by VIKING ADULT
As for the captured barbarians,
by Yamatodake’s command
his son, Takehiko-no-mikoto,
presented them to the emperor.
The sword Kusanagi, meanwhile,
went to the Atsuta Shrine.
In Emperor Tenchi’s seventh year, [668]
Dgy, a monk from Silla,
made up his mind to steal this sword
as a treasure for his own land.
Out at sea, the sword hidden aboard,
he encountered so violent a storm
that his ship at once began sinking.
Recognizing the spirit sword’s curse,
he begged forgiveness, went no farther,
and returned the sword to Atsuta.
Next Emperor Tenmu, in Shuch 1, [686]
called it back, to remain in the palace.
This is the sword of the regalia.
It has overwhelming spirit power.
When Emperor Yzei, in his madness, [r. 876–84]
unsheathed it, his sleeping chamber
exploded in sparks and flashes
exactly resembling bolts of lightning.
Terrified, he cast the sword from him.
It snapped by itself back into its sheath.
That is how impressive the sword was, in times gone by.
It could hardly have simply disappeared,
even after Lady Nii sank with it in her sash to the ocean floor.
The best women divers were summoned to dive for it;
holy monks went on retreat at the greatest temples and shrines,
there to make sacred offerings and pray that it be recovered—
but no, the sword was gone.
Those versed in usage and precedent declared,
“In ancient times the Sun Goddess
vowed that she would protect forever
the emperors sovereign over the realm,
and that vow stands, as firm as ever.
The line born of Iwashimizu271
runs as ever it did in the past;
hence the shining disk of the sun
does not yet lie fallen to earth.
These latter days, though degenerate, do not mean the end of the imperial sway.”
So they pronounced themselves, and one learned doctor added,272
“The great serpent slain of old by Susano-o-no-mikoto,
at the headwaters of the river Hi in the province of Izumo,
so profoundly desired the spirit sword he had lost
that in token of his eight heads and tails
he took the form of the eightieth human sovereign
and, in the person of an emperor in his eighth year,
took it back and dove with it to the bottom of the sea.”
In the depths of the ocean abyss,
the sword was now the Dragon God’s prize.
Naturally, no one could expect
to see it again in the human realm.
13. The Parade of Heike Captives
It was then that the Second Prince, Morisada,273 returned to the capital.
Cloistered Emperor Go-Shirakawa sent a carriage to meet him.
Removed against his will by the Heike,
he had spent three years wandering the waves of the western seas.
His mother and his protector, the Jimyin consultant, had long worried about him,
and his safe return brought the whole household together, weeping tears of joy.
On the twenty-sixth, the Heike prisoners entered the capital
in wickerwork carriages bearing small, eight-petal blossom motifs.
The front and rear blinds on each were raised, and the windows on either side stood open.
Lord Munemori wore a white hunting cloak.
Kiyomune, in a white hitatare, rode at the back of his father’s carriage.
The carriages bearing Munemori and Tokitada.
Tokitada’s carriage followed.
Tokizane, his son, had been due to accompany him, but illness prevented that.
Nobumoto, having been wounded, traveled by quieter streets.
Lord Munemori, once so handsome and imposing,
looked in his now-reduced state quite unlike his former self.
Still, he gazed about him and showed no visible sign of despair.
Kiyomune lay facedown and never raised his eyes. He seemed despondent.
Doi no Jir Sanehira, in light armor over a tan hitatare,
commanded the thirty mounted guards posted before and behind the carriages.
Spectators old and young crowded to watch,
not from the city alone but from provinces near and far as well, and from many temples.
The unbroken press of people ran from the Toba Mansion’s south gate
all the way to Yotsuzuka. There seemed to be millions of them.
No one could even turn around,
nor could a single carriage move.
The famine of Jish and Ywa, [1180–82]
the long warfare in east and west
had brought death to a great many,
but quite plainly many had lived.
It had been only two years
since the Heike fled the city,
and memories of their glory
were still fresh in everyone’s mind.
The dismal spectacle today
of men who had once inspired terror
might almost have been a dream.
Ignorant rustics, humble women
wept, all of them, wringing their sleeves.
Imagine, then, the emotions
felt by those who had served the Heike!
Debts owed for long-standing favor,
loyalty over the generations
made the past all too hard to dismiss,
and yet these people had to live.
Most of them had joined the Genji
but even now could not forget
that old, old association.
Surely sorrow overwhelmed them,
for many pressed sleeves to their eyes
and stood there with downcast gaze.
The youth minding Munemori’s ox was Saburmaru.
Kiso Yoshinaka had killed Jirmaru, his older brother,
for allowing the ox to bolt with the carriage
when he went to call on Cloistered Emperor Go-Shirakawa.
Off in the west, Saburmaru had assumed the guise of a grown man,
but he still longed one last time to tend Lord Munemori’s carriage.
At Toba he therefore approached Yoshitsune.
“An oxherd like me,” he submitted urgently, “the lowest of the low,
cannot presume to claim finer feelings, but, such as I am,
I served Lord Munemori for many years and remain devoted to him.
With your permission, if it pleases you to grant it,
I should like to look after his carriage on his last journey.”
“I see no objection,” Yoshitsune replied. “By all means do so.”
Greatly relieved, Saburmaru
dressed himself in his very best,
took the lead rope from his breast fold,
attached it, and, blinded by tears,
sleeves to his eyes, allowed the ox
to move forward just as it pleased.
The cloistered emperor stopped his carriage
at Rokuj and Higashi-no-tin
to watch, as did both senior nobles
and privy gentlemen, each from his own,
drawn up there in row after row.
So close had these men been to him
that his heart softened after all,
and he was moved to pity for them.
Those with him must have thought this a dream.
“One so longed somehow or other,”
high and low remarked through their tears,
“for recognition, for a word from them.
Who would have thought it could end like this?”
That other year, a
fter receiving appointment as palace minister, Lord Munemori went to convey his formal thanks, followed by twelve senior nobles—the Kasan-no-in grand counselor foremost among them—each in his own carriage, and preceded on horseback by sixteen privy gentlemen under the head chamberlain Chikamune. Nobles of every degree, including four counselors and three captains with the third rank, glittered that day in their finery. Lord Tokitada, then the intendant of the Left Gate Watch, was summoned before the sovereign, there to receive gifts and otherwise to be magnificently entertained. On this day, however, not a single noble accompanied these Taira lords, only twenty of their followers, captured with them at Dan-no-ura, in white hitatare and roped to their saddles. The procession moved east along Rokuj as far as the bank of the Kamo River, then turned back. Munemori and his son went to Yoshitsune’s residence at Rokuj-Horikawa.
Father and son were served refreshments, but neither touched any.
They merely sat in silence, exchanging glances and shedding endless tears.
Munemori did not loosen his clothing when night came
but just lay down on one of his sleeves and covered his son with the other.
Genpachibye, Eda no Genz, and Kumai Tar, his guards, noticed this.
“Alas,” they observed, “for the greatest as for the least of us,
there is nothing more moving than the love between parent and child.
How much good can it do, really,
to cover him just with a sleeve?
But, oh, what love the gesture shows!”
Hardened warriors though they were,
all of them wept.
14. The Mirror
On the twenty-eighth of the month,
Yoritomo in Kamakura received promotion to the junior second rank.
A rise of two grades already bespeaks signal imperial favor,
but this meant a rise of three.
The third rank would actually have been more correct for him,
but promotion to the second skirted the precedent set for Kiyomori.274
At the hour of the rat that night, the mirror moved from the Great Hall of State [midnight]
to the Unmeiden. His Majesty made a progress there,
and three nights of sacred kagura music and dancing followed.
no Yoshikata, a junior officer in the Right Palace Guards,
by imperial command danced Yudachi and Miyabito,
two secret pieces handed down in his family line.
The reward he received brilliantly acknowledged a splendid performance.
Only his grandfather, the court musician Suketada, had known these pieces,
which were so secret that he withheld them even from his son, Chikakata.
Instead he transmitted them to the then-reigning emperor, Horikawa, [r. 1086–1107]
who taught them to Chikakata after Suketada’s death.
Tears spring to one’s eyes at the thought of His Majesty’s zeal
to ensure that the art they required should never be lost.
To speak now of the sacred mirror:
Of old, when the Goddess of the Sun
decided to shut herself away
inside the celestial rock cave,
she wished to leave her descendants
a visible image of herself.
She therefore had a mirror forged,
one that did not satisfy her;
so that she had a second made.
The first is now enshrined in Kii,
at the double sanctuary,
Nichizen and Kokuken.
The second she gave her son,
Ama-no-oshihomimi-no-mikoto,
saying to him as she did so,
“Share your palace with this mirror.”
Thereupon the Sun Goddess
confined herself in the rock cave,
and darkness spread across the land.
Then the swarming millions of gods
gathered at the door of the cave,
to dance and to sing kagura.
The goddess’s interest was piqued:
She cracked open the cave door
and peered out; then every face
shone bright for all eyes there to see.
And that, they say, is how the word
omoshiro entered people’s speech.275
Then the god of colossal strength,
Tajikara-o, with a great heave
threw the door wide open for all time.
Through the reign of Emperor Kaika, the ninth of the line,
the mirror remained in the palace of the sovereign,
but Emperor Sujin, the tenth, in fear of its spirit power,
moved it to a separate hall.
It has resided more recently in the Unmeiden.
One hundred and sixty years had passed
since the capital moved to Heian-ky,
when in Emperor Murakami’s reign—
it was the fourth year of Tentoku, [960]
the ninth month and twenty-third day,
at the hour of the rat—fire broke out
for the first time in the palace grounds,
at the Left Gate Watch headquarters,
no distance from the Unmeiden,
the hall where the mirror was kept.
This was in the middle of the night.
No woman from the palace staff
was present on duty to save it.
Fujiwara no Saneyori276
hastened there, but the mirror had burned.
“This is the end!” he said to himself,
but while he wept, all on its own
the mirror flew up out of the flames,
to hang in the Nanden cherry tree277
and shine there like the morning sun
rising from behind the mountains.
Then Saneyori understood
that all remained well in the world,
and tears of joy sprang to his eyes.
He went down on his right knee, spread his left sleeve wide,
and through his tears addressed the mirror. “Come,” he said,
“if that vow the goddess made to protect the line of sovereigns
still lives, as it did of old, come now, lodge in my left sleeve!”
Before these last words were out, the mirror flew to him as bidden.
He carried it, wrapped in his sleeve,
straight to the Council of State office,
whence in time it was restored
once more to the Unmeiden.
Who now, in this present age,
could even conceive the like
and welcome the mirror to his sleeve?
Those ancient times far outshone ours.
15. The Letters
Taira no Tokitada and his son were quartered close to Yoshitsune.
Tokitada might have resigned himself to his fate under the circumstances,
but no, he must still have thirsted to live,
because he called his son, Tokizane, to him and said,
“Yoshitsune seems to have obtained a box of letters strictly private in nature.
Many, no doubt including me, will die if Yoritomo in Kamakura ever sees them.
I do not know what to do.”
Tokizane replied, “People credit Yoshitsune with being generally kind.
They say that when a gentlewoman approaches him with a heartfelt grievance,
he always listens, whatever the issue may be.
Now, you have several daughters.
What harm could come of presenting him with one?
You may well succeed if you raise the matter once you have that bond with him.”
Tokitada shed bitter tears.
“When I stood high in the world,” he said,
“consort or empress was the goal
to which I aspired for my daughters.
Never would I have considered
giving one to some common fellow.”
His son answered, “As things stand,
the time has come to forg
et all that.
Your daughter by your present wife
is now in her eighteenth year, after all.”
That idea being more than Tokitada could stomach,
he gave Yoshitsune instead a daughter by his previous wife,
one now in her twenty-third year—a little old, perhaps,
but still lovely in face and figure and as sweet-tempered as she could be.
Yoshitsune was delighted to have her.
Since he already had a wife, the daughter of Kawagoe no Tar Shigeyori,
he gave this new one a beautifully appointed house of her own.
When she mentioned the box of letters to him,
he promptly returned it to her father without even breaking the seal.
Tokitada, hugely relieved,
hastened to burn them, every one.
What can possibly have been in them?
Rumor suspected something bad.
The Heike were finished, the provinces were quiet at last,
and nothing impeded travel throughout the realm.
The capital was so peaceful that people began saying,
“There is simply nobody like Kur Yoshitsune.
What did Yoritomo, in Kamakura, ever do for us?
If only Yoshitsune himself were in charge of everything!”
Their talk reached Yoritomo’s ears.
“Why,” he exclaimed, “that is outrageous!
I devised the strategy that sent our armies into battle
and gave us easy victory over the Heike.
Kur Yoshitsune could never have imposed peace all on his own.
Talk like this must have gone to his head, so that he thinks his word is law.
And with all the people in the world he had to choose from,
he is now, I hear, the son-in-law of Taira no Tokitada
and goes out of his way to favor the man. That I cannot accept.
Moreover, he shows no respect in any of this for anyone else’s opinion.
What does he mean by it?
When he gets down here, he will no doubt treat us to some fine strutting.”
16. The Beheading of Fukush
Word reached Munemori that on the seventh of the fifth month
Yoshitsune was to take the Heike prisoners down to the Kanto.
He sent Yoshitsune a messenger with this plea:
“I gather that you are to depart for the Kanto tomorrow.
A father’s love is not to be broken.
I saw on the list of prisoners a boy in his eighth year.
May I ask whether he is still alive?
