by VIKING ADULT
in Qin, raising the Afang Palace
plunged the realm into confusion,
they say. Ah, thatch left untrimmed,
rafters uneven at the eaves,
boats and carriages soberly plain,
clothing innocent of woven pattern:
so did men live, once upon a time!
And thus it is that Taizong of Tang,
having built his Lishan Palace,
considered its great cost to the people—
for such may well have been his reason—
and never went there in the end
but let ferns grow from between the tiles
and thick vines swallow every fence.
“What a difference!” people exclaimed.
2. Moon Viewing
This was the schedule reached:
Ninth of the sixth month, begin work on the new capital.
Tenth of the eighth month, raise the ridgepole of the new palace.
Thirteenth of the eleventh month, His Majesty to make his progress there.
The old capital lapsed into ruin; the new one prospered.
That dreadful summer passed, and soon it was autumn.
Then half of autumn, too, was gone, and those living at Fukuhara
set out for famous places to watch the moon.
Some, recalling storied spots
Commander Genji once frequented,
roamed the coast from Suma to Akashi,
crossed over to the isle of Awaji,
watched the moon from the Eshima rocks.
Others sought Shirara, Fukiage,
Waka-no-ura or chose instead
Sumiyoshi, Naniwa, Takasago
and brought home poems inspired
by Onoe under the moon at dawn.
Those detained in the old city
gazed at the moon from Fushimi
or from Hirosawa Pond.
Lord Sanesada’s longing thoughts
went to the moon of the old capital,
and past the tenth of the eighth month
he journeyed there from Fukuhara.
He found the city wholly changed.
Only rare houses were still standing,
rank weeds clustered before their gates,
dews heavy on neglected gardens.
Wormwood groves, wastes of scrubby weeds
offered shelter only to birds
or to crickets, plaintively singing
where wildflowers dotted the field:
gold, tiny chrysanthemums;
mauve, nodding thoroughwort.
One remaining spark from bygone days,
the empress mother, lived even now151
by the Kamo River, at Konoe.
Lord Sanesada went to see her.
He had a man knock at the main gate.
At this, from within, a woman cried,
“Who is it, requesting admittance
where now no caller ever comes
to brush dew from the wormwood fronds?”
“Commander Sanesada is here from Fukuhara,” the man answered. “The main gate is locked,” she replied. “Come in through the small one to the east.” Sanesada assented and did so.
Having little to occupy her time, the empress mother,
perhaps from a wish to recapture old memories,
had had her southern shutters thrown open and, when Sanesada arrived,
was playing the biwa. “Is this a dream,” she exclaimed, “or are you real?
Come in! Come in!”
In the Uji chapters of Genji,
one of the Eighth Prince’s daughters,
sorry to bid autumn farewell,
tunes her biwa and all night long
plays to ease her unhappiness.
At dawn, then, with the moon in the sky,
perhaps in the end overcome,
she beckons to it with the plectrum:
a mood now easy to understand.152
One of this lady,s gentlewomen,
Kojijū, had gained the nickname
“Wait-All-Evening,” because she replied
to her mistress once, when asked,
“Waiting all evening, and in the morning
watching him go—which of the two
do you find more intensely moving?”:
Waiting all evening,
while interminable hours
pass, to booming bells:
How could cockcrow in the morning
when he leaves compare with that?
This was the poem that earned her her nickname.
Lord Sanesada called the gentlewomen in to chat about past and present,
and late that night he made this imay song on the decline of the old city:
To the ancient capital
I return, to see
a spreading wasteland of weeds,
and desolation.
The moon, shining in the sky,
reveals all below,
and only the autumn wind
blows piercingly chill.
Three times he sang the song over,
very beautifully, and the ladies,
empress and gentlewomen alike,
moistened their sleeves with tears.
Meanwhile night was turning to day.
He bade them farewell and once more
set off to Fukuhara.
Summoning one of the chamberlains in his entourage, he said,
“Kojijū looked utterly heartbroken. Go back to her, then,
and give her from me whatever message comes to mind.”
The man ran back to the residence and, with every mark of respect,
announced that his lord wished him to say:
How could it compare?
you apparently once asked,
speaking of cockcrow.
What about it this morning
makes you then so specially sad?
Kojijū replied, struggling not to weep,
Waiting certainly
weighs when long hours go by,
marked by booming bells,
but cockcrow can break your heart
when it hurts to let him go.
The chamberlain returned to his lord
and reported his exchange with her.
“Yes,” his lord said, “that’s why I sent you.”
Sanesada was deeply impressed.
After that the man came to be called
“Chamberlain Can’t Compare.”
3. Spirit Mischief
The move to Fukuhara over, the Heike began having nightmares
that regularly set their hearts pounding. They often witnessed apparitions.
One night an enormous face, a full bay wide,
peered into the room where Lord Kiyomori lay.
Untroubled, Kiyomori glared hard at it until it melted away.
The Oka Palace, as it was called, having been only recently built,
had no trees worth mentioning anywhere near it,
but one night there came a crash, as of a great tree falling,
and a roar of laughter that if human could well have come from two dozen people.
This was obviously some tengu prank, and they posted a “whistler guard”:
one hundred men by night, fifty by day, to shoot whistling arrows.153
But when the archers shot toward the tengu, they got back dead silence,
whereas arrows shot (so they thought) elsewhere provoked loud laughter.
There was also the morning when Lord Kiyomori
stepped from his curtained bed and threw open the double doors
only to see, heaped in the inner court garden,
dead men’s skulls beyond counting, rolling and churning,
up and down, in and out, rattling against one another with a huge clatter.
“Attendant! Attendant!” he called, but, as it happened, no one came.
Meanwhile the skulls clumped into a great mound,
bursting the bounds of the garden, some hundred and fifty feet high—
> a mountain of skulls, now suddenly crammed with living eyes,
all of them training on Lord Kiyomori an unblinking glare.
Kiyomori glared back, unperturbed, and under his gaze
they disappeared without a trace,
like frost or dew in burning sun.
Another incident involved one of Lord Kiyomori’s horses.
He kept it in his stable, assigned many grooms to its care,
and lavished attention on it day in and day out,
but one night a mouse chewed a nest into its tail and bore her young there.
This was so strange that he had seven yin-yang masters divine its meaning.
Their verdict enjoined extreme caution.
ba no Sabur Kagechika of Sagami, the horse’s first owner,
Kiyomori’s nightmare visions.
had given it to Kiyomori as the best in all the eight provinces of the east.
Named Mochizuki, “Full Moon,” it was black with a white blaze.
Lord Kiyomori gave it to Abe no Yasuchika, the head of the Yin-Yang Office.
Of old, in Emperor Tenchi’s reign,
a mouse one night chewed her nest
into the tail of one of the steeds
sheltered in the imperial stables
and there gave birth to a litter of young,
whereupon evil foreign insurgents
rose like a swarm of angry bees:
The Chronicles of Japan tell the tale.
Another time one of Lord Minamoto no Masayori’s young housemen had a frightening dream. He found himself in what he took to be the Bureau of Shrines. A large gathering of senior officials, formally dressed, was engaged in some sort of debate, at the end of which they expelled from their company one whose seat had been the most junior among them. This figure appeared to be a Heike ally. “Who is this gentleman?” the dreamer asked an old man.
“The divinity of Itsukushima,” the old man replied.
Next an imposing elder, seated in the place of honor, announced, “The Sword of Command, bestowed some time ago on the Taira house, we now award to Yoritomo, in exile in the province of Izu.”
Another, similarly imposing elder seated next to him interjected, “But please let it pass thereafter to my descendants.”
The dreamer asked further what all this meant. The speaker replied, “The one who gave the Sword of Command to Yoritomo is the Great Bodhisattva Hachiman, and the one who wanted it to pass to his descendants is the Kasuga Deity. As for myself, I am the Takeuchi Deity.”154
The dreamer then awoke and told his dream to others. In time the story reached Lord Kiyomori. He sent Gendayū Suesada to demand that Lord Masayori surrender the young man, who promptly fled.
Masayori hastened to call on Lord Kiyomori.
“There is absolutely no truth to this rumor,” he declared,
so the matter went no further. Strangely enough, however,
back when Kiyomori was still governor of Aki,
he went on pilgrimage to Itsukushima, and there, in a sacred dream,
the divinity conferred upon him a perfectly real lance,
with a silver-wound handle, that Kiyomori kept by his pillow forever after,
and one night this lance suddenly disappeared.
Until now the mainstay of the court
and the protector of the realm,
the Heike, so people sadly said,
had flouted the imperial will
and so found the Sword of Command
withdrawn from their possession.
Among those who shared such thoughts, when this news reached him,
was the monk and former consultant Seirai, on Mount Kya.
“So,” he said, “the Heike have had their time.
There has been reason enough for the Itsukushima Deity to favor them.
That divinity is female, though, or so I gather,
being Dragon King Sagara’s third daughter.
Naturally Hachiman awarded the Sword of Command to Yoritomo,
but I do not see why Kasuga should have ordered it passed to his descendants.
Did he mean that once the Heike are finished, and then in their turn the Genji,
Lord Kamatari’s successors, the sons of the regental house,155
should assume military command of the realm?”
A monk who was there with him remarked,
“The gods reveal themselves in all sorts of tactful forms,
now a layman, now a woman. They certainly call the Itsukushima Deity female,
but a divine being possessed of the three wisdoms and the six superpowers
can appear as a layman without any trouble at all.”
These two had turned their backs on the world
and set out to follow the true path,
so that there should have stirred in them
no further thought of the world and its ways;
only the yearning for paradise.
But we humans all so easily praise
good government, when we learn of it,
and lament, when told of them, sorrows.
4. The Courier
On the second of the ninth month,
ba no Sabur Kagechika,
a man from Sagami province,
sent a courier to Fukuhara
with this message: “This past eighth month,
on the seventeenth, Yoritomo,
the Izu exile, once of the Right Watch,
sent his father-in-law, Hj Tokimasa,
to strike under cover of darkness
the province’s deputy governor,
Izumi Kanetaka, at Yamaki,
his home. Kanetaka was killed.
Next, Doi, Tsuchiya, and Okazaki,
with more than three hundred riders
holed up at Mount Ishibashi.
I myself led a force of a thousand—
all, as I knew, Heike loyalists—
to attack them there, and soon enough
we reduced them to half a dozen
around Yoritomo himself,
who, after putting up fierce resistance,
fled for refuge to Sugiyama.
Then Hatakeyama joined us,
with over five hundred men of his own,
while Miura Yoshiaki’s sons
added three hundred mounted men
to the strength mustered by the Genji.
The two sides clashed along the shore,
there between Yui and Kotsubo.
Hatakeyama, defeated in battle,
fell back to Musashi province.
His next move was, with his whole clan—
the Kawagoe, Inage, Edo, Kasai, Oyamada,
and seven more warrior leagues,
in all over three thousand men—
to attack the Miura fortress of Kinugasa.
Miura Yoshiaki was killed.
All of his sons fled from Kurihama,
by sea, to Awa and Kazusa.”
So read Kagechika’s report.
For the men of the Heike, the novelty of the move to Fukuhara had worn off.
Young senior nobles and privy gentlemen, poor fools, would often sigh and say,
“Damn it, I want to see some action! Let’s get out there and after them!”
Hatakeyama Shigeyoshi, Oyamada Arishige, and Utsunomiya Tomotsuna
happened just then to be in the capital on guard duty.
Hatakeyama remarked, “This report must be in error.
I can hardly vouch for the Hj, close as they are to Yoritomo,
but for the rest, I cannot imagine them supporting an enemy of the court.
No doubt a corrected version will come soon.”
Some agreed that that made sense, but others demurred.
“Far from it,” many whispered. “The realm faces disaster.”
Lord Kiyomori was furious. “How I wish I had executed Yoritomo when I had the chance!” he exclaimed. “I reduced his punishment to exile, at the late Lady Ike’s tearful insistence, but
does he honor what he owes me for that? No! Instead he shoots arrows at us!
Not even the gods and buddhas could pardon him that!
That Yoritomo—oh, yes, heaven’s wrath will soon be upon him!”
5. The Roster of Imperial Foes
Who, then, in this realm of ours,
first opposed the imperial will?
In Emperor Jinmu’s fourth year,156
there appeared in the province of Kii,
in Nagusa county, Takao village,
a spider, thick-bodied and long-legged,
stronger than any powerful man.
It took so many people’s lives
that imperial troops marched against it.
They read out His Majesty’s decree,
knotted together a net of vines,
threw it over the spider, and killed it.
Since that time there have been others
who, driven by fierce ambition,
sought to end imperial rule:
ishi no Yamamaru;
Prince yama;
the minister Moriya;
Yamada no Ishikawa;
Soga no Iruka;
tomo no Matori;
Fun’ya no Miyada;
Tachibana no Hayanari;
Hikami no Kawatsugi;
Prince Iyo;
the assistant Dazaifu viceroy
Fujiwara no Hirotsugi;
Emi no Oshikatsu;
Heir Apparent Sawara;
Empress Igami;
Fujiwara no Nakanari;
Taira no Masakado;
Fujiwara no Sumitomo;
Abe no Sadat
and Abe no Munet;
Minamoto no Yoshichika,
the governor of Tsushima;
the Haughty Left Minister Yorinaga;
the ruthless Gate Watch intendant Nobuyori—
all in all, there were twenty of them,
none of whom ever achieved success.
Their bodies lay in the wilderness;
their heads hung at the gates of prisons.
In this present world of ours, the throne inspires no awe.
In ancient times an imperial edict, read aloud to a dead tree,
drew from it blossoms and ripening fruit
and commanded obedience from the very birds of the air.
In fact, it was in somewhat more recent times
that Emperor Daigo visited his Shinsen-en garden [r. 897–930]
and spied there, beside the pond, a white heron.
He summoned a chamberlain. “Catch me that heron,” he said, “and bring it here.”
