan reishū poem in Chinese by Yoshishige no Yasutane.
212. Lake Biwa.
213. The battle at the Uji Bridge (4:11).
214. The “new regent” was Fujiwara no Moroie (1172–1238), the “old one” Fujiwara no Motomichi (1160–1233).
215. Fujiwara no Michikane (961–95).
216. The First Emperor of Qin.
217. Here, funerary monuments.
218. The correct establishment of the calendar was a government function so vital that even Masakado did not seek to usurp it.
219. A campaign (1083–87) during which Minamoto no Yoshiie put down a rebellion in the far north.
220. A sin because the Buddhist commandments forbid taking the life of any sentient being.
221. Originally the deity of Taishan in China, Taizan Bukun was widely addressed in medieval Japan in prayers to obtain prosperity and avoid misfortune.
222. A second marriage.
BOOK TEN
1. The Parade of Heads
(recitative)
Juei 3, the second month: [1184]
The heads of the Heike slain on the seventh at Ichi-no-tani reached the capital on the twelfth.
Those with a tie to these men wondered in anguish what fate might await them now,
and none more so than Lord Koremori’s wife, in hiding at Daikakuji.
“Nearly all the Heike gentlemen were killed at Ichi-no-tani,” she heard someone say,
“but a senior noble, a third-rank Guards captain, was taken alive.
He is on his way up to the city.”
“That must be my husband!” she cried, and collapsed with a robe over her head.
A gentlewoman of hers insisted, “No, my lady, it is Lord Shigehira.”
“Then his head is among the others!” She remained desperately anxious.
(speech)
On the thirteenth, Nakayori of the police went to the Rokuj riverbank to receive the heads. Noriyori and Yoshitsune asked Cloistered Emperor Go-Shirakawa to have them paraded northward up Higashi-no-tin Avenue and hung in the trees before the prison gate. Uncertain how to proceed, the sovereign discussed the matter with the chancellor, the left and right ministers, the palace minister, and a grand counselor, Tadachika.
These five senior nobles reached unanimous agreement:
“No precedent authorizes parading the head of a senior noble through the streets.
Moreover, these gentlemen were the former emperor’s223 commoner relatives,
and they gave long service to the imperial house.
You cannot approve this request.”
The decision therefore forbade a parade of heads.
However, Noriyori and Yoshitsune pressed their case further.
(song)
“In Hgen, long ago, these men
stood against our grandfather,
Tameyoshi, and, in Heiji
against our father, Yoshitomo.
To placate our sovereign’s anger
and to cleanse our forefathers’ shame,
at the risk of our own lives
we have destroyed the emperor’s foes.
If we may not parade these Heike heads through the streets,
what warning hereafter will serve to deter evildoers?”
The two put their case so forcefully that His Cloistered Eminence yielded.
The parade of heads went forward.
The onlookers could not even count them.
Past attendance at the palace
now caused many to quake with fear.
No witness to the spectacle
failed to taste pity and sorrow.
Saitgo and Saitroku,
servants assigned to Rokudai,
Lord Koremori’s little son,
worried so about their master
that the two of them, in disguise,
went to see the heads parade past
and recognized many of them,
but neither saw Koremori’s.
Nevertheless in shock and grief
they could not restrain floods of tears
that they feared others might notice.
They hastened back to Daikakuji.
“What? Tell me! What did you see?” their mistress asked.
“Moromori’s head was the only one we saw from among Lord Shigemori’s sons.”
They went on to name the others.
“My family—all of them!” she cried in a storm of weeping.
After a moment Saitgo spoke, struggling against further tears. “I have been in hiding the past year or two,” he said, “and few people know me. I would have stayed for a more thorough look, but I ran into someone who knew the whole story. ‘In the recent clash, Lord Shigemori’s sons were charged with securing Mount Mikusa, on the Harima-Tanba border,’ he told me, ‘but after Kur Yoshitsune defeated them, they—Sukemori, Arimori, and Tadafusa—put to sea at Takasago in Harima and sailed from there to Yashima in Sanuki. For some reason Moromori is the only brother who stayed behind to be killed at Ichi-no-tani.’ I then asked what had happened to Lord Koremori. He answered, ‘He fell gravely ill before the battle and crossed over to Yashima. He was never at Ichi-no-tani.’ He told me everything.”
“He must have been sick with worry about us,” the lady said.
“Every day when the wind blows,
I picture him at sea and tremble.
Talk of battle leaves me faint,
imagining him being killed.
And now he is so very ill,
who is there to look after him?
Oh, how I long to learn more!”
And her little son and daughter:
“But why did you never ask
what really is wrong with him?”
Their concern was sad and sweet.
They felt about Lord Koremori exactly as he felt about them.
“They must be so worried about me, in the city!” he said.
“No, my head is not on parade,
but I could just as well have drowned or died of an arrow wound.
They cannot possibly assume that I am still alive!
How I wish I could let them know that my dewdrop life still lingers!”
Such were his thoughts, and in this spirit he sent a man of his up to the capital.
He wrote three letters.
The first of these was to his wife.
“No doubt,” he wrote, “the capital
so teems with countless enemies
that
you hardly know where to hide,
and having the children with you
must make this all the more painful.
How I would love to bring you here,
so that we might share the same fate!
But whatever may become of me,
I simply could not subject you to that.”
He wrote at length, and at the end
he added this single poem:
What reunion, when,
awaits us, I cannot say;
let these spindrift lines
gathered from my tide-borne brush
be your memory of me.
To each of the children, he wrote the same message: “How are you managing to pass the time? I promise to bring you here very soon!” His man took these letters on up to their destination. They renewed his wife’s grief.
Four or five days later, he begged leave to return, and in tears she wrote her reply. The children, too, dipped the brush to write their own. “What answer should we write to Father?” they asked.
“Why, whatever you like” was all she could think of to say.
So they did, each the same: “Why have you still not had us join you? We love you! We want to be with you! Please, have us come to you soon!”
The messenger took their letters back to Yashima. Koremori read the children’s first. He seemed more downcast than ever.
“I do not have it in me now,”
he said, “to spurn this sullied world;
the ties of love are just too strong.
I have no wish for the Pure Land.
Rather I will cross the mountains,
make my way up to the city,
visit my dear ones a last time,
then take my life. That will be best.”
He spoke amid streaming tears.
2. The Gentlewoman at the Palace
On the fourteenth, Lord Shigehira, taken alive, was paraded eastward along Rokuj.
His carriage bore a small, eight-petal flower motif.
The blinds were raised, and the windows on both sides stood open.
Doi no Jir Sanehira, in light armor over a tan hitatare,
commanded the thirty guards who rode before and behind the carriage.
People of every degree, from all over the capital, came to watch.
“Poor man!” they said. “What karma was his, to make him deserve this?
That this should happen to him, of all Kiyomori’s many sons!
His father and mother both cherished him, and all the Heike esteemed him.
Whenever he called on the emperor, reigning or retired,
everyone, young or old, gave him courteous welcome.
He burned the temples of Nara, though—this must be retribution.”
The carriage moved on to the riverbank, then turned back.
They put Shigehira in a chapel near the Hachij-Horikawa crossing—
one formerly owned by the late counselor Fujiwara no Ienari.
Doi Sanehira mounted guard.
The cloistered emperor’s envoy, the chamberlain Sadanaga, arrived.
In red, he carried sword and baton.
Shigehira wore a tall eboshi hat
and an indigo-dyed hitatare
dappled with spots of darker blue.
He had never given a thought
to Sadanaga in bygone days,
but the fellow struck him this time
as a very minion from hell,
come to deal harshly with the damned.
“His Cloistered Eminence has this to say to you,” Sadanaga announced:
“‘If you wish to return to Yashima, get in touch with all of the Heike.
They are to restore the three regalia to the capital.
If they do, then yes, you may go back there.’
That is the burden of his message.”
Shigehira replied, “Not for the lives of a thousand or ten thousand Shigehiras
would Lord Munemori or any man of the Heike trade away the regalia—
although I suppose that my mother might, being a woman.
However, I shrink from rejecting His Cloistered Eminence’s wish out of hand.
I shall pass his message on and see what response it receives.”
Heizzaemon Shigekuni went to represent him personally,
and it was Hanakata, one of the sovereign’s servants, who bore the formal decree.
No private letters being allowed, all messages were to be delivered orally.
One of the messages went to his wife,
Lady Dainagon-no-suke:
“Together under distant skies,
I gave you comfort, and you me;
how miserable you must be now,
when life has torn us each from each!
The bond between us remains whole,
I assure you, and I promise
that in the lives that lie before us,
I will be born with you again.”
He wept as he spoke his message.
Shigekuni swallowed tears and set out.
Shigehira had long retained in his service a man named Moku Uma-no-j Tomotoki. Although currently serving the Hachij Princess, Tomotoki went to Doi Sanehira and said, “I served Lord Shigehira for many years and should properly have accompanied him to the west, but I could not do so because by then I had already joined Her Highness’s staff. Today, however, standing among the spectators on the avenue, I found the sight too painful to watch. I request leave to go to him one last time, if I may, to talk over the old days with him and to console him a little. I am not much of a warrior and never followed him into battle, but I used to serve him day in and day out. If you nonetheless suspect my motives, please take charge of this dagger of mine and make this one exception for me.”
Doi Sanehira was a kind man.
“You could hardly get up to much alone,” he answered, “but even so…”
He asked for the dagger, and Tomotoki gave it into his care.
Tomotoki, very pleased,
hurried in to see Shigehira.
He found him visibly downcast—
in fact, so thoroughly wilted
that Tomotoki could only weep.
Shigehira, when he saw him,
thought him a dream within a dream
and remained speechless. He only wept.
Sometime later, after they had talked over past and present, Shigehira asked,
“Now, that gentlewoman you used to take letters to for me—
do you know whether she is still at the palace?”
“I gather that she is.”
“She had no letter from me when we went down to the west,
not even a last word or two, and to my shame
she must believe that I was lying when I swore to love her forever.
I want very much to get a letter to her.
Will you take one and find her for me?”
“I will indeed, my lord,” Tomotoki replied.
Hugely relieved, Shigehira wrote the letter at once and gave it to him.
“What letter is this?” the guards demanded to know. “We cannot let it go.”
“Show them,” said Shigehira. Tomotoki did so.
“No problem there,” the guards declared, and returned it.
Tomotoki went off with it to the palace,
but it was daytime and there were too many people about.
He spent the day concealed in a shed nearby,
then went to stand by the back entrance to the gentlewomen’s rooms.
There he overheard a voice that sounded like hers, saying,
“Of all the people in this world,
how awful that Shigehira
should have been taken prisoner
and put like that on public display!
Everyone says this is what he gets
for having burned Nara. So does he.
‘It was not actually my idea,’
he told me. ‘Those scoundrels around me—
they are the ones who set t
he fires
and burned down the temple buildings.
As beads of dew gather into drops
that drip down the trunk of the tree,
the blame will fall on me alone,
I know it will!’ Those were his words,
and all too clearly he was right!”
She wept bitterly as she spoke.
Tomotoki, struck with pity, saw he had found a companion in grief.
“I beg your pardon!” he called, and she asked, “Where are you from?”
“I bring you a letter from Lord Shigehira.”
In the past she had always kept out of sight,
but now, no doubt moved by passionate feeling,
she came running out, crying, “Where is it? Where?”
She took the letter with her own hands and read it on the spot.
Shigehira had written at length how he had been captured in the west
and how, as things now stood, he might never see the morrow.
At the end he had added this poem:
River of salt tears!
As I am, I spread abroad
a most dismal fame,
yet for all that I still long
for one last moment with you.
The lady, at a loss for words,
slipped it into the fold at her breast
and went back in to weep her fill.
In time she collected herself to write the required answer.
She described her worry and pain during all the time he had been gone.
All because of you,
I, too, spread abroad these days
a most dismal fame,
yet I would gladly, with you,
sink into the ocean depths.
Tomotoki took Lord Shigehira her reply. As before, the guards demanded to read it, and Shigehira allowed them to do so.
“Fine,” they said, and returned it to him.
Now he read it himself. A wave of feeling swept through him. “I was with this gentlewoman for years,” he said to Doi Sanehira, “and there is something I simply must tell her, one last time, in person.”
In his kindness Sanehira replied, “If all you really want is to spend a moment with this lady, then I see no objection.” He authorized the meeting.
Shigehira gladly borrowed a carriage and sent it for her.
She boarded it without delay and came straight to him.
The news that it had drawn up to the veranda brought him out to greet her.