by VIKING ADULT
The former right commander, Lord Munemori, advanced his carriage.
“Your Eminence will oblige me by boarding immediately,” he said.
“But what is this about?” the sovereign demanded to know.
“I am guilty of nothing, as far as I am aware.
Presumably I am to be banished to some far province, some remote island,
like Narichika and Shunkan. Our emperor reigns, after all.
I only make suggestions to him on policy matters.
If it is wrong of me to do that, then henceforth I shall refrain.”
“That is not the issue,” Munemori replied.
“My father wishes you to move to the Toba Mansion
while he goes about restoring peace in the land.”
“Very well, then, Munemori, accompany me there.”
Munemori declined to do so, however, for fear of displeasing his father.
“Ah,” the cloistered emperor reflected, “this fellow is no match for his brother,
the late palace minister. Some time ago I faced the same threat,
but Shigemori, at the risk of his life, put a stop to it, and all has been well since then.
Kiyomori behaves this way because he has no one to warn him against it.
I do not like at all the look of what lies ahead.” He shed august tears.
Then he boarded his carriage. Not one senior noble went with him,
only Kongy, a man-of-all-work, and some junior members of his guard.
A single nun rode in the rear of the carriage.
This honorable nun had once been
wet nurse to the cloistered sovereign:
Second-Rank Lady Kii, she was called.
Westward along Shichij,
then south down Suzaku they went.
Men and women of the lowest degree cried,
“Oh, dear, there goes His Cloistered Eminence,
off into exile, I just know it!”
All of them shed copious tears.
“The earthquake that night, on the seventh,”
people remarked—“yes, it was a portent.”
The carriage reached the Toba Mansion. Nobunari, the master of the imperial table, had managed somehow to slip in and was present in close attendance. His Cloistered Eminence summoned him. “As far as I can see,” he said, “they will execute me tonight. I would like a bath. Is that possible?” Nobunari, already unmanned by the events of the morning, received this request with terror and awe. Tying back the sleeves of his hunting cloak, he got to work breaking up the brushwood fence and splitting a support post for firewood. Then he drew water, poured it, and prepared a proper bath for his lord.
Elsewhere the monk Jken went to speak to Lord Kiyomori at Nishi-Hachij.
“I understand that the cloistered emperor has moved to the Toba Mansion,” he said,
“and that he has nobody with him. I find that very painful.
Surely no harm could come of your allowing me to go to him, alone. I would gladly do so.”
“Very well, I know I can trust you not to overstep yourself.”
So Jken went to the Toba Mansion.
He alighted from his carriage at the gate and entered.
He found the cloistered emperor
reading the scriptures in a loud voice,
eerily imposing in tone.
Softly, Jken came up to him
and saw tears falling from his eyes
onto the open scripture page.
The sight was simply too much:
Jken pressed his face
in sorrow into his clerical sleeves
and in the very presence wept.
There before the cloistered sovereign
sat one single figure: the nun.
“Ah, there you are, Jken,” she said.
“Our lord took refreshment at Hjūji,
yesterday morning, but nothing since,
either last evening or this morning;
nor did he sleep a wink last night.
By this time I fear for his life.”
Jken swallowed any further tears.
“All things have their end,” he began.
“For twenty years now, and more,
the Heike have prospered greatly,
but their evil ways pass all bounds,
and destruction looms before them.
Will the Goddess of the Sun,
will the most noble Hachiman
forsake now His Cloistered Eminence?
If the Seven Shrines of Hie Sann,
objects of our sovereign’s devotion,
uphold still their vow to protect
the teachings of the One Vehicle,
then to the Lotus Sutra scrolls
now before him they will fly
and protect him from further harm.
Then he will reign in his wisdom,
and the evildoers will vanish
as foam vanishes from the water.”
So he spoke, bringing a touch of comfort.
Emperor Takakura was already lamenting the exile of the regent and the ruin of so many officials when, far beyond that, he learned of the cloistered sovereign’s confinement in the Toba Mansion. Thereafter he refused all nourishment. Pleading illness, he remained permanently in his sleeping chamber. Kenreimon-in, his empress, and her gentlewomen were at their wits’ end with worry about what would become of him.
With the cloistered emperor confined to the Toba Mansion,
a sacred rite began at the palace. Every night in the Seiryden,
his private residence, before the Whitewashed Altar,119
Emperor Takakura prayed to the divinities of the Ise Shrines,120
and every prayer was solely for his father, the cloistered emperor.
Emperor Nij had no doubt been a wise ruler,
but on the grounds that an emperor has neither father nor mother,
he had repeatedly contradicted the cloistered emperor’s stated opinion.
Perhaps that is why he had no successor and why Emperor Rokuj, who followed him, [r. 1165–68]
passed away on the fourteenth of the seventh month of Angen 2. [1176]
This makes a very distressing story.
19. The Seinan Detached Palace
“Every principle of conduct
yields before filial piety.
By filial piety a wise king
governs all within his realm.”
So they say, and that is why
Tang Yao held in high regard
a mother aged and infirm,
why Yu Shun revered a father
utterly stubborn in his ways.
That His Majesty wished to follow
this sage king and this wise lord
is worthy of the highest praise!
A letter reached the Toba Mansion in secret from the palace.
“The way the world is now,” His Majesty had written,
“what good could it do me to stay on here in this august abode?
Better to follow the examples of Uda and Kazan: to leave home,
flee the world, and become an ascetic wandering mountains and forests.”
The cloistered emperor replied,
“Please give up any such notion.
Simply knowing that you are there
is to me a source of comfort.
Who else would be left to me,
were you so to vanish from sight?
Be patient, rather: Watch and wait
until this old man’s fate is sealed.”
So His Cloistered Eminence wrote.
Pressing the letter to his eyes,
the emperor dissolved in tears.
The sovereign is a ship, his people water.
Water keeps the ship afloat;
water can capsize it as well.
Subjects sustain their sovereign;
subjects also overthrow him.
In Hgen and Heiji, certainly,
Lord Kiyomori sustained his,
but now, duri
ng Angen and Jish,
he set his sovereign at naught.
The Book of History gives such cases.
Koremichi, the miya chancellor;
the Sanj Palace minister, Kinnori;
Mitsuyori, the Hamuro grand counselor;
the Nakayama counselor, Akitoki—
all were gone by this time, every one.
From earlier days Seirai and Shinpan
were the only gentlemen left alive,
and they—convinced that as things stood
no good could ever come of court service
even, perhaps one day, as counselors—
had in the prime of their manhood
turned their backs upon the world.
Shinpan, who once had overseen
the Bureau of Civil Affairs,
now befriended the hara frosts,
while Seirai, in his time a consultant,
mingled only with the mists of Kya,
and each, they say, worked toward one goal:
enlightenment in the life to come.
There were men, once upon a time,
who hid among the clouds of Mount Shang
or who beside the river Ying
cleansed their hearts under the moon.
Could anyone, then, say of these two
that learning and purity of heart
were not what moved them to give up the world?
Seirai, for one, there on Mount Kya,
said when he learned of these events,
“Ah, how right I was to renounce it!
Such news as this is bad enough,
but what a blow it would have been
to see it all with my own eyes!
The disorders in Hgen and Heiji
filled me with horror at the time,
but such things are certain to happen
now that the world enters its last days.
And what disasters, then, may follow?
Oh, rather, to climb into the clouds,
to vanish deep into the mountains!”
It was the twenty-third of the month. Kakukai, the abbot of Mount Hiei, had repeatedly tendered his resignation, and Meiun, the previous abbot, had come to replace him. Lord Kiyomori meanwhile did as he pleased, but his daughter was the empress, after all, and the regent his son-in-law. No doubt he took it for granted that he could get away with anything. “I leave matters of government entirely in His Majesty’s hands,” he declared, and went down to Fukuhara.
Lord Munemori hastened to the palace to report. “Things would be different if this cession of authority had come from the cloistered emperor,” His Majesty said, “but as they are, go, talk to the regent, and do whatever you think best.” He refused to hear anything further on the subject.
There in the Seinan Detached Palace,
as it were,121 the cloistered emperor
had spent more than half the winter.
Loud moaned the gales over moor and mountain;
bright shone the moon on the frozen garden,
where no human footsteps ever marred
the broad expanse of fallen snow.
Layered ice choked the garden lake;
the flocks of water birds were gone.
The bells of the great temples boomed,
startling the hearer as at Yiaisi;
the shadowed snows on the Western Hills
called to mind Incense Burner Peak.122
The fulling block beat, cold, nightlong,
haunting the cloistered sovereign’s pillow;
wheel tracks traced through frosts of dawn
stretched away past the distant gate.
People, horses passing on the road
conveyed to the sovereign within
sad lessons on the labors of men.
Sturdy guards posted at the gate,
vigilantly watching, day and night,
moved him to ask, “What bond from past lives
can have brought them and me together?”
The tiniest detail of his days
injured his heart in some new way,
and memory kept him in its thrall:
happy excursions here or there,
pilgrimages to holy places,
that great day of his jubilee—
he could not stem the welling tears.
So the new year came, the fourth of Jish. [1180]
93. Fud My (“The Unmoving, the Mantra King”) was the chief deity invoked by an exorcist. Fud carries a sword (to cut attachment to objects of desire) and a rope (to bind demons).
94. Sutoku.
95. Prince Sawara, a younger brother of Emperor Kanmu (reigned 781–806), starved himself to death on his way into exile on the island of Awaji. In 800, to counter the threat his spirit posed, he was posthumously elevated to emperor. The Igami princess, a daughter of Emperor Shmu (reigned 724–49) and empress to Knin (reigned 770–81), was dismissed over an affair involving her son. She cursed the emperor, her husband, and died in prison. In 800 both were enshrined in a Gorysha (“angry spirit shrine”).
96. The legendary Sayo-hime waved her scarf in farewell when her lover sailed for China from the harbor of Matsura, in northern Kyushu.
97. An originally Indian story of two brothers cruelly abandoned by their stepmother on a desert island. It appears in Hbutsushū (A Precious Treasury), a collection of pious stories correctly attributed in 3:7 to Yasuyori. The preface speaks of the author’s exile on Kikai-ga-shima.
98. Because Kiyomori has severed formal ties with his children by becoming a “novice” monk.
99. The deity who was the object of his daily personal devotion.
100. A major temple founded in 794 and still prominent in Kyoto. Great power was attributed to the rites mentioned below. The Japanese name for the first of them is Goshichinichi Mishiho. The esoteric (tantric) deity Daigensui is covered with writhing snakes.
101. The Inner Sanctum of Mount Kya, the holiest spot on the mountain. Kb Daishi (Kūkai), the founder, resides here within his mausoleum in a state of eternal meditation (10:9).
102. Kehi Jingū, in present Fukui-ken, was believed to manifest the Dainichi of the Womb Mandala.
103. The chief member of this triad is Ichikishima-hime, the third daughter of the Sun Goddess. Note 90 describes the second, Tagori-hime. The third is Tagitsu-hime, a daughter of Susano-o. These are also the deities of the ancient Munakata Shrine in northen Kyushu.
104. Possession of a formally consecrated site for the ordination of monks, hence authorization to conduct such ordinations, was a supreme honor for a temple. Raig’s incendiary request reflects the intense rivalry between Mount Hiei and Miidera.
105. Because neither can be taken back.
106. A staff topped by nine jangling metal rings. The old monk is an adept of the esoteric mysteries.
107. A Chinese couplet by Sugawara no Michizane, included in Wakan reishū (1012), a collection of Chinese and Japanese poems for singing aloud. The Japanese poem that follows is also old (from Goshūishū, 1086).
108. From a lament by Nin Hshi, included in the early-thirteenth-century anthology Shinkokinshū: “I, who live on, saw the autumn moon again this year, but I shall not see again the friend I have lost.”
109. A nunnery founded circa 741 by Kmy, Emperor Shmu’s empress.
110. The great physician of the Buddha’s time in India.
111. The Kasuga Shrine, in Nara, is the tutelary shrine of the Fujiwara.
112. In theory about twelve hundred fifty acres.
113. This celebrated master of yin-yang divination and magic lived from 921 to 1005.
114. In Japanese chūu, but probably better known in English by this Tibetan term. The intermediate state, lasting forty-nine days after death, during which the soul wanders before entering a new incarnation.
115. The regent at the time was Fujiwara no Motofusa; the chancellor, Fujiwara no Moronaga.
116. The office of nairan.
117. The former was promoted in 827, the lat
ter in 1067.
118. The first in a set of lines written by the Tang poet Bo Juyi (772–846), to pray that his sin (as a poet) of “frivolous words and fancy talk” should turn in the end into praise of the Buddha. Summing up as they do the dilemma of art and religious aspiration, Bo Juyi’s lines were quoted countless times by writers in medieval Japan.
119. The altar before which the emperor performed rites addressed to the native Japanese deities.
120. There are two Ise Shrines: the Inner (naikū, dedicated to the Sun Goddess) and the Outer (gegū, dedicated to the god of increase). The tale’s references to “Ise” or the “Ise Shrine” generally assume both, with emphasis on the former.
121. Calling the Toba Mansion “the Seinan Detached Palace” assimilates it to the palace in a well-known Chinese exemplary story.
122. Yiaisi, a temple, and Incense Burner Peak are from a poem by Bo Juyi.
BOOK FOUR
1. The Pilgrimage to Itsukushima
(recitative)
The first day of Jish 4, indeed the first three days, [1180]
brought the Toba Mansion no callers. Lord Kiyomori forbade them,
and the cloistered emperor, intimidated, encouraged none.
Only the Sakuramachi counselor Shigenori,
son of the late minor counselor and novice Shinzei,
and his younger brother, the Left City commissioner Naganori,
had authorization to make their visit after all.
On the twenty-first of that first month, the heir apparent donned the trousers123
and also had his solemn first taste of fish.
All this was felicitous indeed, but at the Toba Mansion
talk of it reached His Cloistered Eminence only from afar.
On the twentieth of the second month, the emperor, in no way indisposed,
was forced nonetheless to abdicate, and the imperial dignity passed to the heir apparent.
This happened because Lord Kiyomori had his way in all things.
“The age is ours!” the Heike assured one another in great excitement.
The new emperor received the mirror, the jewel, and the sword.124
The senior nobles gathered in their council chamber,
following ancient usage resting on precedent.
The palace dame Ben came forth bearing the sword,
which Captain Yasumichi received at the Seiryden west front.
Dame Bitchū likewise brought forward the jewel in its case,
