Katsushirō’s wife, Miyagi, was a woman of arresting beauty, intelligence, and steady disposition. Dismayed to hear that he had bought merchandise and was going to the capital, she used every argument she could think of to dissuade him; but she was helpless before his obstinacy, now worse than ever, and so, despite her misgivings about how she would fare in the future,5 she applied herself with alacrity to his preparations. As they talked together that night about the painful separation to come, she said, “With no one to depend on, my woman’s heart will know the extremities of sadness, wandering as though lost in the fields and mountains.6 Please do not forget me, morning or night, and come back soon. If only I live long enough, I tell myself,7 but in this life we cannot depend on the morrow, and so take pity on me in your stalwart heart.” He replied, “How could I linger in a strange land, riding on a drifting log? I shall return this autumn, when the arrowroot leaf turns over in the wind.8 Be confident and wait for me.” Thus he reassured her; the night sky brightened with dawn; and leaving the East Country, where the roosters crow, he hurried toward the capital.9
In the summer of 1455, the shogun’s deputy in Kamakura, Lord Ashikaga Shigeuji, had a falling out with the family of Uesugi, his own deputy, and so when troops burned his palace to the ground, he took refuge with an ally in Shimōsa. From that moment, the lands east of the barrier were thrown into chaos, and each man did just as he pleased.10 The aged fled to the mountains and hid; the young were conscripted; women and children, hearing the rumors—“They will burn this place today! The enemy will attack tomorrow!”—fled weeping, now east, now west. Katsushirō’s wife, Miyagi, too, wanted to escape, but relying on her husband’s words—“Wait for me this fall”—she lived on, anxiously counting the days. Autumn came, but there was no word, not even in the wind. Sad and resentful that the heart of man proved to be as unreliable as this world itself, she composed in her despondency:
“No one will report my misery, I fear—
oh decorated cock of Meeting Hill, tell him autumn too has passed.“11
And yet she had no way to communicate with him, since many provinces separated them. Men’s hearts grew more villainous in the turbulence of the world. Passersby, noting Miyagi’s beauty, tried to seduce her with comforting words, but, firmly guarding her chastity, she would treat them distantly, close the door, and refuse to meet them. Her maidservant departed; her meager savings melted away; and that year, too, came to a close. The New Year brought no peace. What is more, in the autumn of the old year the shogun had bestowed the flag on Tō no Tsuneyori,12 governor of Shimotsuke and lord of Gujō, Mino Province, who went down to the domain of Shimōsa, made plans with his kinsman Chiba no Sanetane, and attacked; but Shigeuji’s forces defended their position resolutely, and so there was no end in sight. Bandits threw up strongholds here and there, set fires, and pillaged. No haven remained in the Eight Provinces; the losses were appalling.13
Katsushirō accompanied Sasabe to Kyoto and sold all his silk. Because it was an age when the capital delighted in luxury, he made a good profit.14 As he prepared to return to the East Country, word spread that Uesugi troops had toppled the shogun’s deputy and then had pursued and attacked him. Katsushirō’s home village would be the battlefield of Zhoulu, bristling with shields and halberds. Even rumors close at hand are frequently untrue; his home was in a distant land beyond myriad layers of white clouds.15 Anxiously, he left the capital at the start of the Eighth Month. Crossing the pass at Misaka in Kiso, he found that robbers had blocked the road, and to them he lost all his baggage.16 Furthermore, he heard reports that new barrier stations had been established here and there to the east, where even travelers were not allowed to pass. In that case, there would be no way to send any message at all. His house had surely been leveled by the fires of battle. His wife would no longer be alive. His village would have become a den of ogres, he told himself, and so he turned back toward the capital; but as he entered the province of Ōmi, he suddenly felt unwell and came down with a fever. In a place called Musa lived a wealthy man named Kodama Yoshibei.17 This being the birthplace of Sasabe’s wife, Katsushirō pleaded for help; and Kodama did not turn him away, but summoned a physician and devoted himself to Katsushirō’s care. Feeling well again at last, Katsushirō thanked Kodama deeply for his great kindness. He was still unsteady on his feet, however, and so he found himself still there when they greeted the New Year. Presently he made new friends in the town, where he was admired for his unaffected honesty, and formed close ties with Kodama and many others. Thereafter, he would call on Sasabe in the capital and then return to stay with Kodama in Ōmi, and seven years passed like a dream.
In 1461 the struggle between the Hatakeyama brothers in the province of Kawachi showed no sign of ending, and the turmoil approached the capital.18 What is more, corpses piled up in the streets as an epidemic swept through the city in the spring. Thinking that a cosmic epoch must be coming to an end, the people lamented the impermanence of all things.19 Katsushirō pondered his situation: “Reduced to this pointless existence, how long should I drag out my life, and for what, lingering in this distant land, depending on the generosity of people with whom I have no ties of blood? It is my own faithless heart that has let me pass long years and months in a field overgrown with the grass of forgetfulness, unmindful even of the fate of her I left at home.20 Even if she is no longer of this world and has gone to the Land of the Dead, I would seek out her remains and construct a burial mound.” Thus he related his thoughts to those around him and, during a break in the rains of the Fifth Month, said farewell. Traveling for more than ten days, he arrived at his village.
Although the sun had already sunk in the west and the rain clouds were so dark that they seemed about to burst, he doubted he could lose his way, having lived for so long in the village, and so he pushed through the fields of summer; but the jointed bridge of old had fallen into the rapids, so that there could be no sound of a horse’s hoofs;21 he could not find the old paths because the farmland had been abandoned to grow wild, and the houses that used to stand there were gone. Scattered here and there, a few remaining houses appeared to be inhabited, but they bore no resemblance to those in former days. “Which is the house I lived in?” he wondered, standing in confusion, when about forty yards away, he saw, by the light of stars peeking through the clouds, a towering pine that had been riven by lightning. “The tree that marks the eaves of my house!” he cried and joyfully moved forward. The house was unchanged and appeared to be occupied, for lamplight glimmered through a gap in the old door. “Does someone else live here now? Or is she still alive?” His heart pounding, he approached the entrance and cleared his throat. Someone inside heard immediately and asked, “Who is there?” He recognized his wife’s voice, though greatly aged. Terrified that he might be dreaming, he said, “I have come back. How strange that you should still be living here alone, unchanged, in this reed-choked moor!“22 Recognizing his voice, she quickly opened the door. Her skin was dark with grime, her eyes were sunken, and long strands of hair fell loose down her back. He could not believe that she was the same person. Seeing her husband, she burst into wordless tears.
Stunned, Katsushirō could say nothing for a time. Finally he spoke: “I would never have let the years and months slip by had I thought that you were still living here like this. One day years ago, when I was in the capital, I heard of fighting in Kamakura—the shogun’s deputy had been defeated and taken refuge in Shimōsa. The Uesugi were in eager pursuit, people said. The next day, I took my leave from Sasabe and, at the beginning of the Eighth Month, left the capital. As I came along the Kiso road, I was surrounded by a large band of robbers, who took my clothing and all my money. I barely escaped with my life. Then the villagers said that travelers were being stopped at new barriers on the Tōkaidō and Tōsandō.23 They also said that a general had gone down from the capital the day before, joined forces with the Uesugi, and set out for battle in Shimōsa. Our province had long since been razed by fire, and every inch
trampled under horses’ hoofs, they said, and so I could only think that you had been reduced to ashes and dust or had sunk into the sea. Returning to the capital, I lived on the generosity of others for these seven years. Seized in recent days with constant longing, I returned, hoping at least to find your remains, but I never dreamed that you would still be living in this world. I wonder if you might not be the Cloud of Shaman Hill or the Apparition in the Han Palace.“24 Thus he rambled on, tediously repeating himself.
Drying her tears, his wife said, “After I bid you farewell, the world took a dreadful turn, even before the arrival of the autumn I relied on,25 and the villagers abandoned their houses and set out to sea or hid in the mountains. Most of the few who remained had hearts of tigers or wolves and sought, I suppose, to take advantage of me now that I was alone. They tempted me with clever words, but even if I had been crushed like a piece of jade, I would not imitate the perfection of the tile, and so I endured many bitter experiences. The brilliance of the Milky Way heralded the autumn, but you did not return.26 I waited through the winter, I greeted the New Year, and still there was no word. Now I wanted to go to you in the capital, but I knew that a woman could not hope to pass the sealed barrier gates where even men were turned away; and so, with the pine at the eaves, I waited vainly in this house, foxes and owls my companions, until today.27 I am happy now that my long resentment has been dispelled. No one else can know the resentment of one who dies of longing, waiting for another to come.“28 With this, she began to sob again. “The night is short,” he said, comforting her, and they lay down together.
He slept soundly, weary from his long journey and cooled through the night as the paper in the window sipped the pine-breeze. When the sky brightened in the fifth watch of night, he felt chilly, though still in the world of dreams, and groped for the quilt that must have slipped off. A rustling sound wakened him. Feeling something cold dripping on his face, he opened his eyes, thinking that rain was seeping in: the roof had been torn off by the wind, and he could see the waning moon lingering dimly in the sky. The house had lost its shutters. Reeds and plumed grasses grew tall through gaps in the decaying floorboards, and the morning dew dripped from them, saturating his sleeves. The walls were draped with ivy and arrowroot; the garden was buried in creepers—even though fall had not come yet, the house was a wild autumn moor.29 And where, come to think of it, had his wife gone, who had been lying with him? She was nowhere in sight. Perhaps this was the doing of a fox? But the house, though dilapidated in the extreme, was certainly the one he used to live in: from the spacious inner rooms to the rice-storehouse beyond, it still retained the form that he had favored. Dumbfounded, he felt as though he had lost his footing; but then he considered carefully: since the house had become the dwelling place of foxes and raccoon-dogs—a wild moor—perhaps a spirit had appeared before him in the form of his wife. Or had her ghost, longing for him, come back and communed with him? It was just as he had feared. He could not even weep. “I alone am as I was before,” he thought as he walked around.30 In the space that was her bedroom, someone had taken up the floor, piled soil into a mound, and protected the mound from rain and dew. The ghost last night had come from here—the thought frightened him and also made him long for her. In a receptacle for water offerings stood a stick with a sharpened end, and to this was attached a weathered piece of Nasuno paper,31 the writing faded and in places hard to make out, but certainly in his wife’s hand. Without inscribing a dharma name or date, she had, in the form of a waka, movingly stated her feelings at the end:
“Nevertheless, I thought, and so deceived
I have lived on until today!“32
Realizing now for the first time that his wife was dead, he cried out and collapsed. It added to his misery that he did not even know what year, what month and day, she had met her end. Someone must know, he thought, and so, drying his tears, he stepped outside. The sun had climbed high in the sky. He went first to the nearest house and met the master, a man he had never seen before. On the contrary, the man asked him what province he had come from. Katsushirō addressed him respectfully: “I was the master of the house next door, but to make my living I spent seven years in the capital. When I came back last night, the house had fallen into ruins and no one was living there. Apparently my wife has left this world, for I found a burial mound, but there is no date, which makes my grief all the more intense. If you know, sir, please tell me.” The man said, “A sad story indeed. I came to live here only about one year ago and know nothing of the time when she was living there. It would seem that she lost her life long before that. All the people who used to live in this village fled when the fighting began; most of those who live here now moved in from somewhere else. There is one old man who seems to have lived here for a long time. Occasionally he goes to that house and performs a service to comfort the spirit of the departed. This old man must know the date.” Katsushirō said, “And where does the old man live?” The man told him, “He owns a field thickly planted with hemp, about two hundred yards from here, toward the beach, and there he lives in a small hut.” Rejoicing, Katsushirō went to the house, where he found an old man of about seventy, terribly bent at the waist, sitting in front of a hearth on a round, wicker cushion and sipping tea. Recognizing Katsushirō, the old man said, “Why have you come back so late, my boy?” Katsushirō saw that he was the old man called Uruma, who had lived in the village for a long time.
“Leaning on his staff, he led the way.”
Katsushirō congratulated the old man on his longevity and then related everything in detail, from going to the capital and remaining there against his true desires, to the strange events of the night before, and expressed his deep gratitude to the old man for raising a burial mound and performing services there. He could not stop his tears. The old man said, “After you went far away, soldiers began to brandish shields and halberds in the summer; the villagers ran off; the young were conscripted; and, as a result, the mulberry fields turned quickly into grasslands for foxes and rabbits.33 Only your virtuous wife, honoring your pledge to return in the fall, would not leave home. I, too, stayed inside and hid, because my legs had grown weak and I found it hard to walk two hundred yards. I have seen many things in my years, but I was deeply moved by the courage of that young woman, even when the land had become the home of tree spirits and other ghastly monsters.34 Autumn passed, the New Year came, and on the tenth day of the Eighth Month of that year she departed. In my pity for her, I carried soil with my own hands, buried the coffin, and, using as a grave marker the brush marks she left at the end, performed a humble service with offerings of water; but I could not inscribe the date, not knowing how to write, and I had no way to seek a posthumous name, as the temple is far away. Five years have passed. Hearing your story now, I am sure that the ghost of your virtuous wife came and told you of her long-held resentment. Go there again and carefully perform a memorial service.” Leaning on his staff, he led the way. Together they prostrated themselves before the mound, raised their voices in lamentation, and passed the night invoking the Buddha’s name.
Because they could not sleep, the old man told a story: “Long, long ago, even before my grandfather’s grandfather was born, there lived in this village a beautiful girl named Tegona of Mama.35 Since her family was poor, she wore a hempen robe with a blue collar; her hair was uncombed, and she wore no shoes; but with a face like the full moon and a smile like a lovely blossom, she surpassed the fine ladies in the capital, wrapped in their silk brocades woven with threads of gold. Men in the village, of course, and even officials from the capital and men in the next province, all came courting and longed for her. This caused great pain for Tegona, who sank deep in thought and, the better to requite the love of many men, threw herself into the waves of the inlet here. People in ancient times sang of her in their poems and passed down her story as an example of the sadness of the world. When I was a child, my mother told the story charmingly, and I found it very moving; but how much sadder is the he
art of this departed one than the young heart of Tegona of old!” He wept as he spoke, for the aged cannot control their tears. Katsushirō’s grief needs no description. Hearing this tale, he expressed his feelings in the clumsy words of a rustic:
“Tegona of Mama, in the distant past—
this much they must have longed for her, Tegona of Mama.”
It can be said that an inability to express even a fragment of one’s thoughts is more moving than the feelings of one skilled with words.
This is a tale passed down by merchants who traveled often to that province and heard the story there.
NOTES
1. Murasaki Shikibu, Genji monogatari, ed. Yamagishi Tokuhei, Nihon koten bungaku taikei, vol. 14 (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1958), p. 41.
2. Yoshida Kenkō, Essays in Idleness: The “Tsurezuregusa” of Kenkō, trans. Donald Keene (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), pp. 117–118.
3. George Sansom provides a good summary of the “absurd situation” in A History of Japan, vol. 2, 1334–1615 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1961), p. 241.
4. Sasabe was a village northwest of Kyoto, later incorporated into the city of Fukuchiyama; Ashikaga, in Ibaraki Prefecture, north of Tokyo, was noted for its dyed silk.
5. An allusion to an anonymous, alternative version of Man’yōshū, no. 2985:
Though I know not how I will fare in the [catalpa bow] future, my heart is with you.
6. An allusion to a poem by Sosei, who, having taken holy vows, wonders where to live away from society:
Where shall I loathe this world?
Tales of Moonlight and Rain Page 10