by VIKING ADULT
till sixty or seventy mounted warriors
Musashib Benkei takes the captured Tosab back to Yoshitsune’s residence.
overwhelmed Tosab’s assault.
They so laid into the attackers
that few of the enemy survived;
the greater number died by the sword.
Tosab, who only barely escaped, took refuge in the wilds of Mount Kurama—
wilds that Yoshitsune knew well, having once lived among them.
He had Tosab seized and brought to his residence the next day.
Apparently the man had been hiding in the ravine called Sj-ga-tani.
They dragged him into the court before the middle gate,
and there he sat, in a blue-black hitatare and a black cowl.
Yoshitsune grinned. “This is what you get for swearing all those oaths,” he said.
Unfazed, Tosab sat up and laughed loudly.
“Yes,” he said, “I swore falsely, and that did me in.”
“To honor the orders of your lord,”
Yoshitsune then went on,
“you gave no thought to your own life.
That is extremely brave of you.
If you prefer to stay alive,
I could send you back to Kamakura.
Is that what you wish me to do?”
“The very idea is preposterous,”
Tosab answered. “If I did,
do you imagine for one moment
that my lord would allow me to live?
‘You are a monk, I know,’ he told me, ‘but you are the man to finish him.’
Once he had spoken his order, my life was his. Could I take it back?
No, just be good enough to behead me now.”
“Very well,” answered Yoshitsune.
“Cut off his head!” They took him out
to the riverbank at Rokuj,
and there they did what they had to do.
There was no one who did not praise him.
5. Yoshitsune’s Flight
Now, there was one Adachi no Shinzabur, a man-of-all-work.
Yoritomo had given him to Yoshitsune with the assurance,
“This fellow is a complete nobody, of course, but he is unusually sharp.”
Yoritomo ordered Adachi to keep an eye on what Yoshitsune was up to
and to report to him whatever he noted.
After the execution of Tosab, Adachi raced day and night down to Kamakura,
where he informed Yoritomo of what had happened.
Yoritomo commanded Noriyori, his younger brother,
to lead a punitive force straight up to the capital.
Noriyori declined repeatedly to do so,
but Yoritomo insisted so forcefully that in the end he gave in.
Noriyori appeared fully armed before Yoritomo to bid him farewell.
“Don’t you go and follow Kur’s example,” Yoritomo warned him.
Noriyori was so frightened that he put off arms and armor then and there
and gave up his expedition to the city.
He wrote out every day ten oaths
swearing undying loyalty
and every night read them aloud:
a hundred days, a thousand oaths
for his brother, Yoritomo.
But no, they still were not enough.
Yoritomo had him executed.
Yoshitsune learned next that a punitive force under Hj no Shir Tokimasa was on its way. He decided to flee toward Kyushu, and in that connection he appealed for help to Ogata no Sabur Koreyoshi, who was powerful enough to have driven the Heike from the nine provinces of the island.
“All right,” Koreyoshi answered, “one of your men, Kikuchi no Jir Takanao, is an old enemy of mine. Give him to me, and I will cut off his head. Then you may count on me.”
Yoshitsune complied at once. Takanao was taken out to the Rokuj riverbank and beheaded. Koreyoshi then upheld his side of the bargain.
On the second of the eleventh month, Yoshitsune called on the cloistered emperor
and through Yasutsune, the lord of the Treasury, addressed him as follows:
“It is unnecessary at this juncture to rehearse
the loyal service that I have humbly rendered Your Cloistered Eminence in the past.
In the present, however, slander issuing from among the men in Kamakura
has moved Yoritomo to order me killed.
I mean therefore to go down for a while to Kyushu.
For that reason I should be extremely grateful
if you were to have your office provide me with a letter of support.”
The sovereign’s response was to wonder what consequences might follow
if his having issued such a document came to Yoritomo’s attention.
He therefore assembled the senior nobles in council.
All present agreed as follows:
“Should Yoshitsune remain in the capital and a large Kanto army then invade the city,
endless violence and turmoil would ensue.
However, if Yoshitsune were to remove himself to some distant region,
that danger would for some time cease to exist.”
Ogata Koreyoshi, the men of the Usuki, the Betsugi, and the Matsura leagues—
indeed every influential Kyushu warrior—therefore received a decree
requiring obedience to their commander, Minamoto no Yoshitsune.
The next day, the third, at the hour of the hare, [ca. 6 A.M.]
Yoshitsune left the capital with some five hundred mounted men.
His departure caused no disturbance whatever.
A warrior of the Settsu Genji,
ta no Tar Yorimoto,
declared, “Must I allow this man
to pass my gate and never shoot
against him one single arrow?”
At a place named Kawarazu,
he caught up with Yoshitsune,
attacked, and joined battle with him.
Yoshitsune had five hundred men.
Yorimoto’s small force of sixty
quickly ended up surrounded.
“Get them, men! Let no one escape!”
the cry went up. The fierce attack
left Yorimoto himself wounded
and most of his retainers killed.
Yorimoto beat a hasty retreat,
with an arrow in his mount’s belly.
Yoshitsune took many heads
and hung them up for the god of war.
“A fine start, that!” he said, pleased.
He put to sea from Daimotsu-no-ura,
only to meet a westerly gale that drove him ashore at Sumiyoshi.
From there he sought refuge in the Yoshino wilds,
but the Yoshino monks attacked, so he fled to Nara.
When the Nara monks, too, attacked, he made his way back to the city
and set off from there toward the far north.
He had started out from the capital with a dozen women,
whom he abandoned at Sumiyoshi.
On the sand, under the pines, they stumbled about or lay weeping, forlorn,
until the Sumiyoshi priests
took pity on them in their plight
and sent them back to the city.
The boats carrying Yoshitsune’s most trusted lieutenants—
his uncle Shida no Sabur Yoshinori, Jūr Yukiie, Ogata no Sabur Koreyoshi—
were blown onto shores and islands hither and yon,
and none knew the fate of the others.
That sudden, violent wind from the west
seemed the work of the angry Heike dead.
On the seventh of the eleventh month, Hj no Shir Tokimasa,
representing Lord Yoritomo in Kamakura,
reached the capital at the head of sixty thousand mounted men.
The next day, the eighth, he called on the cloistered emperor
to urge pursuit and suppression of Yoshitsune, Yukiie, and Yoshinori.
The sovereign grant
ed the decree on the spot.
Just a few days earlier, on the second, at Yoshitsune’s request,
his office had issued a call for rebellion against Yoritomo.
Now, on the eighth of the very same month,
a decree from him directed that Yoshitsune be crushed.
So it goes, alas, in this world where, morning and evening, everything changes.
6. The Yoshida Grand Counselor
Meanwhile Yoritomo applied to the cloistered emperor, Go-Shirakawa,
for appointment as constable over all of Japan
and authority to levy military provisions from every quarter acre of land.
The sovereign remarked in response,
“According to a passage in the Sutra of Innumerable Meanings,
the reward for destroying the king’s enemy has always been half of a state,
but Japan has never known such a case.
Yoritomo’s demand exceeds his deserts.”
However, the council of senior nobles conceded the merit of the request.
Yoritomo’s application was approved.
Yoritomo assigned a warden to each province and a steward to each and every estate. It was no longer possible to conceal a single blade of rice. In such matters it was through the Yoshida grand counselor Tsunefusa, among all the city’s senior nobles, that Yoritomo communicated with the court. This Tsunefusa was known for strict fairness. Once the Genji had seized power, Heike allies began appealing to him in letters and through messengers and flattering him this way or that, but he never budged.
So it was that when the Heike, in their heyday,
confined His Cloistered Eminence to the Toba Mansion
and assigned to the mansion two superintendents,
they chose the Kadenokji counselor and this Tsunefusa.286
A son of the supernumerary controller Mitsufusa,
Tsunefusa lost his father in his twelfth year but rose swiftly nonetheless.
He held at one and the same time
three key posts and rose from there
to head chamberlain, then consultant,
grand controller, grand counselor
at the senior second rank,
and the post of Dazaifu deputy.
He rose past many; none rose past him.
Yes, a man’s worth or worthlessness
never leaves any doubt in the end,
just as an awl pierces a bag.
He was a most remarkable man.
7. Rokudai
Hj Tokimasa issued an announcement:
“Whoever brings forward a scion of the house of Taira,
he shall have the reward that he desires.”
The people of the city, who knew their way about, coveted this reward.
They cruelly went looking for Heike children and found many.
They would present the pretty, pale-skinned son of any nobody,
describing him as Captain So-and-So’s boy, or Lieutenant Whatnot’s,
and claiming, despite the parents’ tears and entreaties,
“His guardian identified him,” or “His nurse says that’s who he is.”
Tokimasa’s men drowned or buried the babies
and smothered or stabbed older boys to death.
No words can describe the mothers’ grief,
the desperate laments of the nurses.
Tokimasa, a father himself
and a grandfather many times over,
hated to do it, but there it is:
Such are the exigencies of duty.
Of special interest was Rokudai, Koremori’s son and a grandson of Shigemori.
The scion of the senior Heike line, he was now growing up.
Tokimasa sent out search parties to capture him, but without success.
He was preparing to return to Kamakura
when a woman appeared at Rokuhara to report,
“West of here, beyond Henjji and north of the mountain temple Daikakuji,
there is a place named Shbudani.
Lord Koremori’s wife is hiding there with her son and daughter.”
Tokimasa sent a man straight there to reconnoiter.
He discovered, living in one of the lodges,
a group of women and children clearly anxious to keep out of sight.
Through a crack in the fence, he saw a white puppy come bounding out,
followed by a handsome boy eager to catch it.
A woman, apparently the boy’s nurse, cried,
“Oh, no! Someone may see you!” and hastily drew him inside.
The man realized that this must be the boy he was after and raced back to report.
Tokimasa hurried there the next day,
surrounded the place, and sent a man in to announce,
“Hj Tokimasa, representing Lord Yoritomo,
has learned that Rokudai, the son of Taira no Koremori, is living here.
Produce him immediately!”
Rokudai’s mother all but fainted.
Saitgo and Saitroku
went running about for a look
and saw warriors on all sides—
they could not possibly get him out.
His nurse collapsed before her mistress,
wailing in agonized distress.
They had been keeping their talk low,
hoping always to pass unnoticed,
but now everyone in the lodge
gave voice to loud lamentation.
Tokimasa, moved to pity,
simply waited, wiping his eyes.
Some time passed; then he spoke again.
“The world is not yet at peace, you see,
and I have come for this young man lest anyone start new trouble.
He will come to no harm. Please send him out at once.”
Rokudai said to his mother,
“There is no escape, you know.
Let me go out there right away.
If warriors come bursting in
searching for me, they will find you
in a most unfortunate state.
Even if I go with them now, I will request leave soon enough and be back. Please do not be so upset.” He did his poor best to reassure her, but he had to comply.
In tears his mother smoothed his hair and dressed him. Just before sending him out, she gave him a beautiful little rosary made of black sandalwood beads. “Call the Name to the end,” she said, “whenever the end may come, and go on to paradise.”
Her son took it and gave her this touching reply: “Now that I must leave you, Mother, all I want is to go and join my father.” At these words,
his young sister, now in her tenth year, spoke up in turn.
“I want to go and join Father, too!” she said, and started out at a run.
Her nurse stopped her from going farther.
This year was only Rokudai’s twelfth,
though he seemed several years older,
such were his looks and dignity.
Lest the foe detect some weakness,
he kept his sleeves pressed to his eyes,
but, alas, the tears overflowed.
He had to board a palanquin
wholly surrounded by warriors.
Saitgo and Saitroku
likewise went with the palanquin,
to left and right. Tokimasa
ordered his men off two fresh horses.
which he then offered the pair,
but both of them refused to ride.
All the way from Daikakuji
to Rokuhara, barefoot, they ran.
Mother and nurse appealed to heaven
or fell in agony to the ground.
The boy’s mother could only weep and lament,
“I hear that lately they have been collecting Heike sons,
then drowning, burying, smothering, or stabbing them to death.
Oh, how, then, are they going to kill my darling boy?
They might behead him at least, if only he were a little older!
Some leav
e a son of theirs with a nurse
and see him only from time to time—
a common practice, though hard to bear
in defiance of parental love.
But, alas, since I bore my son,
I have not let him stray from my side!
Nobody else, so my heart told me,
ever possessed a treasure like him.
Day and night we two cherished him,
until his poor father was lost to me
and I looked for my only comfort
to my children, my constant company.
One is still here, but the other is gone.
What, after this, am I to do?
This has been my enduring fear
these three years past, yet day to day
I never thought to see it happen,
and I have prayed so long meanwhile
to Kannon at Hasedera!287
But no, they did come and take him.
Oh, it is more than I can bear!
I suppose he must be dead by now.”
The night advanced, but her heart was too full, and she could not sleep.
A little later, though, she said to the nurse,
“Just now I dropped off for a moment and dreamed
that he came to me on a white horse.
‘I missed you so badly,’ he said, ‘that I got leave to come back for a while.’
Then he sat down beside me, weeping as though his heart would break.
At that point I awoke and felt about for him, but there was nobody there.
It was a dream, I know, and so short that I wish I had never woken up.”
The nurse wept, too; the night dragged on, and they all but floated away on their tears.
At long last the crier of the hours announced dawn.
Saitroku returned.
“What news? What news do you bring?” the mother asked. They replied, “Nothing has happened yet. Here is his letter.”
She opened it. He had written, “You must be terribly worried. Everything is all right so far. I miss you so much!” It sounded very grown up. After reading it his mother said not a word but instead slipped it into the front fold of her robe and lay facedown. Her misery is all too pitifully easy to imagine.
A good while later, Saitroku said, “Time is passing, and I am worried. I must go back.”
In tears she therefore wrote her answer and gave it to him. Saitroku said good-bye and left.
The nurse, too distraught to sit still, went running out