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274. Any analogy with Kiyomori’s promotion would have been inauspicious, considering his ultimate fate.
275. In modern Japanese, omoshiroi (“white-faced,” “bright-faced”) still means “interesting,” “curious,” “fun.”
276. The incumbent regent and left minister.
277. This cherry tree stood below the steps on the south side of the Nanden (Shishinden).
278. The Kurils.
279. The heaven at the summit of Mount Sumeru, centered on the palace of Indra.
280. Dongfang Shuo and the Queen Mother of the West.
281. Discrete phenomena are not integral to all-pervading reality.
282. Killing an arhat, spilling a buddha’s blood, injuring a monk.
283. The monk Shunjb Chgen (1121–1206) led fund-raising to rebuild the Great Buddha Hall and recast the Great Buddha of Tdaiji.
BOOK TWELVE
1. The Great Earthquake
(recitative)
The men of the Heike were no more, and all was quiet in the west.
Provinces obeyed their governors and estates their stewards.
People high and low were feeling secure
when, on the ninth of the seventh month, at midday, [1185]
the earth shook violently for quite a long time.
Within the confines of the imperial capital,
in the Shirakawa district of the city, the shock destroyed six great temples.284
Of the Hshji pagoda’s nine stories, the upper six fell to the ground.
At Tokujju-in seventeen bays of the thirty-three-bay hall collapsed.
(song)
Imperial palace buildings,
the homes of the noblest gentlemen,
shrines to the gods, imposing temples,
houses of the least of the people
came crashing down with a thunderous roar,
while dust rose like smoke in billowing clouds.
The sky turned black, blotting out the sun.
Old and young grew faint with terror;
fear struck courtiers and commoners.
Provinces far and wide suffered equal disaster.
The earth split open, and water gushed forth;
great boulders cracked and rolled into ravines;
mountains gave way and slid into rivers;
the sea burst from its bed and swamped the shore.
Waves flung coasting boats violently about;
under the hooves of passing horses, the ground failed.
When flood threatens, high ground offers safety,
and crossing a river affords refuge from fire,
but there is no escape from an earthquake.
Only a bird could fly away through the sky;
only a dragon could rise and mount the clouds.
The number of people crushed beneath the ruins
around Shirakawa or Rokuhara
and throughout the city passed all counting.
Three among the four major elements—
water, fire, and air—cause harm often enough,
but not earth, surely. Moved by blind panic,
high and low shut themselves behind closed doors.
Each time the heavens roared or the ground shook,
a chorus of voices, certain of death,
rose in screams and loud appeals to the Name.
Seventy-, eighty-, or ninety-year-olds,
aghast that the world should end so very soon,
raised shrieks that set the children bawling.
Cloistered Emperor Go-Shirakawa happened then to be on a pilgrimage to Imagumano.
So many deaths and the resulting pollution hastened his return to his Rokuj residence.
What he and his entourage saw on the way must have torn at their hearts.
While the emperor rode in the imperial palanquin out to the shore of his lake,
the cloistered sovereign settled into a tent in the garden south of his mansion.
The greatest ladies fled their collapsed residences by palanquin or carriage.
Doctors learned in astrology rushed in, warning that that very night,
at the hours of the boar or the rat, the world would overturn. [ca. 10 P.M.–midnight]
To call this prediction terrifying would be a gross understatement.
They say that during the earthquake
in Saik 3, third month and eighth day, [856]
under the reign of Emperor Montoku,
the head of the Buddha at Tdaiji
fell to the ground. During another,
in Tengy 2, fourth month, fifth day, [939]
the emperor fled his palace
for refuge in a fifty-foot tent
put up before the Jneiden.
But all that happened too long ago
to merit that much attention now.
Surely the like of this disaster
will never in times to come recur.
The emperor had left his capital,
to drown far away in the ocean;
ministers and senior nobles
had been paraded through the streets
and their heads hung at the prison gate.
There has always been reason to fear
the vengeful rage of angry ghosts.
Everyone endowed with some sense
therefore looked with deep apprehension
to what the future might bring.
2. The Indigo Dyer
On the twenty-second of the eighth month, the holy monk Mongaku, of Takao,
hung around his neck the genuine and authentic skull of Minamoto no Yoshitomo,
Lord Minamoto no Yoritomo’s father,
and around a disciple’s neck the skull of Kamadabye Masakiyo.285
So equipped, he set off for Kamakura.
The Yoshitomo skull he had given Yoritomo in Jish 4 was not the real one, [1180]
just some old skull that he had wrapped in white cloth
and presented to Yoritomo to goad him into rebelling.
And rebel Yoritomo did, seizing power over the land
in full faith that the skull really was his father’s.
Now here came Mongaku again, down to Kamakura, with another he had turned up.
A certain indigo dyer long favored by Yoshitomo,
pained that his master’s head should hang year after year at the prison gate
without anyone to pray for his happier rebirth in the hereafter,
approached the then-chief of the police, who allowed him to take it down.
“Yoritomo is in exile,” he reflected, “but he will come into his own in the end.
When he does, he will start looking for his father’s skull.”
So the indigo dyer secreted it at Engakuji, in the Eastern Hills.
Apparently Mongaku heard about this and took him along to Kamakura.
On learning that Mongaku was to reach the town that day,
Yoritomo went out to meet him at the Katase River.
He then changed into mourning gray and returned to Kamakura in tears.
He seated Mongaku on the veranda and stood below him, on the ground, to receive his father’s skull.
The warriors great and small present for this touching moment wept.
Yoritomo cut away mighty rocks
and erected a new temple,
dedicated to his father,
that he named Shjju-in.
The court, too, moved by his gesture,
announced at Yoshitomo’s grave
his appointment to the second rank
and the post of palace minister.
The left grand controller Kanetada,
they say, spoke for the emperor.
Yoritomo’s prowess in war
had lifted not only himself
and his house to impressive heights,
but also, for his father’s spirit,
had obtained rank and position.
What a marvelous achievement!
3. The Exile of Tokitada
&
nbsp; On the twenty-third of the ninth month, the court received from Yoritomo
an order banishing those Heike nobles left in the capital to one province or another:
Tokitada to Noto and his son Tokizane to Kazusa,
Nobumoto to Aki, Masaakira to Oki, the prelate Senshin to Awa,
the prelate Nen to Bingo, and master of monastic discipline Chūkai to Musashi.
Some across the western ocean,
some far past the Kanto clouds,
their journey’s end beyond surmise,
reunion only a fond hope,
swallowing vain tears of parting,
set out to take their separate ways
in misery anyone might share.
One among them, Tokitada,
called upon Kenreimon-in,
then resident at Yoshida.
“My offense is grave,” he told her,
“and today I start into exile.
While I lived, like you, in the city,
I longed to know how you were getting on
and to place myself at your disposal,
but while the thought of what may lie before you is constantly with me,
I find the future impossible to imagine.” So he addressed her, weeping.
“Yes,” she replied, “you are the only one left me from the old days.
Who else now would feel sympathy for me or come to call?”
She could not keep her tears from flowing.
(speech)
Taira no Tokitada was a grandson of Tomonobu, the former governor of Dewa, and a son of the posthumous left minister Tokinobu. Being the late Kenshunmon-in’s brother made him a close maternal relative of Emperor Takakura. The world thought very highly of him. Another sister of his, Lady Nii, had married Lord Kiyomori, which made available to him any combination of appointments that he desired. For that reason he had risen quickly to the second rank and the post of grand counselor, and he had headed the police three times. When, in the latter capacity, he arrested a thief or a robber, he cut off the man’s right arm at the elbow without inquiring further and banished him from the city. This practice earned him the nickname “Police Chief from Hell.”
When the cloistered emperor’s decree demanded that the Heike,
then in the provinces of the west, return the emperor and the regalia,
and Hanakata, who delivered it, had the namikata brand burned into his cheek,
it was Tokitada who ordered the branding.
The cloistered emperor had looked forward to seeing him again,
his late empress having been Tokitada’s sister,
but such foul behavior made him too angry to do so.
Yoshitsune, now equally close to Tokitada, hoped in vain to soothe his wrath.
Tokitada’s son Tokiie, then in his sixteenth year, had escaped exile
and gone to live instead with Tokimitsu, his uncle.
With his mother, Lady Sotsu-no-suke, he clung to his father’s sleeve
in despair that the moment of parting should be at hand.
“It was bound to come anyway, sooner or later,” Tokitada bravely declared,
but no doubt he, too, was deeply affected.
Now into his declining years,
he had to leave the wife and son
who long had meant so much to him;
watch the city, his only home,
vanish behind him into cloud;
and set out for northern marches
that once to him were only names:
an endless and painful journey.
“There are Shiga and Karasaki,
look!” they told him. “And, before us,
the Mano inlet and Katada coast.”
The weeping Tokitada made this poem:
I shall not return,
that I know, at Katada,
watching nets drawn in—
all the water streaming through,
as the tears stream through my eyes.
He had roamed only yesterday
the waves of the western ocean,
until the fierce hatred of the foe
so overwhelmed his little craft
that today, buried under snows
heaped on him in the distant north,
he knew such miseries of loss
as weighed like sullen, brooding clouds
on all his memories of home.
4. The Execution of Tosab
Meanwhile the ten warriors assigned by Yoritomo to attend Kur Yoshitsune
learned privately of their lord’s suspicions about his younger brother,
and in deference to their lord’s feelings they withdrew to Kamakura.
These two men were not only brothers but also to each other as father and son.
Yoshitsune had crushed Kiso no Yoshinaka in the first month of the previous year,
then gone on to defeat the Heike in battle after battle,
until in the spring of the current year he destroyed them for good,
so bringing peace to the realm and calm to the four seas.
For this he deserved a reward, but somehow these rumors were spreading,
and no one, from the emperor down to the least of the commoners, knew why.
It had all begun that spring at Watanabe, in Settsu,
when Yoshitsune was gathering his fleet
and that argument had flared over whether or not to install bow oars.
At the time he had made a fool of Kajiwara Kagetoki,
who thereafter, in bitter resentment, let pass no chance to slander him.
That was how it had happened.
Yoritomo, who believed that Yoshitsune was plotting against him,
realized that dispatching a force up to the capital
would provoke stripping the planks from the Uji and Seta bridges,
chaos throughout the city, and other such dire consequences.
Instead he summoned a fighting monk named Tosab Shshun.
“Go on up to the capital,” he said,
“pretend you are there for a pilgrimage, and kill him.”
Tosab respectfully assented.
He started straight up to the city without even returning to his lodge.
He arrived on the twenty-ninth of the ninth month, but by the next day he had still not reported to Yoshitsune. Yoshitsune sent Musashib Benkei to summon him when he learned that Tosab was in the city. Benkei quickly brought him in.
“Well? Have you no letter for me from Lord Yoritomo?” Yoshitsune demanded to know.
“No, sir,” Tosab replied, “he gave me nothing because he had no particular message. ‘Just tell him,’ he said, ‘that I know the present calm in the capital is due to his presence there, and that he must continue to mount vigilant guard.’ That was all.”
“I do not for a moment believe that,” Yoshitsune rejoined.
“You are here to assassinate me.
Dispatching a force up to the capital
would provoke stripping the planks from the Uji and Seta bridges,
chaos throughout the city, and other dire consequences;
so he obviously sent you instead, with orders to feign a pilgrimage
but really to kill me.” Thunderstruck, Tosab asked,
“What could possibly give you that idea, sir?
I have long been planning a pilgrimage to Kumano, and that is what I am here for.”
Yoshitsune retorted,
“Because of Kagetoki’s slander,
he barred me from Kamakura
and would not even talk to me.
Instead he had me turn around
and go straight back to the capital.
Just give me an answer to that!”
“I know nothing about that, sir,” Tosab protested.
“But as for myself, I have no dark intentions toward you,
and I will gladly sign an oath to that effect.”
“Swear it or not, I still know that Lord Yoritomo has his mind set against me.”
Yoshitsune w
as visibly angry.
To extricate himself from his peril, Tosab wrote out seven oaths,
some of which he burned and swallowed and some of which he offered at shrines.
Once Yoshitsune had dismissed him, he informed the warriors guarding the palace
that the attack would take place that night.
The greatest of Yoshitsune’s loves
was a young woman named Shizuka,
the daughter of Iso-no-zenji,
a shirabyshi dancer.
She was never far from his side.
Shizuka told herself, “I hear that the avenue outside is teeming with warriors. He never called them here, though. There’s no reason for the men on palace guard duty to be carrying on this way. Oh, no! That monk today, with all his oaths—he must be the one behind it! I’ll send someone out to see what’s going on.”
Yoshitsune had in his service several of the “Rokuhara Boys” once at Taira no Kiyomori’s beck and call, and she sent out two. They never returned. Next she sent out a servant girl, hoping that a woman at least would come to no harm.
The girl soon came running back. “Two youths just like the two from here are lying dead in front of Tosab’s gate. His grounds are full of saddled horses, and behind the curtain there are fully armed and armored men all ready to attack. This has nothing to do with a pilgrimage.”
Yoshitsune leaped up, and in frantic haste Shizuka dressed him in his commander’s armor. He tied just the shoulder cord, gripped his sword, and went out. A saddled horse stood waiting for him at the middle gate.
Yoshitsune mounted, ordered the gate thrown open, and awaited the onslaught.
Forty or fifty armored and helmeted riders soon swarmed toward him with fierce cries.
Yoshitsune rose in his stirrups and shouted in a great voice,
“Attack by day or attack by night,
there is not a man in Japan
who can just dispatch Yoshitsune!”
All alone, he charged straight at them,
and those fifty warriors parted
to let him through. Right behind him
came Yoshimori from Ise,
Sat Tadanobu from Mutsu,
Eda no Genz, Kumai Tar,
Musashib Benkei, and others,
each of them worth a thousand men.
Next with cries of “A night attack!”
a stream of Yoshitsune’s men
raced in from quarters everywhere,