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arm in arm, sank from sight together.
While others were thus engaged, Lord Munemori and his son Kiyomune
betrayed no sign of meaning to drown
but went instead to the side of their boat and looked around in horror.
Shocked Heike men shoved Munemori into the water, as though pushing past,
and Kiyomune leaped straight in after him.
All the other men had entered the sea in full armor,
carrying heavy objects to ensure that they sank at once,
but not so this father and son, both of them strong swimmers.
They did not sink.
“If Kiyomune goes down, I will, too,” Munemori told himself. “If he survives, so will I.”
Kiyomune likewise reflected, “I will sink or swim with him.”
While they swam around, keeping an eye on each other,
Ise no Sabur Yoshimori rowed up in a small boat.
He caught Kiyomune at once with his grappling hook and hauled him aboard.
Munemori saw it happen but did nothing.
Yoshimori got him, too.
Lord Munemori’s foster brother,
Hida no Saburzaemon Kagetsune,
boarded Yoshimori’s boat from his own.
“Who are you,” he demanded to know,
“who dare to lay your hands on my lord?”
He drew his sword and swiftly attacked.
Yoshimori seemed in grave danger
when his page intervened to save him.
Coming between them, he attacked back.
The first stroke from Kagetsune’s sword
split the page’s helmet in half,
and the second cut off his head.
Yoshimori remained under threat
when Hori no Yatar Chikatsune
shot full force from a boat alongside
an arrow that caught Kagetsune
under the helmet. His attack flagged.
Chikatsune then boarded the boat
and fought Kagetsune hand to hand.
A man of his came straight after him,
raised Kagetsune’s armor skirts,
and stabbed him twice. For all the fame
Kagetsune enjoyed as a fighter,
his time had come: The wounds were deep,
the enemy many. They cut him down.
Dragged alive from the water, Munemori
before his own eyes saw his foster brother killed.
How can he have felt about that?
As for Noritsune, no one courted an arrow from him, and he had none left.
Perhaps he had known that this day was his last,
for over a hitatare of red brocade he wore Chinese damask-laced armor.
Wielding in one hand a dauntingly long sword and in the other
a plain-handled halberd with a naked blade,
he laid so fiercely about him, left and right,
that no man there dared face him, and many died.
Tomomori sent a man to him.
“Lord Noritsune,” his message said,
“spare yourself bearing too many sins.
Was any man here a worthy opponent?”
“I see,” Noritsune said to himself.
“He wants me to take on their commander.”
Gripping his sword and halberd short,
he boarded one Genji boat, then another,
with fierce cries, always on the attack.
Not knowing which man before him
was Yoshitsune, he raced about,
suspecting anyone finely equipped.
Yoshitsune saw what he was up to.
He made a show of moving forward
but managed never to join with him.
Somehow or other, however,
Noritsune succeeded after all
in leaping with a shout of triumph
straight onto Yoshitsune’s boat.
Yoshitsune must have thought himself lost,
because he in turn, halberd under his arm,
sprang twenty feet to another boat
filled with warriors of his own.
No doubt Noritsune knew all too well
that he was nowhere near that agile.
He made no attempt to follow.
Seeing now that this was the end, he threw sword and halberd into the sea,
doffed his helmet and tossed it away, tore off the lower skirts of his armor,
loosed his wild hair, spread his arms wide in a stance inexpressibly terrifying,
and cried in a great voice,
“Any man who feels up to it,
let him come forward, fight with me,
and take Noritsune alive!
I shall gladly go down to Kamakura
for a word or two with Yoritomo!
Come, gentlemen, come and get me!”
No one would even approach him.
Now, there was a man from Tosa province,
one Aki no Tar Sanemitsu,
son of Aki no Dairy Saneyasu,
the head man of the district of Aki.
Endowed with the strength of thirty men,
he had a retainer as strong as he,
and Jir, his younger brother,
was also far sturdier than most.
The spectacle of Noritsune
inspired Sanemitsu to remark,
“A mighty man he may indeed be,
but once we three get hold of him,
no demon even a hundred feet tall
could resist submitting to us.”
He and the other two took a small boat,
brought it up beside Noritsune’s,
leaped aboard, their neck plates well down,
their swords drawn, and had at him.
Noritsune, perfectly calm,
moved up beside the strongman retainer
as the fellow was coming straight at him
and kicked him with a thunderous splash
into the sea. The next, Sanemitsu,
he clamped under his right arm,
caught brother Jir under his left,
gave the two an almighty squeeze,
and said, “Fine, you’re coming with me,
you two louts, on the road to death,”
and in that, his twenty-sixth year,
he plunged with them into the waves.
11. The Mirror’s Return to the Capital
“I have seen enough,” said Lord Tomomori. “It is time to die.”
He summoned his foster brother, Iga no Heinaizaemon Ienaga.
“Does the old pact between us still stand?”
“Need you ask?” Ienaga replied.
He helped his lord into a second layer of armor and donned one himself.
Arm in arm, the two plunged into the sea.
Twenty or more of Tomomori’s men refused to lag behind;
they, too, arm in arm, sank from sight together.
For one reason or another, however, some escaped—among them
Etchū no Jirbye, Kazusa no Gorbye, Akushichibye, and Hida no Shirbye.
These got away and fled.
Red flags and badges littered the sea
like autumn leaves stripped by the wind
and scattered on the Tatsuta River.266
Once white, the waves on the shore broke pink.
Boats drifted, empty and abandoned,
at the will only of wind and tide,
aimlessly rocking: a desolate scene.
These Heike nobles were taken alive:
Munemori, once palace minister;
the grand counselor Tokitada;
Kiyomune, Right Gate Watch intendant;
Nobumoto, lord of the Treasury;
the Sanuki captain Tokizane;
Masaakira, deputy lord of War;
Munemori’s youngest son, in his eighth year.
These monks were captured:
the great prelate Senshin;
Nen, the superintendent of Hosshji;
Chūkai, a master of dis
cipline;
the Kyjub adept Yūen;
and these major retainers:
Gendayū Suesada,
the Settsu magistrate Morizumi,
Kichinaizaemon Sueyasu,
Tnaizaemon Nobuyasu,
Awa-no-minbu Shigeyoshi and his son—
in all, thirty-eight men.
Kikuchi no Jir Takanao,
Harada no Taifu Tanenao,
and with them every one of their men
had surrendered before the battle.
As for the ladies, they included Kenreimon-in herself;
the regent’s wife, another daughter of Kiyomori;
a third daughter, the Mistress of the Gallery;
Lady Dainagon-no-suke, Shigehira’s wife;
Lady Sotsu-no-suke, the wife of Tokitada;
Tomomori’s wife, Jibuky-no-tsubone;
and many more—forty-three in all.
What kind of year can it have been,
what kind of month, that in Genryaku 2,
as spring was drawing to a close,
the emperor himself should have drowned
and his officials roamed the waves?
The emperor’s mother and her ladies
fell into barbarian hands,
while tens of thousands of warriors
swept off ministers and great nobles.
These regained their home in the end,
but not, to their infinite chagrin,
wearing brocade like Zhu Maichen,
and the trials that the ladies suffered
taught them the grief of Wang Zhaojun
on her way to the land of the Xiongnu.267
On the third of the fourth month, Yoshitsune reported to Cloistered Emperor Go-Shirakawa, through Genpachi Hirotsuna, the Heike defeat on the twenty-fourth of the third month past, in the strait between Ta-no-ura in Buzen and Dan-no-ura in Nagato, and he announced the safe return of the three regalia. Throughout the residence the news caused a great stir. The cloistered sovereign called Hirotsuna into his private court, questioned him closely about the battle, and in his joy appointed him a lieutenant in the Left Watch. On the fifth he sent Thgan Nobumori westward, to find out whether the return of the regalia was really assured. Nobumori did not even go home but galloped straight off, whip raised high, on one of the cloistered sovereign’s own horses.
On the fourteenth, Yoshitsune,
on his way up to the capital
with the Heike captives, men and women,
reached Akashi in Harima.
Over this famous stretch of shore
there rose into the deepening night
a moon as brilliant as any in autumn.
The gentlewomen clustered together.
“Never did we imagine,” they said,
“on passing this way two years ago,268
that we would ever see the like.”
Each of them wept her secret tears.
Gazing aloft, toward the moon,
Lady Sotsu-no-suke reflected,
Gaze lifted skyward,
from my tear-drenched sleeves I catch
the gleam of the moon.
Tell me, moon, all that you know
of life there above the clouds!
Jibuky-no-tsubone:
The face of the moon
I once knew above the clouds
shines here, too, unchanged,
but the brilliance of its light
only darkens my sad heart.
And Lady Dainagon-no-suke:
I am the one
travel brings to spend a night
on Akashi shore,
yet in the waves beside me
lodges a companion moon!
“They must so desperately miss better days!”
Yoshitsune said to himself,
kind as he was even in battle.
He felt intense pity for them.
On the twenty-fifth of the month,
the mirror and the jewel in its chest
reached Toba, and from the palace
the news brought these gentlemen to receive them:
the Kade-no-kji counselor Tsunefusa,
the Takakura consultant-captain Yasumichi,
the provisional right controller Kanetada,
the Left Gate Watch officer Chikamasa,
the Enami captain Kintoki,
the Tajima lieutenant Noriyoshi,
accompanied by these warriors:
the Izu chamberlain-commissioner Yorikane,
the Ishikawa magistrate Yoshikane,
the Left Gate Watch officer Aritsuna.
That night at the hour of the rat, [ca. midnight]
the mirror and the jewel in its chest
entered in solemn dignity
the precincts of the Council of State.
The imperial sword was lost.
As for the jewel, apparently
Kataoka no Tar Tsuneharu
found its chest floating and rescued it.
12. The Sword269
The age of the gods bequeathed to us,
in this our realm, three spirit swords:
Totsuka,
Ama-no-hayakiri,
Kusanagi.
They say that Totsuka is kept
in the Isonokami Shrine
at Furu, in Yamato province,
and Ama-no-hayakiri
at the Atsuta Shrine in Owari.
Kusanagi is kept in the palace;
it is now the priceless sword
among the three regalia.
This is the story of Kusanagi.
Of old, Susano-o-no-mikoto
had a palace built for himself
at Soga in Izumo province.
Seeing the sky there forever covered
by eight-colored clouds, he made this song:
Where rise eightfold clouds,
Izumo, an eightfold fence
to keep my wife home
I put up, an eightfold fence,
yes, a fence I build, eightfold!
This was the first poem, ever,
made in thirty-one syllables.
The cloud he noted explains why
he called the province Izumo:
“Land of Ever-Rising Cloud.”
In that far-off time, Susano-o-no-mikoto descended to the headwaters of the river Hi in the province of Izumo, and there he met a pair of earthly deities named Ashinazuchi, the husband, and Tenazuchi, the wife. They had a beautiful daughter called Inada-hime. All three were weeping.
“Why do you weep?” Susano-o-no-mikoto asked.
To his question they replied,
“Once we had eight daughters.
The serpent swallowed all of them
except the one that you see here,
and soon it is to have her, too.
This serpent’s eight heads and tails
slither over eight peaks and valleys.
On its back grow queer plants and trees.
Its years number uncounted thousands,
and its eyes are like sun and moon.
Every year it devours humans.
Children mourn their parents, eaten;
parents mourn their eaten children.
Whether south or north of our village,
cries of mourning never cease.”
Moved to pity, the god changed their daughter to a pristine comb
and concealed it in his hair.
He filled eight tubs with sake,
made a likeness of her, and stood it up on a high place.
The sake reflected her form.
The serpent, thinking she was real,
drained the tubs to the last drop and lay there drunk, dead to the world.
The god drew the Totsuka sword from the scabbard at his waist
and fiercely slashed the serpent to pieces.
One tail, though, he could not cut. This struck him as strange.
He slit the tail open lengthwise, peered inside,
and discovered there a spirit sword,
“This,” she said, “is the sword that I dropped long ago on the High Plain of Heaven.
While it was in the serpent’s tail, thick cloud always covered the land,
so it bore the name Ama-no-murakumo no Tsurugi, ‘Sword of Celestial Cloud.’”
The Sun Goddess, once the sword was hers,
made it a treasure of her heavenly palace.
When, later, she sent the celestial grandchild
down to earth, to rule as lord
over the Central Land of Rich Reed Plains,
she gave him, with the mirror, this sword.
Until the reign of Kaika, ninth of the line,
it remained with the emperor himself,
but in the reign of the tenth, Sujin,
in terror of the dire spirit might
the Sun Goddess wields, her shrine was moved
to hallowed Shiki in Kasanui,
there in the province of Yamato,
and the sword, too, remained in her shrine.
His Majesty then had a copy made,
to serve him as his constant protector,
and its might matched that of the first.
The sword Ama-no-murakumo spent three reigns, Sujin to Keik,
reverently honored within the Sun Goddess’s shrine.
When in the reign of Emperor Keik, the sixth month of his fortieth year,
the eastern barbarians raised rebellion,
his son, Yamatodake-no-mikoto, stout of heart and superb in strength,
received the imperial commission to go down to the east.
He went first before the Sun Goddess to bid her farewell.
Through his younger sister, the High Priestess,270
she enjoined care and diligence and gave him the sword.
When he reached the province of Suruga, the rebels there tricked him, saying,
“This province is rich in game. Enjoy the hunt!”
Then they set fire to the meadows and almost burned him to death,
but he drew his spirit sword and with it mowed the grass for miles around.
Next he set his own fire, which the wind at once blew over the rebels.
Every one of them died in the flames.
Thereafter the sword Ama-no-murakumo was called Kusanagi, “Grass Mower.”
Yamatodake-no-mikoto pressed ahead with his campaign and for three years conquered rebels everywhere. Having subdued the evildoers in province after province, he was on his way back up to the capital when illness struck. In the seventh month of his thirtieth year, at Atsuta in the province of Owari, he at last passed away. Wonder of wonders, his spirit became a white bird that flew up into the sky.