by VIKING ADULT
Lord Yoritomo in Kamakura issued a directive.
To: Asakura no Tar Takakiyo in the province of Tajima:
I understand that the Heike retainer Etchū no Jirbye Moritsugi now inhabits your province. Summon him and deliver him to me.
Takakiyo called in Kehi no Shir, his son-in-law. “How are we to capture him?” he asked.
“In the bath” was the decision reached. They let Moritsugi take his bath and sent in five or six sturdy men to seize him, but he flattened them when they went for him and again when they got back up. All were wet, and Takakiyo’s men simply could not hold him down. In the end, though, one cannot prevail against many. Twenty or thirty men came at Moritsugi, beat him into submission with the flat of their swords and halberds, and sent him straight to Kamakura.
Yoritomo had him brought in and questioned him. “If you have such an old tie to the Heike,” he said, “why did you not die with them?”
“Because they fell too easily. I have been looking for a chance to finish you. For that purpose I have been equipping myself with the best sword and with battle arrows of the finest steel. Now that my fate has caught up with me, I have nothing further to say.”
“Good man!” Yoritomo exclaimed. “Come over to me and I will look after you. Will you do that?”
“A warrior does not serve two masters. Show a man like me leniency and you will regret it. I only ask that you cut off my head at once.”
“So be it, then,” Yoritomo replied. They took him out to Yui-no-hama and did so. No one failed to sing Moritsugi’s praises.
The reigning emperor, Go-Toba, gave himself to music and poetry and left matters of government to Ky-no-tsubone.290 The result was a constant stream of grievances and complaints. A passion for swordsmen on the part of the king of Wu led to endless injuries throughout his realm; the king of Chu so loved willowy slenderness that many women in his palace starved to death. The sovereign’s tastes influence those below him, and men of understanding all lamented the parlous weakness of this emperor’s rule.
Now Mongaku, ever the scary monk, mixed himself up in things better left alone. He aspired to put the Second Prince291 on the throne because this prince cultivated scholarship and valued high principles. While Yoritomo lived, he could do nothing, but on the thirteenth of the first month of Kenkyū 10, [1199] Yoritomo died. Mongaku at once prepared to rebel. News of his plan soon got out, and the police went to his lodging at Nij-Inokuma. They arrested him, and he was exiled, in his eighties, to the province of Oki.
On his way out of the city, Mongaku declared, “Old as I am, a man whose every day may be his last, he could at least have vented his displeasure by consigning me to some odd corner near the capital—but no, he must banish me to Oki! The ball-playing brat—I can’t stand him! Just wait till I have him join me there!” It was a terrifying speech.
This emperor was keen on the ball game of gitch, hence Mongaku’s gibe. Strangely enough, when he raised rebellion during the Jkyū years, [1219–22] it was to Oki, among all the possible provinces, that he was banished. They say that the late Mongaku’s spirit went on ranting to him there.
All this while, Rokudai had been quietly pursuing his practice at Takao. “Look at whose son he is, and whose disciple!” the great lord in Kamakura292 often remarked. “No doubt he has shaved his head, but not his heart.” And so it was that And Sukekane was ordered to seize him and bring him down to the Kanto. At the Tagoshi River, Okabe Gonnokami Yasutsuna then executed the command to behead him. They say that Rokudai owed surviving from his twelfth to his thirtieth year entirely to the grace of the Kannon of Hasedera. So at last ended the Heike line.
Taken down by Yūa, a disciple of the Buddha
an 3, eleventh month, twenty-ninth day [1370]
284. More literally, the six temples with a character read sh in their names: Hshji, Sonshji, Enshji, Saishji, Jshji, and Enshji.
285. A retainer of Yoshitomo’s.
286. Both are actually the same man. The Kade-no-kji counselor Tsunefusa has already appeared twice before (8:1 and 11:11).
287. A Kannon temple in the mountains east of Nara and a major pilgrimage center.
288. Eguchi, near the mouth of the Yodo River, was famous for its prostitutes and singing girls.
289. Yoritomo’s brother-in-law.
290. Go-Toba’s nurse Noriko, a daughter of Fujiwara no Norikane and the mother of his future empress, Shmeimon-in.
291. Morisada, a son of Emperor Takakura and younger brother of Emperor Antoku.
292. The shogun at the time would have been Minamoto no Yoriie (1182–1204) or Sanetomo (1203–19).
THE INITIATES’ BOOK
1. Kenreimon-in Becomes a Nun
(recitative)
Kenreimon-in found lodging in the Yoshida neighborhood, below the Eastern Hills.
The place belonged to Kye, a senior monk in Nara.
Weeds grew tall in the garden after years of neglect,
and thick shinobu ferns fringed the eaves. The blinds were gone,
baring to view a sleeping chamber open to wind and rain.
(song)
Flowers blooming in many hues
lacked any eye to appreciate them;
the moon that shone in night by night
met no admiring watcher’s gaze.
Of old, beauty and opulence
illumined the only life she knew
amid her hangings of brocade;
now the loss of her whole house
and refuge in a monkish hovel
must have plunged her into despair.
She was like a fish on dry land,
a bird strayed too far from the nest.
Faced with what lay before her,
she missed the tossing of the waves,
the miseries of life at sea.
Far, far away blue billows rolled.
Her thoughts flew to roam the clouds
that wandered there a thousand leagues
across the ocean in the west,
while here, beneath the mossy thatch
that roofed this poor hut of hers,
she wept to see the moonlight fall
on a small, neglected garden
hidden in the Eastern Hills.
No words could convey her sorrow.
So it was that in Bunji 1, on the first of the fifth month, [1185]
Kenreimon-in renounced the world.
Insei, a holy Chrakuji monk, conferred the precepts on her.
She offered the Buddha in return Emperor Antoku’s robe.
Her son had worn it to the last, and it retained his fragrance.
In his memory she had brought it from the west all the way to the city,
and she had meant to keep it with her as long as she lived,
but she had nothing else to give, and it might help him in the afterlife.
Weeping, she therefore brought it forth.
Rendered speechless by her gift, the monk withdrew in silence,
wringing the tears from his ink-black sleeves.
Sewn into a sacred banner,
the robe then hung, so they say,
before the Chrakuji altar.
This lady in her fifteenth year
had received the emperor’s call
and in her sixteenth become empress.
Always at her sovereign’s service,
she loyally, every morning,
sent him off to morning council
and gave herself to him every night.
In her twenty-second year, she bore a prince
who rose to heir apparent, then to emperor in his turn,
so that she came to bear the noble title of Kenreimon-in.
She was even more than Kiyomori’s daughter,
for the emperor was her son: She was the mother of the realm.
No one in the world enjoyed greater honor.
Now, this year was her twenty-ninth.
Her peach and damson beauty still shone,
so, too, her lotus-bl
ossom looks,
but, knowing that she no longer needed
hair adorned with kingfisher glints,
she cut it off and became a nun,
setting aside every worldly sorrow
to start out at last on the true path.
Even so her mourning continued.
Not while she lived could she forget
how, when they saw that it was over,
the men had all leaped into the sea
or how those two had looked at the last:
her emperor son and Lady Nii.
To her it simply made no sense
to linger on in this dewdrop life,
only to suffer new misery.
She could not stem the flow of her tears.
In this fifth month the nights were short,
but still, for her, very slow to pass,
and since all sleep eluded her,
no dream returned her to times gone by.
The lamp’s dying glow, turned to the wall,
dark rain beating nightlong on the window
made her feel terribly alone.293
The grief of the Shangyang lady,
long confined in the Shangyang Palace,294
could hardly have surpassed her own.
Perhaps to renew old memories
the owner had planted near the eaves
a prettily flowering orange tree
that suffused the breeze with its scent.
Twice a cuckoo called, then again.
Memories returned. Kenreimon-in
wrote on the lid of her inkstone box,
Cuckoo, when you come
seeking from the orange tree
that sweetest fragrance,
do you call out of yearning
for your loves of long ago?295
(speech)
Her gentlewomen had not bravely thrown themselves into the sea like Lady Nii and Kozaish. Carried off by rough warriors, they had all returned to the city, their home; then young and old alike had renounced the world. So changed in looks that no one could have known them, they now inhabited improbable valley depths or craggy wilds.
The houses once theirs had gone up in smoke,
leaving behind only vacant wastes
now fast reverting to grassy moorland.
No one they had known ever came to see them.
Poor things, they must have felt like that man
who strayed long ago into the realm of the immortals
and met on his return only descendants
seven generations on from when he had left.
Then, on the ninth of the seventh month, [1185]
the great earthquake struck. Walls collapsed,
the ruined palace pitched askew,
and she lost all semblance of a home.
No green-robed guard stood at her gate.
Her garden fence, in desperate plight,
gathered more dew than all the moors,
while as though knowing their time had come,
crickets began their plaintive song.
Longer and longer grew the nights,
while sleep fled ever further from her,
until she feared day might never dawn.
With autumn adding its own sadness
to the boundless fund of her sorrows,
life for her became hard to bear.
All things in this world die away.
Her old associations withered,
and no one remained to comfort her.
2. Kenreimon-in Moves to hara
Still, the wives of Lords Takafusa and Nobutaka, each in her own way,
managed secret visits to Kenreimon-in.296
“I never imagined,” Kenreimon-in said, weeping,
“that I would ever need help from those two.”
The gentlewomen attached to her wrung the tears from their sleeves.
Her dwelling was not yet far from the city,
and many people passed by on the road.
While waiting for her own end to come,
she longed to find some mountain fastness
safely beyond the reach of bad news,
but she had no idea where to look.
A lady then came to her and said,
“In the hills behind hara, there is a quiet retreat named Jakk-in.”
Kenreimon-in reflected that a mountain village might indeed be very lonely
but that she would rather live there than here, among the miseries of the world,
and so she made up her mind to go.
They say that Lord Takafusa’s wife arranged a palanquin for her.
She moved to Jakk-in late in the ninth month of Bunji 1. [1185]
Her path wound through bright autumn woods
that caught her gaze as she passed by,
until the sun—were these hills that high?—
began all too soon to drop from sight.
Across the fields a temple bell
boomed out the bleak end of the day.
Gathering dews bent wayside grasses,
fresh tears streamed to soak her sleeves,
and fallen leaves raced by on the wind.
The sky clouded over. Before long
a cold winter rain began to fall.
A stag belled somewhere in the distance,
while failing cricket song swelled and died.
Amid such concerted melancholy,
no words could convey her wretchedness.
“When we fled from shore to shore
and wandered on from island to island,
still, in those days things were better,”
the poor lady kept assuring herself.
Jakk-in, amid mossy rocks
and far removed from worldly cares,
was the very spot she had hoped for.
Perhaps she felt that the garden there,
its dewy expanse of hagi fronds,
frost-withered, and its chrysanthemums
below the fence now turning brown,
evoked all too well her own decline.
She went before the altar and prayed,
“May His Majesty’s sacred spirit
achieve unhindered awakening
and swiftly reach enlightenment.”
She then felt him present beside her.
Never, never would she forget him.
Next to Jakk-in proper, she put together a ten-foot-square hut of her own,297
half given over to sleeping and half to her private chapel.
Day and night, morning and evening, she never neglected her litanies
nor ever failed to honor her perpetual calling of the Name,
and so it was that she spent her months and days.
On the fifth of the tenth month, as dusk was falling,
there came a rustling among the fallen oak leaves in the garden.
“Oh, who can have come looking for me
in my retreat here, far from the world?
Go and see!” Kenreimon-in cried.
“If it is someone who must not find me,
then in all haste I will go and hide!”
It turned out to be a passing stag.
“Tell me,” said Kenreimon-in, “what was it?”
Lady Dainagon-no-suke answered, doing all she could not to cry,
Who would tread his way,
seeking you here, through these rocks?
No, the fallen leaves
rustled only for a stag
that chanced to be passing by.
Moved by this news, Kenreimon-in
wrote the poem in her own hand
Kenreimon-in at Jakk-in, among falling autumn leaves. At lower left: The stag.
on the door by her small window.
Amid the monotony of her life,
she noted happy similes
that comforted her in her sorrow.
The trees that stood before her eaves
were in her eyes the seven trees
of priceless jewels in the Pure Land;
brimmed with the blessed waters
of the eight supernal virtues.
Transience? The flowers of spring,
so quickly scattered by the winds.
Life itself? The autumn moon
that slips so soon behind the clouds.
That morning in the Zhaoyang Palace,
the lady who had loved the blossoms
saw wind strip them of their beauty,
and she who in the Zhangqiu Palace298
one night in poems praised the moon
watched the clouds swallow its light.
Once jade towers and golden halls,
floors spread with cushions of brocade,
offered the empress wondrous lodging;
now her hut of bundled grasses
invited from all tears of pity.
3. The Cloistered Emperor’s Visit to hara
By and by, in the spring of Bunji 2, the cloistered emperor conceived the wish [1186]
to call upon Kenreimon-in at her quiet hara retreat.
The wind in the second and third months was strong, the lingering winter cold severe.
The mountaintops were still white with snow, and ice choked the ravines.
But once spring had passed, once summer had come and the Kamo Festival was over,299 he started out for hara before dawn. Since this was a secret progress, he took only six senior nobles with him—Tokudaiji Sanesada, Kasan-no-in Kanemasa, Tsuchimikado Michichika, among others—and eight privy gentlemen. A few of his guardsmen attended him as well.
Traveling by the Kurama road,
he paused to contemplate on the way
what once had been Fudarakuji,
built by Kiyowara no Fukayabu;
and the spot where so long ago
the Ono Grand Empress had resided.300
He then boarded his palanquin.
Floating above distant mountains,
white clouds recalled fallen blossoms;
cherry boughs leafing out in green
stirred regret for the spring just past.
It was late in the fourth month.
Pushing on through the summer growth,
the sovereign, on his first such journey,
wondered anew at each passing scene
and noted with profound emotion
that signs of human presence were gone.
To the west, up against the hills,
