by VIKING ADULT
Kehi, though, prospers greatly, while Itsukushima languishes as though ignored.
Report this to His Majesty and restore it. Do that and, be assured,
rank and office will be yours beyond all other men. You will have no rival.”
So he spoke, then rose and went away.
Where the old monk had been,
an unearthly fragrance filled the air.
Lord Kiyomori had him watched:
Still in sight for three hundred yards,
he then simply disappeared.
That was no ordinary man—
so the awestruck lord understood—
but the great teacher Kb Daishi!
Moved to a new surge of faith,
he resolved not to let this pass:
In the Mount Kya Golden Hall,
he would paint the Twin Mandalas.
The western he assigned to Jmy,
a master holy-image painter;
the eastern he would paint himself,
and did so. For some reason
he drew blood from his own head,
they say, to paint upon Dainichi,
central amid eight lotus petals,
the tall crown that he wears.
Lord Kiyomori made his way up to the capital and called there on the retired emperor.
His report deeply moved the sovereign, who extended his appointment.
So it was that Kiyomori restored Itsukushima. He replaced the torii,
rebuilt the sanctuaries, and constructed several hundred yards of galleries.
The work once done, he went there himself and spent the night in vigil.
He dreamed that a divine youth, his hair in side loops, came forth from the sanctuary.
“I bring you a message from the Triple Goddess,” he said.103
“Take this blade and with it pacify the four seas. You shall be the emperor’s protector.”
He gave the dreamer a lance with the shaft spiral-wrapped in silver.
Lord Kiyomori found it there beside his pillow when he awoke.
The Triple Goddess gave him this oracle:
“Did you heed me, or have you forgotten
what I told you through the holy man?
If you conduct yourself ill, however,
you will do your descendants no good.”
With these words the goddess ascended.
What a marvelous thing to happen!
6. Raig
In Emperor Shirakawa’s reign, Lord Morozane’s daughter became empress. [1072–86]
Kenshi was her name. His Majesty loved her and longed for a son by her.
Now, there lived at Miidera an adept known as Raig, a monk of great power.
His Majesty summoned him. “You will offer such prayers,” he informed him,
“as to ensure that the empress bears a prince.
If she does, your reward will be anything you desire.”
“Very well, Your Majesty,” Raig replied.
He returned to Miidera and there for one hundred days
devoted every particle of his being to offering up the prayers required.
During those hundred days, the empress conceived readily,
and in Jh 1, the twelfth month and sixteenth day, she gave easy birth. [1074]
The child was a boy.
The delighted emperor summoned Raig. “What is your wish?” he asked. Raig requested an ordination platform for Miidera.104
“That wish is not one that I had foreseen,” His Majesty replied. “I assumed that you would ask for promotion. A prince’s birth is welcome because it assures the succession and secures peace in the realm. What you ask would enrage Mount Hiei and provoke turmoil. There would be war between Enryakuji and Miidera, and the Tendai teaching would be lost.”
The emperor rejected Raig’s request.
Raig returned to Miidera bitterly disappointed and prepared to starve to death.
Alarmed, His Majesty summoned e no Masafusa, then still the governor of Mimasaka.
“I gather that you are one of Raig’s patrons,” he said.
“Go to him and try to make him see sense.”
Masafusa obediently set off for Raig’s lodge, to speak to him for the emperor.
He found Raig shut up in a smoke-blackened personal chapel,
whence there issued, in fearsome tones, these words:
“The Son of Heaven does not jest;
his word is said to be like sweat.105
If my modest wish is to go unmet, then, since my prayers gave the prince life,
I will take him with me into the demon realm.”
He refused to see Masafusa, who returned to the emperor and reported his words.
Soon, to His Majesty’s astonishment and dismay, Raig died of starvation.
Shortly thereafter the prince fell ill.
Many prayers were offered for him,
but they seemed to do him no good.
Some dreamed that an old, white-haired monk
stood by his pillow, ringed staff in hand;106
some saw this monk with their waking eyes.
“Frightening” is hardly the word.
So it was that on the sixth day,
in the eighth month of Shryaku 1, [1077]
the prince, in his fourth year, passed away.
He had been named Atsufun.
The grief-stricken emperor summoned Ryshin, the abbot of Mount Hiei, a prelate of imposing rank and a monk of impressive power. “What am I to do?” he asked.
Ryshin replied, “My Mountain alone, Your Majesty, brings to fruition such desires as yours. The future Emperor Reizei came into the world because the minister of the right, Lord Morosuke, entrusted Rygen, my great predecessor, with prayers to that end. This will present no difficulty.” He returned to Mount Hiei, and there, for one hundred days, he prayed with fierce intensity to Sann, the god of the mountain. During those hundred days, the empress conceived, and in Shryaku 3, [1079] on the ninth of the seventh month, she gave easy birth to a prince, the future Emperor Horikawa.
Yes, angry spirits were to be feared in earlier times as well.
Now, despite the general amnesty declared most exceptionally for this august birth,
the monk Shunkan alone received no pardon. This was unfortunate.
That same year, in the twelfth month,
on the eighth day, it was decreed
that the prince should be heir apparent.
His tutor was Lord Shigemori,
and the master of his household
the counselor Yorimori.
7. Naritsune’s Return
In the new year, Jish 3, late in the first month, [1179]
Lieutenant Naritsune left the Kase estate in Hizen and hurried on up to the capital.
The weather was still very cold, though, and with the sea so rough
the ship crept from harbor to harbor and island to island,
not reaching Kojima in Bizen until about the tenth of the second month.
From there Naritsune sought out where his father had lived.
He discovered, on bamboo pillars and battered sliding doors,
traces of the brush made by his father to pass the time.
“Nothing brings a man back like writing in his own hand,”
he and Yasuyori reflected, reading and weeping, weeping and reading.
They also noted this: “Angen 3, seventh month, twentieth day: entered religion. [1177]
Twenty-sixth of that month: Nobutoshi came down.”
So Naritsune learned that Minamoto no Nobutoshi, of the Left Gate Watch,
had come on a visit to his father.
Written on the wall nearby, they found:
“Amida’s welcome will not fail;
rebirth in paradise is sure.”
“So,” Naritsune concluded
when his eye fell on these words,
“he did aspire to the Pure Land”;
and he felt, amid boundless grief,
a slight touch of
comfort.
He found his father’s grave in a grove of pines. No mound announced its presence.
On a slight, sandy rise, he brought his sleeves together and, in tears,
spoke as though to one living:
“That you now watch us from beyond,
I heard on my island, from afar,
but life fails to follow my wishes,
and I could not then hurry to you.
Yes, I survived exile on that island, and after two years I have been called back.
That is no doubt a joy, but only seeing you again, alive,
could have made my life worth living. I came as soon as I could,
but there is no need now for further haste.”
He spoke with great fervor, weeping.
And Naritsune’s father, for his part,
had he really been still alive,
would certainly have asked his son
how he was these days, but, alas,
the gulf between one life and the next
inflicts only sorrow and pain.
Who could reply, from beneath the moss?
There came to Naritsune’s ears
only wind rushing through the pines.
Naritsune and Yasuyori spent the night circumambulating the grave, calling the Name.
The next morning they rebuilt the mound, surrounded it with a railing,
and before it put together a provisional shelter,
where for seven days and seven nights they called the Name and copied sutras.
On the last day, they erected a tall, funerary stupa, on which Naritsune wrote:
“Holy spirit of the departed,
put behind you birth and death;
seek only enlightenment.”
And beneath the date, he added:
“His filial son, Naritsune.”
The local peasants, though uncouth,
knew that a son is a great treasure,
and from each the sight drew tears.
The years may come, the years may go,
but a parent’s loving-kindness
is never to be forgotten,
though it passes like a dream
or like a fleeting vision.
Tears of yearning always flow.
How the buddhas of the three worlds
and the ten directions, the blessed host,
must have pitied Naritsune!
How his father’s shade surely rejoiced!
Naritsune bade the dead farewell.
“I should stay with you awhile,” he said,
“to build you greater merit still
by calling upon Amida,
but there are in the capital
those who await me anxiously.
Be assured that I will come again.”
In tears he then started on his way.
Perhaps the departed, in the earth,
was equally sad that he should go.
On the sixteenth of the third month, with light still in the sky, Naritsune reached Toba.
There his late father had had a mountain villa, Suhama Hall.
For years now it had been deserted. The compound wall had lost its covering tiles,
and the gate, though still standing, had no doors. Naritsune went into the garden.
There was no sign of human presence, and the moss grew deep.
He gazed across the lake. The spring breeze
from Autumn Hill raised on its waters
an endless procession of white ripples
cloven by sporting mandarin ducks,
purple, and by the white of gulls.
Longing for him who had enjoyed them,
he shed tears in an endless stream.
The house, yes, was still there, but the latticework above the transoms was gone;
so, too, were the shutters and the sliding doors.
“Here my father did such and such….
This is how he passed through this door….
That tree he planted himself.”
Voicing such reminiscences, he fondly recalled his father’s presence.
On this sixteenth of the third month,
a few cherry blossoms still lingered,
while willow, plum, peach, and damson
each flaunted its seasonal glory.
He who had owned all this was gone,
but even so, no flower forgets spring.
Naritsune stood beneath the blossoms.
“Peach and damson never reveal how many springs have come and gone;
vaporous mists retain no tracks: Who can have lived here long ago?”107
This was once my home,
and if, in this world of ours,
such blossoms could speak,
ah, what questions I would ask
about those days long ago!
To himself he hummed these old poems,
and Yasuyori, too, was moved,
moistening his ink-black sleeves.
Having meant to leave at sundown,
he could not bear after all to go
and stayed well on into the night.
Through the advancing hours, the moon,
as ever in a ruined house,
shone light of mounting brilliance
through cracks in the ancient eaves.
Day would soon rise above the hills,
yet still he had no wish to leave.
But Naritsune could not stay forever. A carriage had come for him,
and he did not want to keep waiting those who expected him.
In tears he set out from Suhama Hall.
As the two entered the capital, their hearts must have felt both joy and sorrow.
A carriage had come for Yasuyori, too, but he did not board it.
“I cannot bear to leave you yet,” he said, and rode instead in the rear of Naritsune’s,
as far as the Kamo riverbed at Shichij. There, their ways were at last to part,
but they still could not face the moment of farewell.
Two who spend just half a day
happily beneath the blossoms,
companions for a single night
passed contemplating the full moon,
travelers caught by a shower,
who shelter under the same tree:
All these grieve when they say good-bye.
How much truer, then, this must be
of two who have suffered together
island exile, shared sea voyages,
braved as one the waves, and in life
both experienced the same karma.
Surely they understood full well
the strength of a bond from lives gone by.
Naritsune went to the residence of his father-in-law, Norimori.
His mother, until then living on Mount Ryzen, had come there the day before,
to await him. She cried when she saw him come in:
“I, who live on… !”—and that was all.108
There she lay, her head under a robe.
The gentlewomen and staff of Norimori’s household crowded around, all weeping with joy. Imagine, then, how happy Naritsune’s wife was, and his nurse, Rokuj! The burden of endless grief had turned Rokuj’s black hair white, and his wife, once so vivacious and pretty, had wasted away almost beyond recognition. The child in his third year when Naritsune went into exile was now old enough to wear his hair bound in loops. And there beside him was another, perhaps now in his third year.
“And who is this?” Naritsune asked.
“Why, this, you see…” Rokuj began, then pressed her sleeves to her eyes and wept.
Oh! Naritsune cried to himself, remembering that his wife had been pregnant when he left and how worried he had been. And the child had grown up so nicely!
Naritsune once more served the cloistered emperor,
and he rose to consultant and captain.
Yasuyori, who had a villa at Srinji in the Eastern Hills,
settled there to think long and hard about the past.
Here
at my old home,
moss in so thick a carpet
overgrows the eaves;
far less moonlight than I thought
comes shining in through the cracks.
Naritsune’s reunion with his family.
Soon he retired there for good
to ponder all those past sorrows
and, they say, wrote a book of stories
entitled A Precious Treasury.
8. Ari
So it was that of the three Kikai-ga-shima exiles, two were recalled to the capital.
The monk Shunkan, poor man, remained behind alone on that dreadful island.
Now, there was a youth whom Shunkan had favored and kept in his service since boyhood.
Ari was his name. When Ari learned that the exiles would be back that day,
he went to meet them at Toba, but his master was not with them.
He asked what had happened. They told him that Shunkan’s crime was so grave,
he had been left on the island. Ari was upset, to say the least.
He regularly roamed around Rokuhara, keeping his ears open,
but never heard a word to suggest the likelihood of a pardon.
He went to where his master’s daughter was living in hiding.
“Fortune has not favored your father,” he said. “He is not coming back.
I have made up my mind to go to the island myself, at all costs,
and find out what has happened to him. Please give me a letter for him.”
She wrote it in tears. Ari wanted to say good-bye to his parents
but said nothing to either, knowing that they would not let him go.
A trading ship bound for China was to sail in the fourth or fifth month,
but that meant a summer departure, and he could not wait.
He set out late in the third and after a long voyage reached the Satsuma coast.
At the port that offered passage
onward to the island, people stared.
They stole his clothes, but Ari
never felt a breath of regret.
To keep the young lady’s letter
from prying eyes, he secured it,
safely hidden, in his topknot.
So, aboard a merchant vessel,
he successfully reached the island.
The little he had heard in the city
did not begin to describe it.
There were no paddies, no dry fields.
