by VIKING ADULT
What will you gain from taking my head when you do not know who I am?”
Moritoshi must have seen he was right, for he replied,
“Although born a Heike lord, I was good only for war:
My name is Moritoshi, once governor of Etchū. Who are you?”
“Inomata no Kobeiroku Noritsuna, from Musashi,”
Inomata answered. “As far as I can see,
the Genji are now too strong and the Heike face defeat.
If your great lord still lived, then yes, taking an enemy’s head
might win you glory and rich reward, but he is gone.
Spare me this once and you will have your reward:
I will save for you the lives of dozens of your men.”
Moritoshi was furious.
“I am not good for much,” he said,
“but I am a Heike after all.
I have no intention of seeking help from any Genji, nor do I imagine any Genji wanting mine. You should have held your tongue!”
He was about to strike when Inomata spoke again. “For shame!” he said, “to take the head of a man who has already surrendered!”
“Very well,” Moritoshi answered, “your life is yours.” He drew Inomata to his feet. Before them the ground was dry and hard, like an upland field; behind them stretched a paddy filled with deep mud. They sat down on the path that bordered it and rested.
Soon a single warrior came galloping toward them, clad in black-laced armor and riding a pale roan. Moritoshi peered suspiciously at him.
“That is Hitomi no Shir, a good friend of mine,” Inomata said. “He is probably heading this way because he has seen me. There is no need to worry.”
All the time, though, he was thinking, “If I grapple with Moritoshi when Shir gets close, he is bound to join in.”
By now the man was hardly more than a few yards away. Moritoshi at first kept an eye on both, but with Shir so near now, he reserved his watchful gaze for this new foe. His eyes were off Inomata when, with a shout, Inomata jumped to his feet, shoved Moritoshi’s breastplate with both hands, and knocked him backward into the paddy.
While Moritoshi struggled to rise,
Inomata leaped on top of him,
drew the dagger from his foe’s waist,
pulled open the skirts of his armor,
plunged in the dagger thrice, hilt and fist,
and took the head. Then Shir arrived.
To forestall any possible dispute,
he roared, “Inomata Noritsuna
has slain Taira no Moritoshi,
famed so long as a demon or god!”
His exploit earned him pride of place
on the roster of valorous deeds that day.
14. The Death of Tadanori
Tadanori, governor of Satsuma, commanded the west Heike force at Ichi-no-tani.
He wore black-laced armor over a dark blue brocade hitatare,
and his powerful black horse sported a lacquered saddle sprinkled with silver and gold.
Amid a hundred of his men, he coolly fought a series of skirmishes, meanwhile retreating,
until Okabe Tadazumi, of the Inomata League, spotted him as a commander.
Whip and stirrup, Okabe caught up with him.
“Who are you?” he demanded to know. “Declare your name!”
“One of yours,” Tadanori replied. He glanced back at the man,
who glimpsed blackened teeth in the helmeted face.
“Heavens! No one on our side blackens his teeth!” Okabe reflected.
“He must be a Taira noble!”
Okabe rode up beside the man and seized him.
Tadanori’s hundred, all forcibly drafted, came from an assortment of provinces,
and none rushed to his aid. At the sight every man fled as fast as he could.
“You wretch!” said Tadanori.
“When I told you I was one of yours,
you should have let it go at that!”
Having been brought up at Kumano,
he was a strong man and very quick.
In a flash he drew his dagger.
He stabbed Okabe twice on horseback
and once more after he had fallen.
So it was that he struck three blows.
The first two of these glanced off the armor, failing to penetrate it.
The third went inside the helmet, but the wound was too light to kill.
He had Okabe’s head pinned to the ground and was about to cut it off
when the man’s page galloped up from behind, drew his sword,
and cut off Tadanori’s dagger arm at the elbow.
Tadanori knew that this was the end. “Leave me a moment,” he said.
Right panel: The death of Tadanori. In background: Atsumori in the water (left) and Kumagai challenging him to come back (right).
“I wish to call the Name ten times.”
He gripped Okabe and shoved him a bow length away.
Then he turned his face to the west,
called ten times on Amida, and ended,
“You who illumine the worlds,
you gather to you without fail
all sentient beings who call your Name!”
That very instant Okabe,
from behind him, struck off his head.
He knew he had killed a commander,
but not who that commander was.
He then read a strip of paper
attached to the slain man’s quiver.
It bore a poem on the topic
“Blossoms at a Wayside Inn”:
Nightfall on the road,
and should one then seek lodging
beneath a cherry tree
the blossoms themselves, that night,
might prove a most gracious host.
The signature read, “Tadanori.”
He knew then who was his prize.
He impaled the head on his sword, lifted it high, and announced in a great voice,
“I, Okabe Tadazumi, have slain the great Heike commander
Tadanori, governor of Satsuma!”
Both sides, on hearing these words,
were struck with pity. “Alas,” they cried,
“for a gentleman so accomplished
both in poetry and in war!
This great commander will be missed!”
15. Shigehira Taken Alive
Lord Taira no Shigehira, a Guards captain with the third rank,
was the deputy commander in Ikuta Wood,
but all his men had died or fled; with him he had only one left.
That day he wore a dark blue hitatare embroidered with bright yellow plovers
under armor with purple lacing darker toward the bottom
and rode a superb steed named Dji Kage.
His foster brother, Gotbye Morinaga, wore a dappled tie-dyed hitatare
under scarlet-laced armor,
and he rode Shigehira’s treasured Yomenashi, a light gray.
Kajiwara Kagesue and Sh no Shir Takaie spotted him as a commander
and, whip and stirrup, raced after him.
Ships that promised salvation
lay in great numbers along the shore,
but the enemy, in hot pursuit,
never gave him a chance to escape.
Across the Minato River he fled,
across the Karumo River,
past Hasu Pond on his right
and on his left Koma Wood,
past Itayado and Suma,
driving onward toward the west.
Shigehira’s was a very fine steed.
The pursuers’ horses, exhausted,
seemed unlikely ever to catch him;
in fact, he drew farther and farther ahead.
Kajiwara Kagesue
therefore stood tall in his stirrups
and took a chance on a very long shot.
The arrow sank deep into the rump
behind Shigehira. His mount weakened.
Gotbye Morinaga
must have feared that Shigehira
would demand his horse, for he fled,
whip high. “What is this, Morinaga?”
Shigehira called. “What you swore to me
all those years ago is something else.
Where are you off to, abandoning me?”
Morinaga pretended not to hear.
He stripped the red badge from his armor,
tossed it from him, and galloped away.
The foe was near; his horse was failing.
Shigehira rode into the sea,
but the shallows ran out much too far
to allow him to drown. He dismounted,
cut the band that secured his armor,
untied the shoulder cords, took it off,
and made ready to slit his belly,
but Sh no Shir came charging up,
leaped down from the saddle, and cried,
“Oh, no you don’t! You’re coming with me!”
He got Shigehira onto his own horse,
tied him to the saddle pommel,
mounted a new steed, and off he went.
Morinaga, whose horse had unusual stamina, got away easily
and became in time a Kumano monk under a master named Onaka.
After this master’s death, his widow, a nun,
went up to the capital to pursue a lawsuit, and Morinaga went with her.
Many there knew him as Lord Shigehira’s foster brother.
“He’s a wretch, this Morinaga,” they said, snapping their fingers in anger.
“He wouldn’t die with Shigehira, who was always so good to him,
and now he turns up as a monk, with some nun or other!
He should be ashamed of himself!”
Indeed Morinaga was ashamed.
They say he kept a fan over his face.
16. The Death of Atsumori
The enemy army was finished, and Kumagai Naozane remarked,
“The Heike lords will be falling back down to the water,
so as to get away on their ships.
I would gladly do battle with a worthy commander.”
He rode toward the shore and found a warrior there,
wearing a silk hitatare embroidered with cranes under delicately tinted green armor,
a helmet with spreading horns, a sword with gold fittings,
and, on his back, arrows fletched with mottled feathers.
He carried a lacquered, rattan-wrapped bow
and rode a dappled gray with a gold-trimmed saddle.
Eyes fixed on a ship out at sea,
he plunged into the water and swam toward it some fifty yards.
Kumagai shouted a challenge to him:
“My eyes tell me that you are a man of high rank. For shame, to turn your face from an enemy! Come back! Come back!”
He beckoned urgently with his fan, and the other came. Kumagai halted beside him even as he rode up onto the shore and gripped him hard. The pair fell. Kumagai pinned the head to the ground and, to take it, tore off the helmet. He beheld a youth in his sixteenth or seventeenth year, his face lightly powdered, his teeth blackened, and about the same age as Kumagai’s son, Kojir. He was very pretty, too. Kumagai could not bring himself to begin. He spoke instead: “Who are you, if I may ask? Tell me your name. I will spare you.”
“And who are you?” the other answered.
“Nobody you can have heard of:
Kumagai no Jir Naozane
from the province of Musashi,”
Kumagai replied.
“Well then, nothing about you requires me to give you my name.
I am a worthy opponent. Take my head anyway and ask around.
Others will know me.”
“Ah!” Kumagai said to himself.
“Then he is of very high rank!
And what if I do behead him?
His losing army cannot win.
If, on the other hand, I do not,
our winning army still cannot lose.
Kojir’s wound, though slight, was still a terrible shock.
How this young lord’s father, then, will suffer when he learns that his son has been killed!
No, I simply must spare his life.”
But then he glanced behind him.
He saw Doi and Kajiwara galloping his way with fifty men.
Struggling to hold back his tears, he said,
“What I want, you know, is to spare you,
but the great host of men on my side
will never allow you to get away.
Rather than leave your fate to others,
I prefer to see to it myself
and to pray for you in the afterlife.”
So he spoke; and the lordly youth:
“Just take my head now. Only be quick.”
Kumagai, overcome by pity,
hardly knew how even to begin.
His sight darkened, his courage faltered,
he barely knew what he was doing,
but there was simply no escape:
In tears, he took the head after all.
“Alas,” he murmured in bitter grief,
“the warrior’s calling is harder than any.
Had I not been born to a warlike house,
never would I have known such sorrow!
What cruelty has been forced on me!”
He pressed his sleeves to his eyes and wept.
A moment went by. There was more to do.
He took off the young man’s hitatare,
meaning to use it to wrap the head,
and found at his waist a brocade bag
containing a flute. “Oh, how awful!
At dawn today, within the fortress,
you could hear men making music,
and obviously he was one of them!
We boast in our army from the east
warriors by the tens of thousands,
but I am certain not one of them
brought a flute with him into battle!
These noble gentlemen are so refined!” Kumagai went to present himself before Yoshitsune, and the sight of the head drew tears from every man present. Only later on did Kumagai learn that the youth had been Atsumori, the son of Taira no Tsunemori, the director of palace upkeep. He had been in his seventeenth year. It was then that Kumagai felt rise compellingly within him the aspiration to enlightenment.
Now, as to Atsumori’s flute,
his grandfather, Tadamori,
a most accomplished musician,
had once received it as a gift
from Retired Emperor Toba.
He then passed it down in his line,
and it had come, or so they say,
for his talent, to Atsumori.
The name of the flute was Saeda.
It is a touching thought indeed
that the giddy charms of music
served to turn a warrior’s mind
to praise the way traced by the Buddha.
17. The Death of Tomoakira
Chamberlain Narimori, the last son of the counselor Norimori,
died in combat with Tsuchiya no Gor Shigeyuki, from Hitachi.
Tsunemasa, of the grand empress’s household and Tsunemori’s eldest son,
fled to the water, to escape on one of the ships,
but the men of Kawagoe no Kotar Shigefusa surrounded him and struck him down.
Tsunetoshi, Kiyofusa, and Kiyosada, the governors of Wakasa, Awaji, and Owari,
charged together into the enemy, fought fiercely, took many trophies, and died together.
The counselor Tomomori had commanded the Heike force at Ikuta Wood,
but after losing all his men he fled to the shore with just two others,
his son Tomoakira, the governor of Musashi, and a man of theirs, Kenmotsu Tar Yorikata.
They, too, hoped that a ship would save them.
Alas, just then ten riders, apparently from the Kodama League,
flying a banner emblazoned with a battle fan,
came down on them with ferocious yells.
Kenmotsu, who wielded a mighty bow,
shot an arrow straight into the neck
of their standard-bearer, who rode ahead.
He toppled headlong. There was another,
apparently their commander:
He pulled up right beside Tomomori
to seize him, but Tomoakira,
his son, burst in between them, grappled,
crashed down with him, and took his head.
He was getting again to his feet
when the man’s page attacked and took his.
Kenmotsu Tar fell upon him there,
gripped the page hard, and disposed of him.
He then emptied his quiver, drew his sword,
and killed many of the enemy men,
until an arrow struck his left knee.
He died where he sat, still fighting.
Amid the confusion Tomomori swam his superb steed
a mile or so out into the sea and caught up with Lord Munemori’s ship.
The ship was too crowded, and they turned the horse back.
“That animal will fall into enemy hands,” Shigeyoshi warned.
“I’ll kill him with an arrow.”
He put one to the string and moved forward to shoot, but Tomomori stopped him.
“Let anyone claim him who will,” Tomomori said.
“He saved my life, after all. I will not have it.”
Shigeyoshi was forced to desist.
The horse, unwilling to leave his master,
for some time remained near the ship,
still swimming toward the open sea,
but the ship drew ever farther ahead,
and at last the horse returned to shore.
As soon as he found footing again,
he looked back once more toward the ship,
and two or three times he neighed.
Then he came up on dry land and rested awhile.
Kawagoe no Kotar Shigefusa took him in hand
and presented him to the cloistered emperor.
He went straight into the sovereign’s stables, where he had lived before,
in the stalls reserved for the most valued steeds.
Lord Munemori had gone to thank the sovereign
for his elevation to palace minister, and had received him then as a gift.
Tomomori prized the horse when he gained possession of him
and on the first of each month prayed to Taizan Bukun that the steed should thrive.221
