by VIKING ADULT
destroy the Heike just before he does,
and get myself known as one of Japan’s two great commanders.”
Such was the goal he suggested. Kanet was pleased and impressed.
“That is just what I brought you up for!” he exclaimed.
“Now you are really talking like a descendant of Yoshiie!”
He set himself immediately to the task of planning rebellion.
In Kanet’s company, Yoshinaka had been up to the capital often,
to learn something of what the Heike were like and how they lived.
When he came of age in his thirteenth year, he went on pilgrimage to Iwashimizu
and declared there, before Great Bodhisattva Hachiman,
“My great-grandfather, Lord Yoshiie, became your son
and took the name Hachimantar. Now I follow in his footsteps.”
Before Hachiman’s sanctuary he first tied his hair into a man’s topknot
and assumed the name Kiso no Jir Yoshinaka.
“The first thing to do,” said Kanet,
“is to send around a circular letter.”
In Shinano he had a few words
with Nenoi no Koyata
and Unno no Yukichika,
neither of whom turned him away.
They were the first, and after them
every last warrior in Shinano
assented as leaves bow to the wind.
In Kzuke the fighting men
of Tago county, glad to honor
their old bond with Yoshikata,
rallied, every one, to the call.
Yes, the Heike were finished.
Now was the time for the Genji
to achieve their long-cherished goal.
6. The Couriers
Kiso is a region in southern Shinano province,
on the Mino border and so quite close to the capital.
The Heike got wind of what was going on.
“The eastern provinces are rebelling!” they cried.
“And now the north, too? What are we to do?”
Lord Kiyomori declared, “Yoshinaka does not worry me.
He may have all the Shinano warriors behind him,
but for us, in Echigo, we have the descendants of Koremochi:
J no Tar Sukenaga and J no Shir Sukemochi.
These two brothers command a great many men.
They will soon dispose of him, at a word from His Majesty.”
“I wonder, I just wonder,” people murmured among themselves.
On the first day of the second month, Lord Kiyomori appointed J no Tar Sukenaga, from Echigo, to govern that province. Apparently this measure had to do with his plan to kill Yoshinaka. On the seventh the ministerial and lesser noble houses dedicated copies of the Sonsh darani and pictures of Mantra King Fud. They did so to dispel the threat of war.
On the ninth came the news that Musashi Gon-no-kami Yoshimoto,
of Ishikawa county in Kawachi province, with his son Yoshikane,
had turned against the Heike and reached an understanding with Yoritomo
and that he was planning to flee toward the east.
Lord Kiyomori at once sent a punitive force against him
under Gendayū Suekata and Settsu no Hangan Morizumi.
They set out at the head of three thousand horse.
In their fort Yoshimoto and his son
had no more than a hundred men.
The besiegers uttered their battle cry,
started the opening arrow exchange,
and for hours attacked in waves.
Within, the defenders fought desperately.
Most were killed, Yoshimoto among them.
Yoshikane, badly wounded, was taken alive.
On the eleventh, Yoshimoto’s head reached the capital,
where it was paraded along the great avenues.
There was a precedent for this in a time of imperial mourning:
The head of Minamoto no Yoshichika, once governor of Tsushima,
had been paraded likewise through the streets after Emperor Horikawa died.
On the twelfth a courier arrived from Kyushu:
Kinmichi, the chief priest of the Usa Shrine,
reported that Ogata no Sabur and everyone else in Kyushu,
even to the Usuki, the Betsugi, and the Matsura leagues,
had turned against the Heike and were now Genji allies.
“First the east and north and now this?” the Heike cried out in alarm.
“Oh, what are we going to do?”
On the sixteenth, from Iyo province,
another courier brought further news.
The winter before, Kawano no Shir Michikiyo
and every man in Shikoku had spurned the Heike
to make common cause with the Genji,
whereupon the Nuka novice, Saijaku of Bingo,
a dedicated Heike ally, charged over into Iyo
and killed Michikiyo at the fortress of Takan.
Michikiyo’s son, Michinobu, was away at the time
in Aki, visiting his maternal uncle, Nuta no Jir.
Michinobu’s loss fired him with hatred for Saijaku.
“I’ll get that man somehow or other,” he resolved,
and awaited a chance to do so. Meanwhile Saijaku,
having dispatched Michikiyo and subdued Shikoku,
this year on the fifteenth of the first month
crossed to the harbor of Tomo in Bingo province,
where he drank and caroused with a crowd of singing girls.
While he lay there drunk, dead to the world,
Michinobu burst in with a hundred resolute men.
Saijaku had three hundred with him, but the sudden assault
threw them into confusion. Arrow and sword
quickly ended any resistance. Michinobu took him alive,
raced back to Iyo, marched to the Takan fortress
where his father had met his death, and there,
with a saw, decapitated the man.
Others claim that he crucified him.
7. The Death of Kiyomori
After that, every man in Shikoku followed Kawano Michikiyo.
Word had it that even the Kumano superintendent Tanz,
although deeply beholden to the Heike,
had turned against them and joined the Genji.
All the eastern and northern provinces were in a state of rebellion,
and so, too, those to the south and west.
News of barbarian uprisings beat upon the ears;
the emperor received constant reports of incidents announcing revolt.
The enemy menace rose up on every side.
To the intense distress of all—not the Heike alone, but anyone of feeling—
the world as people had known it seemed doomed.
On the twenty-third, the senior nobles met in council.
Lord Munemori observed that the force dispatched to the Kanto had achieved little.
“I recommend sending another,” he said, “this time under my command.”
“That would be splendid!” the assembly flatteringly responded.
His Cloistered Eminence issued a decree:
All senior nobles and privy gentlemen holding military office
and with knowledge of arms were to join a force under Munemori,
in order to suppress the rebels in the provinces of east and north.
On the twenty-seventh, Lord Munemori was due to set forth
on his punitive campaign against the Genji in the east,
but he delayed his departure because Lord Kiyomori was unwell.
The next day, the twenty-eighth, Kiyomori’s condition was grave.
“This is it, then,” people whispered at Rokuhara and throughout the city.
From the very first day of Lord Kiyomori’s illness, nothing passed his lips, not even water, and his body burned like fire. The heat within twenty-five or thirty feet of where he lay was unbearable. His only words were “Hot! Hot!” This
was clearly no common affliction. When he stepped down into a stone basin filled with water from the Senju spring on Mount Hiei, to cool himself, the water bubbled furiously around him and soon boiled.
Water sprayed on him from a bamboo pipe, to give him relief,
recoiled as though from hot stone or iron and never reached him.
What water did touch him turned to fire.
Black smoke filled the room, and flames swirled high in the air.
Perhaps Reverend Hz, long ago,
saw something similar when he went,
at the invitation of King Enma,
to find where his mother had been reborn.
King Enma, moved to compassion,
gave him an escort of hell minions,
who guided him to the hell of fierce heat.
Once through the iron gate, Hz saw
flames darting skyward like shooting stars,
several hundred yojanas177 high.
The spectacle now was similar.
Lord Kiyomori’s wife, Lady Nii, had a terrifying dream.
A fiercely burning carriage drove in through the gate,
escorted before and behind by beings with the heads of horses or oxen.
The front of the carriage displayed, on an iron tablet, the single character mu.
Lady Nii asked in the dream what to make of this.
“We have come from King Enma’s court,” she was told, “to receive Lord Kiyomori.”
“What does that iron tablet mean?”
“For the crime of burning the sixteen-foot, gilt-bronze Roshana
on Jambudvīpa, the southern continent of men,
King Enma has sentenced Kiyomori to the depths of Muken,
the hell of unbroken agony. The mu is written, but not yet the ken.”
Dripping with perspiration, the astonished Lady Nii related her dream,
and the hair rose on all those who heard her.
To holy temples and holy shrines
they offered with reckless abandon
gold and silver, the seven treasures,
even horses, saddles, and armor,
bows and arrows, swords and daggers,
together with their fervent prayers,
but none of this made any difference.
Lord Kiyomori’s sons and daughters
gathered at their father’s bedside,
bewildered and deeply distressed,
but no sign offered any hope.
On the second of the intercalary second month,178 Lady Nii braved the terrible heat to approach her husband’s pillow and address him, weeping. “My despair grows daily at the sight of you,” she said. “If you still desire anything in this life, please, when your mind clears a little, tell me what it is.”
Lord Kiyomori, once so forbidding, managed to whisper painfully under his breath, “In Hgen, Heiji, and after, I subdued repeated uprisings against the court, received rewards beyond my station, and enjoyed the great good fortune of becoming chancellor and an emperor’s grandfather. My children and grandchildren prosper, and in this life I have no further ambition. But there is one thing that I still desire. I cannot rest because I have not yet seen the head of the Izu exile, Yoritomo.
Never mind building me temples and pagodas,
never mind pious prayers for me once I am gone.
No, I want Yoritomo’s head off and hung before my grave.
That is the only commemoration I wish.”
What profoundly sinful words!
On the fourth his torment was such that, as a last resort,
he lay down on a board dripping with water. It did not help.
He writhed in agony, gasping for breath, and finally died in convulsions.
The din of horses and carriages
dashing madly hither and yon
rang through the heavens and shook the earth.
No sovereign’s fate, no emperor’s end
could have provoked a greater uproar.
This year had been his sixty-fourth—
not yet time to die of old age,
but all at once his destined span
was over. No sumptuous litanies,
no secret rites could help him now.
The glory of the gods and buddhas
vanished for him, the heavenly powers
withdrew all further protection.
What, then, could any mortal do?
Warriors by the tens of thousands,
each loyally ready to die for him,
surrounded him in ranks, high and low,
but not for one moment could they repel
the murderous demons of transience
invisible, irresistible.
To the great mountain at death’s gate,
whence none return, to that river
the dead cross, over three fords;
to the Yellow Springs, to the bardo
he set off without doubt all alone.
Only his many crimes, new and old,
came forth to meet him as hell fiends.
There is good reason to pity him.
In any case, there was more to do.
On the seventh, at Otagi,
the funeral pyre turned him to smoke.
Reverend Enjitsu hung the bones
around his neck, went down to Settsu,
and buried them on Ky-no-shima.
He whose fame had so resounded
the whole length and breadth of Japan,
who had wielded colossal power,
Kiyomori, in an instant
floated as smoke into the sky
over the city, while the remains
mingled soon with the sands of the shore,
and all he had been returned to earth.
8. Sutra Island
Strange things happened the night of the funeral.
The Nishi-Hachij Mansion, lavishly adorned with gold, silver, and jade,
suddenly burned to the ground.
Houses burn often enough, it is true, but this was a great disaster.
Rumor spoke of arson, but who could have done it?
And that same night, south of Rokuhara,
twenty or thirty people—if indeed they were human at all—
were heard singing, “Ah, the lovely waters, roaring, the great waterfall…”
together with sounds of dancing and gusts of laughter.
Retired Emperor Takakura’s passing in the first month of that year had begun a time of national mourning, and only a month or two later Lord Kiyomori, too, had died. How could the meanest peasant, man or woman, not grieve? The Heike warriors judged that such hilarity must issue from tengu, and a hundred of their hot-blooded youths went after the laughing voices.
They came to His Cloistered Eminence’s Hjūji residence, deserted these two or three years except for a caretaker, one Motomune, once a Bizen provincial official. Twenty or thirty of Motomune’s friends had gathered to drink under cover of night. Given the circumstances, they began by heeding a warning not to make any noise, but then they got drunk and started dancing.
The young warriors burst in, seized every drunken reveler (thirty in all),
marched them to Rokuhara,
and lined them up in the court before Lord Munemori.
Munemori inquired into what had been going on and then declared,
“It would not be right to behead men as drunk as these.”
He let them all go.
After a death the simplest people,
morning and evening, ring the bell,
performing the usual liturgies
to Amida and the Lotus Sutra,
but, Kiyomori’s funeral over,
there were no alms or offerings.
The sole concern, morning or evening,
was battle tactics and strategy.
Lord Kiyomori had indeed suffered appallingly as he died,
but much about him showed that he was no ordinary man.
When he went on pilgrimage to the Hiyoshi Shrine,
that—people said—not even a newly appointed regent
on his Kasuga pilgrimage or his first visit to Uji
could conceivably have gone with a more impressive train.
Marvelous, though, beyond all else
was the island of Ky-no-shima,
which he built off Fukuhara
and which even in our own time
keeps the shipping there from harm.
Construction of this island began early in the second month of h 1, [1161]
but in the eighth month of that year typhoon-driven waves
swept away all the work done so far.
Late in the third month of h 3,
Kiyomori boiling. Top left: Lady Nii’s dream of hell fiends.
Awa no Minbu Shigeyoshi
received the commission to start again.
In their council the senior nobles
proposed securing the foundations
by means of a living sacrifice,179
but that was judged too great a sin.
Instead they wrote the words of the sutras,
all of them, on the building stones—
hence the name Ky-no-shima:
“Sutra Island.”
9. Jishinb
Old men claimed that Lord Kiyomori, however evil his reputation,
was really the great Buddhist master Jie180 reborn. And this is why:
In the province of Settsu, there stands a mountain temple named Seichji.
The head priest there, Jishinb Son’e, once a scholar monk on Mount Hiei,
for many years had been an ardent devotee of the Lotus.
The spirit had moved him to leave the Mountain and come to this temple,
where over time he won all who knew him to faith.
At the hour of the ox on the night of the twenty-second, in the twelfth month of Shan 2, [1172, ca. 2 A.M.]
he was leaning on his armrest, reading the Lotus Sutra,
when between dream and waking he saw a man of fifty or so,
in white pilgrim garb, tall lacquered hat, straw sandals, and gaiters,
approach him bearing a formal letter.
“Where do you come from?” Son’e asked.
“From the palace of King Enma. I bring you a message from him.”
The figure gave Son’e the letter. Son’e opened it and read:
SUMMONS
TO: Jinshinb Son’e of Seichji
