by VIKING ADULT
LANGUAGE, WRITING, PERFORMANCE, TRANSLATION
The Heike text can be set down in different ways. One manuscript is written exclusively in Chinese characters (kanji), another almost entirely in phonetic script (kana). Most are somewhere in between. In any case, the language remains the same. It is a little closer to modern Japanese than that of earlier literature. Japanese readers today can follow Heike in the original more easily than they can Genji.
The mood and style vary widely. There are intensely lyrical passages that exploit the vocabulary and imagery of Japanese poetry, while others have a strongly Chinese flavor. There are battle narratives and formal documents. There are also poems in the classic, thirty-one-syllable form (waka, “Japanese poem”), together with occasional song (imay) lyrics. Tacitly or explicitly, however, authorities agree that apart from the poems and songs, Heike is in prose. In Japanese the text looks like prose, all translations into foreign languages have been in unbroken prose, and discussions of the work in English describe the work as prose. So why does this translation look the way it does?
The answer appeals to two distinctions: the one between prose and verse, and the one between reading and performance.
Only the text of the Odyssey remains. Anyone good at ancient Greek can read it, and over the centuries many have done so. Although no one knows what the Odyssey sounded like when performed, the text is in verse, and verse suggests song. Homer undoubtedly sang it somehow, accompanying himself on a stringed instrument.
That is how Kakuichi and his fellows performed Heike. They accompanied themselves on the biwa, an instrument of the lute family, and were called biwa hshi (“biwa monks”). All were blind and wore Buddhist robes. They traveled widely and performed for audiences high and low.
Did they really perform all of so lengthy a work? Records mention complete performances (ichibu Heike), but it is unclear how long these might have taken and how common they might have been. The earliest written evidence, consisting of entries in three early-fifteenth-century diaries, suggests that by then a noble patron could seldom hear even a major consecutive sequence, let alone the entire work. Two whole books, in sessions a month apart, seem to have been a rarity. Most performances covered one or two, less often up to five or six chapters (performers call them ku, scholars shdan), of a complete book. The patron could not necessarily choose the program, and in any case audiences must often have demanded favorite pieces, thus encouraging relative neglect of the rest. Even in the heyday of the biwa hshi, someone wishing to know the whole tale may have had to read it, too, if possible.
But what would a performance have been like, if Heike is in prose? The answer begins with the proposition that the text is not really prose at all.
That is not to call it verse instead. Rather, the issue is that in English and other such languages, “prose” implies the possibility of verse. In past centuries an author could expound all sorts of subjects in verse. To call the Heike text prose is to imply that it could have been written in verse, like the Odyssey. But that is not so. Sustained verse narrative, in a form corresponding to verse in English or in ancient Greek, is impossible in the language of the tale. The classical Japanese definition of verse is too restricted.
Poetic convention banned from poetry most of the vocabulary and most of the subjects needed for a continuous story. It also assumed only one brief form: the thirty-one-syllable waka. The rare, longer chka (like Atsumori’s in the Enky-bon) only extends the waka mood a little and could serve no better to narrate events. In short, Heike is not in prose because no counterpart possibility of verse, or even any remotely adequate conception of verse, existed then. It is really neither verse nor prose.
This opens the possibility of translating it into something other than prose, providing that a reason and adequate authority can be found for doing so. The reason here is a wish to modulate silent reading by conveying after all a hint of the varied voicing heard in performance. The authority is the eighteenth-century Heike performance score (Heike monogatari fushitsuki) selected by Yamashita Hiroaki for his edition of the tale (Heike monogatari, 2 vols., Meiji Shoin, 1975 and 1979). This score prescribes the voicing pattern for each passage. For the text itself, however, the translation relies on Kajihara Masaaki and Yamashita Hiroaki, eds., Heike monogatari, 2 vols., Iwanami, 1991 and 1993; and Ichiko Teiji, ed., Heike monogatari, 2 vols., Shogakukan, 1994. Credit is also due the superbly accurate translation by Helen McCullough (The Tale of the Heike, Stanford University Press, 1988).
Guided by Heike monogatari fushitsuki, this translation divides the text into three major formats: “speech” (shirakoe), “recitative” (kudoki), and “song.” These can be imagined as analogous to spoken dialogue, recitative, and aria in oratorio or opera.
“Speech,” which the performer declaimed without ornament, is here laid out as justified prose set against the right margin of the page. Documents such as petitions, official communications, and formal prayers are presented in the same way, in italics. “Recitative,” the most common voicing pattern in the tale, was sung within a relatively restricted musical range. These passages are laid out in highly irregular lines that start at the left margin and occasionally overflow the full width of the page. “Song” covers a dozen named styles of elaborately ornamented voicing, the distinctions between which are beyond the reach of the printed word. These passages are presented as verse. Waka poems and imay lyrics, a special class of “song,” are indented a little more deeply than the verse, in lines (waka are italicized) that match the syllabic meter of the original.
To a reader in another land and language, all these centuries later, “speech,” “recitative,” and “song” may often seem to overlap in mood and content. Between the first two especially, it may not be obvious why a passage is in one rather than the other, apart from the need to vary delivery in order to retain audience interest. Some “recitative” passages invite spirited treatment in English, but others, despite goodwill, do not. Moreover, the content of some “song” passages may seem remote from anything likely to be sung in English. Still, there are in general clear differences among the three. Treatment of a subject in “song,” especially, often suggests a hierarchy of value.
“Song” naturally serves to convey intense emotion or stirring conflict. However, it is also prominent when the subject is an emperor or when the narration dwells on a classical Chinese analogy—in effect, a hallowed precedent—for the Japanese situation at hand. Such treatment affirms the all-but-transcendent standing of emperors and their role as gentle models of tolerance and cultivation. It also conveys the enormous prestige, for Japan, of Chinese antiquity and historical experience, and it confers a corresponding dignity on the Japanese parallel. Another kind of “song” passage (for example, 4:3) simply lists warrior names and titles, thus highlighting the noble names and honorable offices that give these passages narrative dignity and rhetorical weight.
“HGEN AND HEIJI”: HISTORY AND ANGRY SPIRITS
A major preoccupation in The Tale of the Heike is defense of the throne against insubordination and rebellion. A roster of historical rebels appears at once (1:1), followed by others, more or less complete, later on. Prominent among the culprits mentioned are Taira no Masakado (died 940), whose insurrection in the east of the country was put down by Kiyomori’s ancestor Sadamori; Fujiwara no Sumitomo (died 941), who rebelled in the west; and the brothers Abe no Sadat (1019–62) and Munet, who rose up in the north.
By the twelfth century, two complex warrior houses stood ready to quell such disorder: the Heike (Taira) and the Genji (Minamoto). While a few of their members belonged to the court hierarchy in the capital, most were based in the provinces. For centuries they had supported the central government militarily, as needed, against external, provincial challenges. However, in 1156 (the Hgen Conflict) and 1159 (the Heiji Conflict), rivalry among court factions drew Heike and Genji warriors into clashes within the capital itself.
The Hgen and Heiji conflicts unleashed brutality unkno
wn in Japan for hundreds of years and left lasting scars. The relatively short Tale of Hgen (Hgen monogatari) and Tale of Heiji (Heiji monogatari) make the gravity of these events clear, and The Tale of the Heike, in which the words “Hgen and Heiji” recur like a refrain, confirms it at length. The Hgen and Heiji conflicts so embittered the losers that their angry spirits seemed to threaten the victorious Heike or even to explain their eventual downfall.
It had all started forty years earlier, in 1141, when Emperor Sutoku (born 1119, reigned 1123–41) suffered a great humiliation. His father, Retired Emperor Toba (born 1103, reigned 1107–23), forced him to abdicate in favor of a little boy born to Toba’s beloved Bifukumon-in (Fujiwara no Nariko, 1117–60). This child then became Emperor Konoe (born 1139, reigned 1141–55).
When Konoe died young, Sutoku hoped to succeed him or at least to see his own son do so. Instead Toba arbitrarily appointed one of Sutoku’s half brothers, Emperor Go-Shirakawa (born 1127, reigned 1155–58). Meanwhile Bifukumon-in, Toba’s favorite, was accusing Sutoku of having cursed Konoe to death, in collusion with the powerful Fujiwara no Yorinaga (1120–56). Yorinaga, the “Haughty Left Minister” or “Uji Left Minister” of the tale, had prevailed in a power struggle within his own house and become the de facto regent. In 1155 Toba dismissed him and elevated his Fujiwara rival. Then, in mid-1156, Toba died. The Hgen Conflict broke out immediately.
The Hgen era began a few months before Toba’s death and continued until the early summer of 1159. The short Heiji era, which followed, ended in early 1160. The Genji warriors in The Tale of the Heike look back bitterly and repeatedly to “Hgen and Heiji,” and they burn to erase the shame of their forebears’ defeat.
This is what happened: With Toba gone, Sutoku and Yorinaga moved to depose Go-Shirakawa and return Sutoku to the throne. For armed support they called on Tameyoshi (1096–1156), Minamoto no Yoritomo’s father, and on Taira no Tadamasa (died 1156), an uncle of Kiyomori’s. To counter them Go-Shirakawa recruited Yoshitomo (1123–60), Tameyoshi’s eldest son, and Kiyomori himself.
Yoshitomo prevailed in the Hgen Conflict, on Go-Shirakawa’s behalf. He was then forced to oversee the execution of his own father and of five of his younger brothers. Kiyomori executed Tadamasa. These were the first executions in Japan in more than three centuries. Yorinaga was killed in flight. Sutoku was banished to the province of Sanuki on Shikoku, where (according to The Tale of Hgen and other sources) he cursed the victors. Widespread opinion attributed the Heiji Conflict and other troubles to his wrath. In the nineteenth century, the outspoken thinker Hirata Atsutane still traced to Sutoku’s baleful influence the late-twelfth-century shift of power from the imperial court to the warriors. Atsutane, a champion of return to direct imperial rule, urged placating him by reestablishing in Kyoto the shrine originally built there by Go-Shirakawa in 1184 (10:13).
After the Hgen Conflict, Kiyomori allied himself with Go-Shirakawa’s closest adviser, Shinzei (Fujiwara no Michinori, 1106–59), while Yoshitomo cultivated Shinzei’s bitter enemy, Fujiwara no Nobuyori (1133–59). In early 1160, Kiyomori was away on a pilgrimage when Yoshitomo and Nobuyori moved against him, thus initiating the Heiji Conflict. They captured Go-Shirakawa and his son, Emperor Nij (born 1143, reigned 1158–65), and they killed Shinzei. Kiyomori raced back to the capital. His eldest son, Shigemori (1138–79), and others attacked the palace, crushed the rebels, and killed Nobuyori.
Yoshitomo was killed while fleeing eastward. His son Yoritomo, then a boy, faced execution, but Kiyomori’s stepmother, Lady Ike (Ike no Zenni), persuaded Shigemori to intercede on his behalf. Kiyomori responded by merely banishing him to the province of Izu. From there Yoritomo eventually launched the campaign that destroyed Kiyomori’s house. Meanwhile Go-Shirakawa had abdicated in 1158 and nominally renounced the world in 1169. These steps left him free to play his active, influential, and highly ambiguous role in the events of the tale.
The Yukinaga credited in Essays in Idleness with writing an early Tale of the Heike was a literary-minded provincial governor whose father, Fujiwara no Yukitaka, figures in the tale itself. On the fifth of the first month of Juei 3 (1184), holding the office awarded to him earlier by Kiyomori (3:17), Yukitaka called on the regent, Kuj Kanezane (1149–1207). The tale does not mention the meeting, but Kanezane recorded it in his extensive diary (Gyokuy), a major historical source on the period. The Genji army was driving toward the capital at the time.
Kanezane asked about the recasting of the Great Buddha of Tdaiji, since Yukitaka was charged with overseeing the work (end 6:9). His question touched on the Heike crime that the tale treats as heinous above all: the burning of Nara and the destruction of the Great Buddha (5:14) in the twelfth month of Jish 4 (1180). Yukitaka assured Kanezane that it was going well. He then passed to what was for him a closely related subject. He said:
My son and daughter are subject to spirit possession. It always happens in a time of crisis. The possessing spirits are those of Retired Emperor Sutoku and the Uji Left Minister [Yorinaga]. Their oracles are unfailingly accurate. It is very strange. Please tell no one.
He also mentioned spirit demands, delivered through his children, for a shrine at Sutoku’s grave in Sanuki and Buddhist services there for his repose.
It is not hard to imagine Yukinaga, an eyewitness to his time, feeling called on to write the initial version of a story that repeatedly conveys anxiety about the very spirits who (according to his father) sometimes possessed him. When Kiyomori’s daughter, Emperor Takakura’s empress, approaches the term of her pregnancy (3:1), angry spirits invade her body. Chief among them are Sutoku’s and Yorinaga’s, followed by those of the recently executed Narichika and Saik. Kiyomori at once placates Sutoku and Yorinaga by awarding them a laudatory posthumous title (Sutoku) and higher court rank (Yorinaga). Once his daughter has borne an imperial heir, however, he forces the boy’s father to abdicate in favor of this grandson (4:1), the child emperor Antoku. The obvious parallel with Sutoku’s humiliation frightens people, despite the Heike lords’ voluble rationalizations and justifications. “Yes,” the text observes, “the angry dead inspire fear” (3:1).
AUTHORITY IN THE WORLD OF THE TALE
The tyrant Kiyomori, whose arbitrary power rested on force, nonetheless had other key figures to contend with. The Heike reader may wonder sometimes where in the world of the tale decisive authority really lies.
Kiyomori headed the Heike, as Yoritomo did the Genji. Both secured the cooperation of local warriors linked to them by lineage or by long-established ties of service and reward. However, Yoritomo campaigned against the Heike from his base at Kamakura (near modern Tokyo), far from any corrupting or competing influence from the capital. In contrast, Kiyomori had seized power in the capital itself, from within the world of the old civil and imperial aristocracy. He sometimes rode roughshod over this aristocracy, but he never swept it away. This made the question of authority in his heyday particularly complex.
In the distant past, the emperors really had (sometimes) ruled the relatively small part of Japan under central control, but direct imperial rule remained a recurrent ideal down to modern times precisely because it was rare. Powerful figures around the sovereign sought his effective power, leaving him only intangible prestige. Many centuries earlier the nonimperial Fujiwara house had successfully imposed its senior representative as “regent” upon almost every emperor—so much so that the relationship between the regent and the emperor had become enshrined in sacred legend. As Taira no Shigemori puts it in an impassioned speech to his father, Kiyomori (2:6),
Yes, this land of ours is remote, a few scattered millet grains,
yet here rule the descendants of the Great Sun Goddess,
for whom Ame-no-koyane’s lineage governs the realm.
The Sun Goddess, the origin of the imperial line, had concluded a solemn pact to this effect with Ame-no-koyane, the Fujiwara ancestral deity. Shigemori’s words therefore uphold an unassailable ideal. However, despite the rhetoric that treated the emp
eror as an inspiring monarch, a twelfth-century emperor ruled little. The regent’s “governing” role, too, had dwindled, and at times Kiyomori displayed contempt for the incumbent (1:11).
A regent typically imposed himself by marrying his daughter to the reigning emperor and becoming the maternal (commoner) grandfather of the next one. Things might not go that smoothly in practice, but the pattern was established, and Kiyomori insisted on following it. He married a daughter to Emperor Takakura, whom he then swept aside in order to put his grandson on the throne. This shockingly presumptuous success (seen from the tale’s perspective) replicated a regent’s. However, he left the nominal regent in place. Being in theory merely the emperor’s servant and defender, he did not disturb the formal hierarchy of the court.
A very young emperor was easier to control than a mature one, but the duties of the imperial office, although purely ceremonial, were still burdensome. Both the emperor and the real power holders therefore had something to gain from early abdication. An abdicated emperor became an in.
Since English offers no equivalent for the word in, this translation resorts to the established approximation of “retired emperor.” If a retired emperor wanted further freedom and aspired to piety, he could become a nominal monk. He then went on living at home, wearing clerical robes, and could among other things travel on pilgrimage. In translation he then becomes “the cloistered emperor.” The Go-Shirakawa of the tale is an outstanding example. He spent only two or three years as emperor, then abdicated and a few years later donned clerical robes. That left him free to pursue many interests. Indeed, any gentleman could become the same sort of monk, living at home and free to do more or less as he pleased. He was then called a nyūd (“novice”). Some of the warriors in the tale are nyūd. Kiyomori became one at the height of his power, in order to ward off an illness. Being a nyūd did nothing to curb his tyranny.
