by VIKING ADULT
Murakami no Sabur of the Shinano Genji, who had turned from Kiso to the cloistered emperor, was cut down. Next the mi captain Tamekiyo and Echizen governor Nobuyuki, also on the sovereign’s side, were slain and their heads taken. Mitsunaga, the governor of Hki, and his son Masatsune were both killed. Lieutenant Masakata, a grandson of the Azechi grand counselor Sukekata, went into battle in armor and a tall court hat. Higuchi no Jir Kanemitsu took him prisoner.
Meiun, abbot of Mount Hiei,
and Cloistered Prince Enkei of Miidera
had sought safety with the sovereign,
but the black smoke came down on them.
On horseback they rushed to the riverbank,
where volleys of arrows greeted them.
Both of them died, shot from their horses,
and Kiso’s warriors took their heads.
Lord Yorisuke, too—the governor of Bungo and lord of Justice—
had confined himself in the residence,
but fire beset him and he raced to the bank of the river.
There the warriors’ lackeys stripped off his clothes and left him naked.
It was the nineteenth of the eleventh month, in the morning,
and the wind blowing down the river was freezing cold.
Yorisuke had a brother-in-law, a ranking monk named Shi,
whose acolyte had come out to the riverbank to watch the battle.
He noticed Yorisuke standing there, naked, and ran to him with a cry of horror.
He wore his cassock over two white kosode robes
and should properly have taken those off to clothe the poor man,
but no, he removed that short cassock of his and threw it over Yorisuke.
It remained draped over Yorisuke’s head, not even secured with a sash,
and from behind, it must have looked ridiculous.
Yorisuke then set off with the acolyte monk in white,
but not at a pace that matched the circumstances.
No, he kept stopping here and there to ask,
“Whose house is that?” “Who lives there?” “Where are we?”
The onlookers clapped their hands with glee.
The sovereign boarded a palanquin
and started for somewhere else—anywhere.
The warriors showered him with arrows.
The Bungo lieutenant Munenaga,
in a tan hitatare and folded eboshi,
accompanied him. “Beware!” he cried.
“This is His Cloistered Eminence!
Take care not to violate his person!”
The warriors all dismounted and knelt.
“Who are you?” the sovereign inquired.
Yashima no Shir Yukitsuna, from Shinano, announced his name
and lent his men’s strength to the palanquin.
They broke into the Goj Palace,
installed the cloistered emperor there, and mounted stern guard.
The child emperor boarded a boat [Go-Toba]
and sailed out onto his garden lake.
When volleys of arrows followed him,
the consultant Nobukiyo
and Norimitsu, governor of Kii,
out there on the water with him,
called, “We have His Majesty with us!
Avoid committing a grave offense!”
The warriors dismounted and knelt.
Then they escorted His Majesty
as far as the Kan’in Mansion.
The pathetic nature of this progress
truly defies description.
The battle during which Yoshinaka kills Meiun and Enkei. Hjūji burns, while the child emperor takes refuge on his garden lake.
11. The Battle at Hjūji
The mi governor Nakakane, one of the cloistered emperor’s allies,
held the west gate of the Hjūji residence with fifty horsemen
when Yamamoto Yoshitaka, of the mi Genji, came galloping up.
“What are you all doing here?” he asked. “Whom are you fighting to protect?
It seems both their majesties, cloistered and reigning, are gone!”
“Fine!” Nakakane cried. With a great shout, he drove in among the enemy
and laid about him so fiercely that with seven remaining men he broke through.
Among them was a warrior-monk named Kagab, of the Kusaka League in Kawachi.
He rode a pale roan with an extremely hard mouth.
“This horse is too dangerous,” he complained. “I can’t handle him.”
“Take mine, then,” said Nakakane.
Kagab mounted Nakakane’s chestnut with a white-tipped tail,
and with whoops and yells they charged into Nenoi no Koyata’s two hundred men holding Kawarazaka.
Five were killed, cutting Nakakane down to just two.
Kagab’s move to his master’s horse did not help. He, too, was killed.
Now, Nakakane had a houseman named Nakayori.
Separated from his lord by hostile forces,
Nakayori did not know what had happened to him.
Then he spotted a chestnut horse with a white-tipped tail, fleeing the battle.
He summoned his servant.
“That looks like Nakakane’s horse,” he said. “He must have been killed.
I promised that if we had to die, we would die together.
The thought of dying apart from him is too painful.
Did you see what body of men he charged into?”
“I believe he attacked the one on Kawarazaka.
That is the one his horse bolted from.”
“Then go back now, immediately,”
Nakayori replied, to make sure
that the man would loyally carry
word of his end to those at home.
Then, alone, he charged into the foe
and in a great voice announced his name:
“Behold Shinano no Jir Nakayori,
second son of Shinano governor
Nakashige and descended
nine generations from Prince Atsumi!
This year is my twenty-seventh.
Come, if you think you can best me—
here I am, ever at your service!”
Slashing about him in all directions,
he raced through them, killing many,
until he himself at last was slain.
Nakakane knew nothing of this. Together with his elder brother, the governor of Kawachi, and just one of his men, he fled south. Meanwhile the regent, Motomichi, had left the city for Uji to escape the fighting. Nakakane caught up with him in the Kohata hills.
The regent stopped his carriage, suspecting that the three might be Kiso’s men. “Who are you?” he demanded to know.
“Nakakane and Nakanobu,” they answered.
“How extraordinary! I was afraid that you were rabble from the north. Your arrival is very welcome. Stay with me and guard me.”
With respectful obedience they conducted him to the Fuke Mansion. From there they fled on toward Kawachi.
The next day, the twentieth, Kiso went out to the Kamo riverbank at Rokuj,
where he had the heads taken the day before hung in rows and recorded.
There were more than six hundred and thirty.
Among them were those of Meiun,
the Tendai abbot, and of Enkei,
the cloistered prince of Miidera.
Everyone who saw them shed tears.
Kiso then had his seven thousand
turn their horses toward the east
and three times utter such a shout
as to shake heaven and earth.
Alarm spread again through the city, but the shout was for victory rather than war.
The consultant Naganori, son of the late minor counselor Shinzei,
called at the cloistered emperor’s current residence, the Goj Palace.
“I have a report to make to His Cloistered Eminence.
Let me through!” he demanded, but the warriors on duty refused.
&n
bsp; There was only one thing to do. He entered a hut nearby,
shaved his head, became a monk, and donned black robes.
“Surely you cannot object to me now!” he said. “Let me in!”
And they did. He went to His Cloistered Eminence
and reported in full the names of the chief figures killed.
The sovereign wept copiously.
“Never did I imagine,” he said,
“that Meiun would die before his time.
It is I whose end was near,
and he gave his life in my place.”
He could not stop his streaming tears.
On the twenty-first of the month,
Kiso gathered those closest to him
to discuss what course to take next.
“Yes,” he declared, “I, Yoshinaka,
faced the sovereign in battle and won.
I might now become emperor,
or perhaps cloistered emperor.
Emperor would be good, but then,
wearing my hair like a little boy
in the end would not suit me at all.
Cloistered emperor would be fine,
but I could hardly become a monk.
No, I will be regent instead.”
Kakumei, the secretary
he kept always beside him, observed,
“Ever since Kamatari, my lord,
the regent has been a Fujiwara,
and you are a Minamoto.
Unfortunately, you cannot do that.”
“So be it, then. Those are not for me.”
Forthwith he appointed himself
director of the sovereign’s stables
and took over Tanba province.
Just imagine! He had not known
that an emperor, once retired,
is “cloistered” if he becomes a monk
and that an emperor not yet of age
wears his hair like the boy he is.
Kiso also took over the former regent Motofusa’s daughter
and imposed himself on the gentleman as a son-in-law.
On the twenty-third of the eleventh month,
he cashiered the Sanj counselor Tomokata and forty-eight other high officials,
whom he then placed under house arrest.
The Heike in their day had dismissed forty-three at once,
but not forty-nine. Kiso’s outrage was worse.
Meanwhile, in Kamakura, Yoritomo sent his younger brothers
Noriyori and Yoshitsune to end the havoc Kiso was causing.
News that he had burned the Hjūji residence and taken the sovereign prisoner,
plunging the realm into darkness, gave them pause.
“No,” they decided, “we cannot just go straight up to the capital and do battle.
We must inform Yoritomo.”
They were lodging with the head priest of the Atsuta Shrine, in Owari,
when Kintomo and Tokinari, two members of the cloistered emperor’s guard,
came racing down there to bring them the story.
Yoshitsune said, “Kintomo must go to the Kanto.
A messenger not fully informed could only give confusing answers when questioned.”
Accordingly, Kintomo galloped on to Kamakura.
Kintomo’s underlings had fled, to escape the fighting, and he therefore took with him his eldest son, Kinmochi, then in his fifteenth year. They reached the Kanto, and Kintomo made his report.
Thunderstruck, Yoritomo sent this message by courier to the capital: “The Tsuzumi Lieutenant, Tomoyasu, fed the sovereign such strange advice that His Cloistered Eminence’s residence burned and two monks of the highest distinction were killed. This is unacceptable. Tomoyasu, at least, already amounts to a rebel against the throne. There will only be further serious trouble if His Cloistered Eminence listens to one more word from him.”
This brought Tomoyasu racing day and night down to Kamakura, to justify himself.
Despite an order that no one should see or speak to him,
he presented himself daily at Yoritomo’s residence.
In the end he returned in shame to the capital.
Thereafter he apparently lived unknown, somewhere near Fushimi Inari.
Kiso sent the Heike a message.
“Come back to the capital,” it said.
“Let us unite and attack the east.”
Munemori welcomed the idea,
but not Tokitada or Tomomori.
“Whatever ruin the world may threaten,”
they warned, “do not let Yoshinaka
seduce you now into returning.
That would be most unfortunate.
Here we have with us His Majesty,
complete in virtue, and his regalia.
You would do far better to say,
‘Doff your helmet, unstring your bow,
come to us here, and submit.’”
That is the answer they gave, but Kiso ignored them.
Motofusa, the former regent, invited Kiso to come and see him.
“Lord Kiyomori behaved very badly,” he said,
“but good karma such as his is very rare,
and he kept peace in the realm for twenty years.
Evil ways do not suffice for governing.
You should instead restore to their posts
all those from whom, for no reason, you took them.”
Despite his thoroughly barbaric demeanor, Kiso complied.
He restored all the dismissed officials to their posts.
Motofusa’s son, Moroie, was then still only a captain and counselor.
Kiso at his own initiative raised him to minister and regent.
Since no ministerial post was actually vacant at the time,
for the purpose he borrowed that of palace minister from Tokudaiji Sanesada.
People always have some remark to make about anything,
and they called this new regent the “Upstart Minister.”
On the tenth day of the twelfth month,
His Cloistered Eminence left Goj
and moved to the house of Naritada,
the master of the sovereign’s table,
at Rokuj and Nishi-no-tin.
On the thirteenth came the year-end Seven-Day Rite.
Next the appointments list was announced.
In accordance with Kiso’s wishes, every man got the post he desired.
There the Heike were in the west,
and there Yoritomo in the east,
while Kiso lorded it in the city.
It was just like those eighteen years,
between the Early and Later Han,
when Wang Mang wielded usurped power.
The barriers everywhere were shut.
No tax goods could be collected;
no estate revenue came in.
Everyone throughout the capital
suffered like fish in dwindling water.
Under these parlous circumstances,
the year at last came to a close.
The third year of Juei began. [1184]
197. A prophetic text attributed to Prince Shtoku and often mentioned in medieval writing.
198. No explanation is known for this extravagant notion.
199. Not to be confused with Fujiwara no Michinori, whose religious name was also read Shinzei.
200. Japanese: tokko, a brass implement pointed at each end and essential in esoteric Buddhist ritual.
201. The sacred fire (Sanskrit: homa) burned on the altar during an esoteric ritual.
202. Son’i (866–940), then abbot of Mount Hiei, quelled the angry spirit of Tenjin (Sugawara no Michizane).
203. A Shinkokinshū poem by Princess Shokushi evokes Tchi, a village not far from Nara, in connection with fulling (beating) hempen cloth. The name also sounds as though it means “remote place.”
204. Usa Hachimangū, a major shrine to Hachiman.
205. Xuanzang (602–64) traveled to India from Tang China in order to seek the true Buddhist te
aching and translated many sutras into Chinese. The Pamirs are a mountain range in Central Asia. The “Shifting Sands” may have to do with the Gobi Desert.
206. A stock Chinese-derived description of an elegant bedroom.
207. The great Hachiman shrine in Kamakura, built by Yoritomo in 1180.
208. The lady whose story is told in 1:7.
209. The aisle (hisashi) was the space in a house surrounding the central chamber, between the chamber and the veranda. It was lower than the central chamber by the depth of the lintel (nageshi). This aisle (hirobisashi) is a second one beyond the first, again a lintel’s depth lower.
210. Kumade, a set of iron hooks mounted on a long handle.
BOOK NINE
1. Ikezuki
(recitative)
On the first day of Juei 3, there was the cloistered emperor,
installed in the home of Naritada, the master of the imperial table,
at Rokuj and Nishi-no-tin.
The house so little resembled an imperial residence
that to observe the customary rites was out of the question.
The cloistered sovereign received no formal new-year greeting,
and the counterpart morning greeting to the emperor was omitted as well.
(song)
The Heike saw the old year out,
the new year in at Yashima,
where despite this fresh beginning,
rites to mark the first three days
fell sadly short of what they wished.
No doubt His Majesty was present,
but there was no new-year feast,
nor did the emperor greet the gods.
No festive trout arrived from Kyushu,
no Kuzu men from Yoshino.
“Yes, the times were troubled then,
but this is not the way things were
when the capital was ours.”
So they talked among themselves.
Spring came, bringing every day
balmier breezes down the shore
and milder sunshine. But, alas,
the Heike felt still caught in ice,
like birds of the Himalayas.
“‘On either bank, to east and west,
willows leaf out soon or late;
on plum branches north and south,
some flowers open, others fall.
So do all have their own time.’211
Ah, how lovely it was then,
