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This old poem then came to the emperor’s mind. He set it down on thin, deep green paper.
Studiously concealed
passion will out after all:
I so long for you,
people are asking me now,
Could it be you are in love?
These words that had come to his brush,
he had Lieutenant Takafusa
take to the lady without delay.
She blushed and then, feeling unwell,
so she said, left to go home.
There she confined herself to bed
and, five or six days later, died.
“One day of her sovereign’s favor
ruins a girl’s life forever.”
So wrote the Chinese poet, rightly.
Of old, Emperor Tang Taizong
planned to have Zheng Renji’s daughter
serve him in his Yuanguan Hall,
but Wei Zheng reminded him,
“This girl is promised to young Lu.”
Taizong therefore renounced his wish.
Emperor Takakura felt the same way.
4. Kog
With the sovereign in thrall to the sorrows of love,
the empress sent him Kog, a gentlewoman of hers, to console him.
A daughter of the Sakuramachi counselor Lord Shigenori,
Kog was the palace beauty and highly skilled on the koto.
Grand counselor Lord Takafusa, then still a lieutenant, had been her first lover.
His barrage of courting poems and letters at first produced no visible effect,
but his ardor apparently won her over in the end, because she did yield.
They could not go on together, though, once the emperor called her to serve him.
Takafusa’s tears of frustrated longing never left his sleeves dry.
He forever haunted the palace, hoping at least for a distant glimpse of her. Back and forth he paced past the blinds of her room or just stood before them, but Kog, being now His Majesty’s, did not see how she could talk to him any longer, whatever he might have to say, or read his letters either. She allowed nothing to pass between them, not even through someone else.
Perhaps, thought Takafusa, just perhaps…
and wrote a poem that he flicked in to Kog through her blinds.
Oh, it is too hard
when my teeming thoughts of you
so fill the heavens
that, near as you are to me,
you are still so far away.
Kog would have liked very much
to give him an answer on the spot,
but there was the emperor to consider,
and she must have preferred discretion,
for she never touched or read it.
Instead she had a maid pick it up and toss it into the nearby garden.
Takafusa thought that horrid of her,
but what really frightened him was that someone might find it.
Hastily he collected it,
slipped it into the fold of his robe,
and went away.
Soon he was back again:
Do you mean to say,
now you will not even touch
anything I write,
despite having banished me
long since from your very heart?
He would never see her again,
he knew—no, not in this life—
and rather than live on in misery,
he wished only that he could die.
Lord Kiyomori heard what was going on.
The empress was one of his daughters, and another was married to Takafusa.
He had lost two sons-in-law to Kog.
“No, no!” he cried. “Nothing will go right as long as Kog is around.
Summon her and get rid of her!”
Word of this reached Kog.
“Never mind what happens to me,” she reflected.
“His Majesty does worry me, though.”
So one day, at dusk, she left the palace and vanished, no one knew where.
The emperor was very upset.
By day he retired to his bedroom,
dissolved in tears, while at night
he ventured out to the Shishinden,
to seek consolation from the moon.
Lord Kiyomori heard about that, too.
“So the emperor is pining for Kog,” he said. “All right, I know what to do.”
He forbade the emperor’s personal gentlewomen to approach him,
and the courtiers who frequented the palace,
knowing he was displeased with them,
no longer dared to go there, for fear of his power.
The imperial precincts felt thoroughly gloomy.
The tenth of the eighth month was past.
The moon shone in a flawless sky,
but tears clouded the emperor’s eyes,
dimming its brilliance for him.
Somewhat later in the night,
he called out for an attendant,
but none was there to answer him.
That night there chanced to be on duty,
stationed at a distance from him,
a young official named Nakakuni.
“Nakakuni, at your service,”
this man called back. The emperor answered,
“Come here. I have a question for you.”
Wondering what it could be,
Nakakuni approached the presence.
“Do you happen to know,” the emperor asked, “where Kog has gone?”
“How could I, Your Majesty?” Nakakuni replied.
“I cannot vouch for its being true, but I gather from what people say
that Kog is now in Saga, behind a gate with just a single door.
Would you go and find her for me, without knowing whose house it is?”
“How could I, Your Majesty, unless I know who owns the house?”
“No, of course, you couldn’t, could you?”
The imperial visage glistened with tears.
Nakakuni thought it over some more.
“Why, yes! Kog plays the koto!
On such a beautifully moonlit night,
she cannot fail to be making music
in fond memory of her lord!
I myself have been called on sometimes
to accompany her on the flute—
I would know her touch anywhere!
There can’t be that many houses in Saga. I’m bound to hear her music sooner or later, if I have a good look around.” So he reflected.
“Very well, Your Majesty,” he said, “I shall go and do my best to find her, even without knowing whose house she is in. If I do find her, though, she will probably not believe me unless I bring her a letter from you. I hope that I may take one with me.”
The emperor saw that Nakakuni was right. He wrote the letter and gave it to him.
“Take a horse from the imperial stables,” His Majesty said.
Nakakuni did so and set off, whip raised high under the bright moon,
to follow through on his meandering search.
“A village far into the hills,
where the stag bells.” So the poet
once described Saga, and Nakakuni
felt its autumnal melancholy.
Whenever he came across a house
with such a gate, he stopped to listen
discreetly for some sign of her
but heard no one playing the koto.
“Perhaps,” he thought, “she has devoutly
gone to visit the Shakad,”174
so he went there, and he looked in
at many other temples, too,
but nowhere found any gentlewoman
resembling in the least Kog.
“Rather than go back empty-handed,
better not to go back at all.”
So Nakakuni said to himself.
“If I could, I would wander on
wherever the path I take might lead,
but ever
ywhere is the sovereign’s realm,
and no refuge could hide me for long.
Then what in the world am I to do?
Ah, yes! Hrinji is not far off.
Perhaps the moonlight has drawn her there.”
Nakakuni set off that way.
He was approaching Kameyama
when, from near a grove of pines,
he made out faint koto music.
Wind on high, wind sighing through pines,
or perhaps that lady’s koto?
He urged his mount on, and there it was:
the one-door gate and, from within,
the clear music of a koto.
From a safe distance, he lent an ear:
No, there was no mistaking now
Kog’s distinctive touch on the strings.
And what was it that she was playing?
“I Love Him So,” a woman’s song
of poignant longing for her lover.
“Sure enough,” he said to himself, “she is thinking of our sovereign.
Of all the pieces she might have played, how sad that she should choose this one!”
Marveling at this stroke of fortune, he took out his flute, played a little,
Nakakuni hears Kog’s music.
and rapped smartly at the gate.
The music stopped. He called out,
“Nakakuni is my name.
I am here from His Majesty.
Please have someone open the gate!”
He knocked and knocked, to no effect.
Eventually, to his relief, he heard somebody emerge. He waited breathlessly.
The latch lifted, the gate cracked open, and a pretty little gentlewoman peeked out. “You must have the wrong house,” she said. “No one here would be expecting a message from the palace.”
Fearing that an inadequate answer might encourage her to close and lock the gate again, Nakakuni thrust it open, entered, and sat down on the veranda near the double doors.
“What can have possessed you, to move to such a place?” he began. “There may be reason to fear for His Majesty’s life, the way he is pining for you. Perhaps you imagine that this is a fancy of mine, but I bring you a letter from him.” He took it out and had the little gentlewoman give it to Kog.
Kog unfolded it and read it:
It really was from the emperor.
Immediately she wrote a reply
and sent it out with a set of robes
suitable for a gentlewoman.
With those robes over his shoulder,175
Nakakuni ventured to say,
“No other messenger, I am sure,
would wish to add anything more
after receiving your reply,
but can you really have forgotten
how, when you used to play in the palace,
I was called in for the flute part?
I would be sorry now to start back
without hearing a word in your voice.”
Kog must have understood how he felt, for she answered him in person.
“As you have probably heard, Lord Kiyomori made such frightening threats
that I fled the palace in terror when news of them reached me.
Living here lately has kept me from making music,
but I cannot remain here forever.
No, there is a step I mean to take tomorrow, out beyond hara,
and the gentlewoman with whom I am staying begged me
to play for her once, tonight, before I go.
‘It is late now,’ she said. ‘No one will be out there to stop and listen.’
And yes, I so missed all I had left
that I did play my dear old koto,
and you knew my touch right away.”
She could not keep her tears from flowing,
and Nakakuni, too, wet his sleeves.
In time Nakakuni swallowed his tears.
“A step that you plan to take tomorrow, beyond hara—
you must mean that you will become a nun.
No, no, you cannot do that! Just imagine His Majesty’s misery!”
And to the two grooms he had with him: “Do not allow her to leave!”
He left them there
to mount guard over the house
and rode off, back to the palace.
He arrived under a lightening sky.
“Surely His Majesty is asleep,”
he said to himself. “Whom can I ask to take him the news?”
He had the horse he had ridden tethered—the one from the imperial stables—
tossed the gift set of woman’s robes over the Prancing Horse partition,
and presented himself at the sovereign’s residence.
The emperor was still in the same room as the evening before.
He was murmuring these Chinese lines:
“‘Southward they soar and northward fly,
yet autumn geese will bear for me no news of heat or cold.
Up from the east it rises and runs to the west,
but the dawn moon accepts only my gaze as my thoughts follow.’”
Nakakuni came in upon him and told him about Kog. His Majesty
was deeply stirred. “Bring her to me tonight,” he commanded.
Nakakuni feared the consequences if Lord Kiyomori ever found out, but the emperor had spoken. He readied a handsome equipage—attendants, ox driver, ox, and carriage—and set out for Saga. Kog cited many reasons not to obey, but in one way and another he persuaded her to change her mind. She boarded the carriage and arrived at the palace, where His Majesty lodged her well out of sight. He had her come to him every night, and in time she bore him the princess known later on as Bmon-in.
Somehow Lord Kiyomori learned after all what was going on.
“They told me Kog was gone,” he said, “but that was a blatant lie.”
He seized her, made her a nun, and banished her from the capital.
She had long wanted to leave the world, but not this way, under duress.
In her twenty-third year, in deep black robes, she came to live in Saga.
Her fate was cruel. This, they say, is the sort of thing
that destroyed the emperor’s health and led at last to his death.
Cloistered Emperor Go-Shirakawa
had suffered a succession of blows,
having lost Emperor Nij,
his eldest son, in the Eiman years [1165–66]
and Emperor Rokuj, his grandson,
in the seventh month of Angen 2. [1176]
Next, his empress, Kenshunmon-in,
to whom he had so solemnly sworn
by the stars, above in the River of Heaven,
that they would share one wing in flight
and on earth their spreading branches—
stricken as though by autumn vapors,
she had vanished like morning dew.
Since then years and months had passed,
but these partings remained for him
as fresh as yesterday or today,
and his tears never ceased to flow.
Then, in the fifth month of Jish 4, [1180]
his next son, Prince Mochihito, was slain,
and now Retired Emperor Takakura,
his last hope for this life and the next,
had gone before him into death.
Speechless with grief, he could only weep.
“‘Bitter among all bitter blows
is losing a son in advanced age.
Painful among all miseries
is to die young, before mother and father.’”
These words of Lord Tomotsuna,
when his son, Sumiakira, died,
now spoke to His Cloistered Eminence
with the plain force of simple truth.
Even so, he never neglected
reading aloud the Lotus Sutra
and practicing the Three Mysteries,176
which gained him a vast store of merit.
Now that the whole realm was in mourni
ng,
the court set aside its brilliant colors
to favor instead more somber hues.
5. The Circular Letter
Fearing after all the sheer cruelty of his conduct,
Lord Kiyomori sought to mollify His Cloistered Eminence
by giving him his daughter by the Itsukushima Shrine maiden in Aki:
a sweet and lovely girl now in her eighteenth year.
She went attended by many ranking gentlewomen, carefully chosen,
and accompanied by a throng of senior nobles and privy gentlemen,
just as a consort does when she enters the palace.
This was less than fourteen days after the retired emperor’s passing,
and people whispered disapprovingly among themselves.
Meanwhile talk began going around
of one Kiso no Yoshinaka,
a Minamoto in Shinano province.
Yoshinaka’s father was Yoshikata, a commander of the heir apparent’s corps of guards and the second son of Tameyoshi. He was in his second year when, on the twenty-sixth of the eighth month of Kyūju 2, [1155] Yoshikata died by the hand of Akugenda Yoshihira, of Kamakura. His weeping mother took him to Shinano, where she sought refuge with Kiso no Chūz Kanet. She begged Kanet to bring up her son and make a man of him. Kanet agreed to do so, and he fully upheld his promise for twenty years and more.
Young Yoshinaka, as he grew,
displayed quite remarkable strength
and bold courage beyond compare.
“What a bow he draws! What a fighter!”
people exclaimed among themselves.
“Whether on horseback or on foot,
he surely equals in every way
Tamuramaro in days of old
or Toshihito, Koremochi,
Tomoyori, Yasumasa,
or those forebears of his own,
Yorimitsu or Lord Yoshiie!”
One day Yoshinaka summoned his guardian, Kanet, and said,
“Word has it that Yoritomo has raised rebellion
and subjugated the eight provinces of the Kanto
and that he is now moving on the capital by the Tkaid route,
aiming to overthrow the Heike.
Well, I have a mind to seize the Tsen and Hokuroku provinces,