One of the peaks they labeled the Shingū, or New Shrine, another the Hongū, or Original Shrine, and various spots approaching these they called the such-and-such lesser shrine, giving them names taken from the subsidiary shrines of the Kumano area. And then each day, with Priest Yasuyori as the leader and the Tanba lesser captain accompanying him, they would carry out their “pilgrimage to Kumano,” praying for a return to the capital. “Hail to the Gongen Kongō Dōji,” they intoned in supplication. “We implore you, take pity on us! Permit us once more to go back to our old homes and see our wives and children again!”
1. The Five Precepts are against killing, stealing, lasciviousness, lying, and drinking alcohol.
2. The Five Standards are benevolence, righteousness, decorum, wisdom, and sincerity.
3. Amaterasu is the tutelary deity of the imperial family.
4. Amanokoyane is the tutelary deity of the Fujiwara clan, the most powerful aristocratic family for much of the Heian period.
5. This is an allusion to the Book of Songs (Shijing), the oldest collection of poetry in China and one of the Confucian classics.
6. Hachiman, who was worshiped as both a Japanese god (kami) and a bodhisattva, was the tutelary deity of warriors.
7. Prince Shōtoku (574–622), who served as regent during the reign of Empress Suiko (r. 592–628), was a figure renowned for both his political and his religious activities. His Seventeen-Article Constitution, which consists of injunctions for good government based on Confucian and Buddhist principles, was written in 604.
8. According to Buddhist mythology, Mount Sumeru, which rises in the center of this universe, is the highest mountain in the world.
9. The Hosshō-ji temple, which was founded in 1077 by Emperor Shirakawa, was the first and largest of a group of temples known as the Six Victory Temples (because each contained the character for “victory” in its name). They were built to the immediate east of the capital and had strong ties to various retired emperors until the thirteenth century.
KENREIMON’IN (Taira): daughter of Kiyomori; eventually gives birth to Emperor Takakura’s child, the future Emperor Antoku.
KIYOMORI (Taira): Taira clan head.
NARITSUNE (Fujiwara): son of Narichika; exiled for his father’s involvement in the Shishi-no-tani conspiracy.
NORIMORI (Taira): son of Tadamori, brother of Kiyomori, and father-in-law of Naritsune; intervenes on Naritsune’s behalf.
SHUNKAN: bishop, high official at the Hosshō-ji temple, and Shishi-no-tani conspirator; exiled and never pardoned.
YASUYORI (Taira): minor member of the Taira clan and Shishi-no-tani conspirator.
The Pardon (3:1)
On the first day of the first month of the second year of the Jishō era [1178], New Year’s felicitations were offered at the palace of the retired emperor, and on the fourth day Emperor Takakura paid a ceremonial visit to the retired emperor, his father. These ritual activities were carried out in the customary manner. But the retired emperor had not yet gotten over his anger at the fact that the preceding summer the senior counselor Narichika and many other of his intimates had been executed or sent into exile. He took little interest in government affairs and appeared to be in a disgruntled mood. As for Prime Minister Kiyomori, ever since Yukitsuna1 had informed him of the plot against him, he had viewed the retired emperor with great suspicion. Although on the surface his relations with the retired emperor remained unchanged, behind the forced smiles lurked an attitude of deep distrust.
On the seventh day of the First Month a comet appeared in the eastern sky. It was of the type called Chi You’s Banner or Red Breath.2 On the eighteenth day the comet increased in brilliance.
Meanwhile, it was learned that Kiyomori’s daughter (later Kenreimon’in), who at this time was still called empress, had taken ill, a fact that greatly upset the members of the court and the populace as a whole. Sutra recitations for her recovery were initiated at various temples, and government officials were dispatched to present offerings at shrines here and there. The physicians brought out all their medicines; the yin-yang diviners plied their skills; and every sort of exoteric and esoteric Buddhist ritual was performed. Then it became known that this was no ordinary illness but that in fact the consort was pregnant. Emperor Takakura was eighteen at the time and the consort was twenty-two, but until now they had not been blessed with either son or daughter. How splendid if a prince should be born! thought the members of the Heike clan, and they displayed such jubilation that one would suppose the happy event had already taken place. The comment of the other clans was “Now the Heike will really be in their glory—the child is sure to be a boy!” …
When Norimori heard the reports of the consort’s continued illness, he said to Shigemori, the lord of the Komatsu mansion, “Many different types of prayers have been offered for the consort’s wellbeing. But I cannot help feeling that a general pardon at this point would be the most effective. If the men who have been exiled to Kikai-ga-shima were recalled, the blessings and benefits would surely be greater than those that could be achieved by any other means.”
Shigemori thereupon approached his father Kiyomori on the matter. “Norimori keeps pleading with me to recall his son-in-law Naritsune from exile, and I am much moved by his appeals. If these reports of the consort’s continued illness are true, her troubles must have been caused by the angry spirit of the deceased Narichika. And if you hope to placate his angry spirit, then above all you should recall his son Naritsune from exile while the latter is still alive. Once these doubts and pleadings of others are appeased, our own affairs will go smoothly. By granting their wishes, we will ensure the swift fulfillment of our own wishes; the consort will give birth to a male child, as we all hope she will; and our family will enjoy even greater glory than in the past!”
Kiyomori replied in a tone much milder than that he recently had been accustomed to use. “In that case,” he said, “what should we do about Shunkan and Yasuyori?”
“If you recall Naritsune, you should recall the others as well. To leave any one of them behind would surely invite blame.”
“I have no objection to recalling Yasuyori,” said Kiyomori. “But Shunkan owes everything he has attained in life to my help and intervention. And yet he turns around and uses his own Shishi-no-tani villa as a base of operations, seizing every chance he can to plot his nefarious schemes. I could never think of pardoning Shunkan!”
Shigemori returned home and summoned his uncle Norimori. “Your son-in-law Naritsune will be pardoned. You need have no more worry on that score.”
Norimori pressed his palms together in a gesture of joy and thanksgiving. “When Naritsune was sent into exile, he kept pleading with me and asking tearfully why I couldn’t intercede for him. It was a heartrending sight!”
“I can well imagine how you felt,” replied Shigemori. “Anyone is bound to feel deeply concerned when a son is involved. I will do all I can for you when I speak to my father.” With that, he withdrew to an inner room.
So at last it was decided that the exiles in Kikai-ga-shima should be recalled, and Kiyomori issued a letter of pardon and dispatched it by messenger from the capital. Norimori was so overjoyed that he sent a private messenger of his own to accompany the official envoy on his way. They had orders to proceed as rapidly as possible, traveling day and night. But the sea-lanes were not always favorable to their progress, and they had to battle adverse winds and waves. Thus although they left the capital in the last third of the Seventh Month, they did not arrive at Kikai-ga-shima until around the twentieth of the Ninth Month.
The Foot-Drumming (3:2)
The messenger dispatched with the letter of pardon was Tan Zaemon-no-jō Motoyasu. As he and his men stepped ashore from the boat, they began inquiring here and there. “Are the men who were exiled from the capital here?—the Tanba lesser captain, the Hosshō-ji administrator, the Taira police commissioner?”
Naritsune and Yasuyori had gone as usual to worship at the Kumano Shrine th
ey had built and were not around. Only Shunkan was there and when he heard these inquiries, he exclaimed, “Have I longed so much that now I’m dreaming? Or is this the Devil of the Sixth Heaven3 come to play tricks on my mind? I can’t believe this is true!” Stumbling, staggering, he scrambled forward as fast as his feet would take him. “What do you want? My name is Shunkan and I was exiled from the capital!” he announced.
The messenger took the prime minister’s letter of pardon out of the pouch that was hanging around the neck of one of his servants and handed it to Shunkan.
Opening the letter, Shunkan read: “The grave offense for which exile to a distant island was imposed is hereby pardoned. Prepare to return to the capital with all possible speed. Because of the prayers for the imperial consort’s safe delivery, a general pardon has been issued. Accordingly, Lesser Captain Naritsune and Priest Yasuyori are granted pardon.”
That was all the letter contained—no mention whatsoever of Shunkan. He thought that perhaps his name was on the outside cover of the document, but he could not find it there. He read the letter over from beginning to end, from end to beginning, but he could find only two names, no trace of a third.
After a while, Naritsune and Yasuyori appeared. But whether Naritsune read the letter of pardon or Yasuyori read it, they could find only two names, never three. Perhaps the whole thing is a dream, they thought, and yet it seemed real. Surely it must be real—yet it was still like a dream. Moreover, although the messenger brought with him various letters for Naritsune and Yasuyori that had been entrusted to him by persons in the capital, there was not so much as a note of inquiry addressed to Bishop Shunkan. Have all the people I know somehow vanished from the capital? thought Shunkan, more distressed than ever.
“All three of us were accused of the same crime and sentenced to exile in the same place!” he exclaimed. “Why, then, when a pardon is issued, should only two men be recalled and the other left behind? Have the Heike suffered some lapse of memory? Or did the scribe who wrote the letter make a mistake? What is the meaning of this?” he demanded, gazing up at the heavens, flinging himself on the ground, weeping and moaning, little as such antics could help him.
“The fact that I’m here like this is all because of your father’s poisonous schemes!” cried Shunkan in agony, clinging desperately to Naritsune’s sleeve. “You can’t pretend my troubles are no concern of yours! Even if I can’t return to the capital without a pardon, at least take me in the boat as far as Kyushu. While you two were here, just as the swallows come in spring and the wild geese visit the paddy fields in autumn, so from time to time I received word of what was happening in the capital. But now if you leave me, how can I ever hope for such news?”
In an effort to comfort him, Naritsune replied, “I understand exactly how you must feel. And happy as I am that we two have been recalled to the capital, I hardly have the heart to make the journey when I see you in this distraught condition. But the envoy has said that it is impossible to take you with us. And if word should get abroad that three men left the island when there was not a pardon for three, I’m afraid there might be real trouble. It’s best if I go back to the capital first and talk to people. I will see what sort of mood the prime minister is in and then send someone to fetch you. Meanwhile, you must wait here patiently as you have in the past. The important thing is to look after your health. You’ve been skipped over this time, but sooner or later you are certain to be pardoned!” To these words of assurance, Shunkan responded only with tears, without caring who saw.
A bustle of activity signaled that the boat was about to depart, whereupon Shunkan began frantically scrambling aboard, only to be put off, and having been put off, scrambling aboard once more, determined to be taken along. But he was left behind with the bed quilt that Naritsune had given him as a parting gift and a memento from Priest Yasuyori, a copy of the Lotus Sutra. When the hawser was untied and the boat started to pull away from the shore, Shunkan seized hold of the hawser, clinging to it until he had been dragged into water up to his waist, up to his armpits, up to the point where he could barely stand. And when he could no longer keep his footing, he grasped hold of the gunwale, crying, “What are you doing! Do you really mean to go off and leave me? I never thought you could be so cruel! Where is the kindness you once showed me? Just take me along, wrong as it may be! Take me at least as far as Kyushu!”
But to his frantic pleas the envoy only replied, “That is quite impossible!” And when he had pried Shunkan’s fingers loose from the gunwale, the boat at last rowed off.
At a loss to know what else to do, Shunkan returned to the shore and, flinging himself down, began beating his legs on the ground in the sort of tantrum small children indulge in when their nurse or mother has gone off and left them. “Let me come on board! Take me with you!” he screamed.
But the boat merely rowed away from the shore, leaving behind its customary trail of white waves. Although it had not yet gone far into the distance, Shunkan could no longer see it through the confusion of his tears. Rushing to a nearby hilltop, he waved to the boat in the offing. When Lady Sayo of Matsura in ancient times waved her scarf in longing at the boat that carried her husband to a far-off land, her despair could hardly have been greater than Shunkan’s.
Even after the boat had disappeared from sight and evening had fallen, Shunkan did not return to his humble dwelling, but with the salt of the waves still on his legs and the night dews wetting him, he remained where he was until dawn.
Nonetheless, he thought to himself, Naritsune is a man of great kindness, and he will surely take steps to rescue me! Leaning heavily on this hope, he put aside for the moment all thought of drowning himself, fragile though such hopes might be. Now he could understand just how the brothers Sōri and Sokuri must have felt long ago when they were cast away on the desert island of Kaigakusen.4
Many Buddhist rituals are performed throughout the realm to ensure the safe birth of Kenreimon’in’s child. The rites have an effect, and the empress gives birth to a son. But blunders and improprieties mar the rituals and celebrations following the birth. On his return from Kikai-ga-shima to the capital, Naritsune stops at the hut in Narichika’s place of exile and at his father’s villa in the capital before going to see his remaining family and servants.
Ariō (3:8)
So of the three men who had been exiled to the island of Kikai-ga-shima, two were recalled to the capital. The third, Bishop Shunkan, was left to be sole guardian of the dismal island, a bitter fate indeed.
From the time Shunkan was a young man, he had in his service a boy named Ariō whom he treated with great kindness. When word reached the capital that the exiles from Kikai-ga-shima would be arriving in the city that very day, Ariō journeyed as far as Toba in the outskirts of the capital to welcome them, but he could see no sign of his old master. Asking the reason for this, he was told, “That man’s crimes were so terrible that he’s been left behind on the island.”
Ariō was stunned by the news. For a while he spent all his time loitering around Rokuhara, where the Heike had their headquarters, hoping to learn something more about his master’s fate. But there did not appear to be any possibility of a pardon for Shunkan.
He then went to visit Shunkan’s daughter at the place where she was living in hiding. “Your father was not included among those who were pardoned and will not be returning to the capital. I must somehow make my way to the island and see for myself how he is faring. I wonder whether you would write a letter that I can take with me.” Weeping as she did so, Shunkan’s daughter wrote the letter and gave it to him.
Ariō would like to have taken leave of his father and mother, but he was afraid they would not approve of the journey and so he did not do so. A ship was leaving for China around the Fourth or Fifth Month, but he felt he could not delay his departure until the beginning of summer. Instead, he left the capital around the end of the Third Month and, after enduring the numerous hardships of a sea voyage, arrived at the bay of Satsuma
in Kyushu.
From Satsuma he went to the port from which he would take a boat to Kikai-ga-shima. There the local people, suspicious of what he was up to, stripped him of his clothing, but he never for a moment regretted having made the trip. So that they would not rob him of the letter from Shunkan’s daughter as well, he hid it in his topknot.
He boarded a merchant vessel that took him to the island. But even though he had heard vague stories about it when he was in the capital, he was utterly unprepared for what he found. The island had no rice paddies, no vegetable fields, no villages, and no hamlets, and although a few persons were living there, he could barely understand a word they said.
Ariō addressed one of them: “Excuse me …”
“What is it?” was the answer.
“The Hosshō-ji administrator who was exiled here from the capital—do you know where he is?”
If the words “Hosshō-ji” and “administrator” had meant anything to the man, he might have answered, but as it was, he merely shook his head. “I don’t know.”
The Tales of the Heike Page 5