The Tales of the Heike

by Burton Watson

  “This is somewhat troubling,” said Hotoke. “Originally I was not to be admitted but was sent away at once. But through the kind offices of Lady Giō, I was allowed to present myself. Having done so, I would be most reluctant to do anything that would counter Lady Giō’s intentions. I beg to be excused as soon as possible so that I may be on my way.”

  “There is no reason for that!” replied Kiyomori. “But if you feel uneasy in Giō’s presence, I will see that she leaves.”

  “But how would that look?” objected Hotoke. “I was uneasy enough to find that the two of us had been summoned here together. If now, after all her kindness, she were dismissed and I were to remain behind, think how dreadful I would feel! If by chance you happen to remember me, perhaps you might summon me again at some future time. But for today I beg to take my leave.”

  Kiyomori, however, would not hear of this. “Nonsense!” he said. “You will do no such thing. Have Giō leave at once!”

  Three times he sent an attendant with these instructions.

  Giō had long been aware that something like this might happen, but she was not expecting it “this very day.”7 But faced with repeated orders to leave the house at once, she resigned herself to doing so and set about sweeping and tidying her room and clearing it of anything unsightly.

  Even those who have only sought shelter under the same tree for a night or have merely dipped water from the same stream will feel sorrow on parting. How sorrowful, then, Giō’s departure must have been from the place where she had lived these three years. Her tears, futile though they were, fell quickly. Since there was nothing she could do, however, she prepared to depart. But perhaps wanting to leave behind some reminder of herself, she inscribed the following poem on the sliding panel of the room, weeping as she did so:

  Those that put out new shoots, those that wither are the same, grasses of the field—come autumn, is there one that will not fade?

  Getting into her carriage, she returned to her home and there, sinking down within the panels of the room, began weeping.

  “What has happened? What is wrong?” her mother and sister asked, but she did not reply. It was only when they questioned the maid who had accompanied her that they learned the truth.

  Before long, the monthly stipend of a hundred piculs of rice and a hundred strings of coins ended, and for the first time Hotoke’s friends and relations learned the meaning of happiness and prosperity. Among high and low, word spread throughout the capital. “They say that Giō has been dismissed from the prime minister’s service,” people said. “We must go call on her and keep her company!” Some sent letters, others dispatched their servants to make inquiries. But faced with such a situation, Giō could not bring herself to receive visitors. The letters she refused to accept; the messengers she sent off without a meeting. Such gestures served only to deepen her mood of melancholy, and she passed all her time weeping. In this way the year came to an end.

  The following spring Kiyomori sent a servant to Giō’s house with this message: “How have you been since we parted? Lady Hotoke appears to be so hopelessly bored that I wish you would come and perform one of your imayō songs or your dances to cheer her up.”

  Giō declined to give any answer.

  Kiyomori tried again. “Why no answer from you, Giō? Won’t you come for a visit? Tell me if you won’t come! I have ways of dealing with the matter!”

  When Giō’s mother, Toji, learned about this, she was very upset and, having no idea what to do, could only plead tearfully with her daughter. “Giō, at least send an answer,” she begged. “Anything is better than being threatened!”

  But Giō replied, “If I had any intention of going, I would have answered long ago. It is because I have no such intention that I’m at a loss as to how to reply. He says that if I do not respond, he has ways of dealing with the matter. Does this mean I will be banished from the capital? Or that I will be put to death? Even if I were expelled from the capital, I would have no great regrets. And if he wants to deprive me of my life, what of that? He once sent me away a despised person—I have no heart to face him again.” She thus refused to send an answer.

  But the mother continued begging. “As long as you continue to live in this realm, you cannot hope to defy the prime minister’s wishes! The ties that bind man and woman are decreed from a past existence—they do not originate in this life alone. Those who vow to be faithful for a thousand or ten thousand years often end by parting, whereas those who think of this as merely an affair of the moment find themselves spending their whole lives together. In this world of ours there’s no predicting how things will turn out between a man and a woman.

  “For three whole years you enjoyed favor with the prime minister. That was a stroke of fortune hardly to be matched. Now if you refuse to answer his summons, it is scarcely likely you will be put to death. Probably you will merely be banished from the capital. And even if you are banished, you and your sister are young and can manage to live even in the wildest and most out-of-the-way spot. But what about your mother? I am a feeble old woman—suppose I am banished too? Just the thought of living in some strange place in the countryside fills me with despair. Let me live out the rest of my days here in the capital. Think of it as being filial in this world and the next.”

  Much as it pained her, Giō did not feel that she could disobey these pleas from her mother, and so weeping all the while, she set out for the prime minister’s mansion. But her heart was filled with foreboding. It would be too difficult to make the trip alone, Giō felt, and therefore she took her younger sister, Ginyo, with her, as well as two other shirabyōshi dancers, the four of them going in one carriage to Nishi-hachiijō.

  Upon her arrival, Giō was not shown to the seat she had previously been accustomed to occupy, but instead to a far inferior place where makeshift arrangements had been made. “How can this be?” she exclaimed. “Although I was guilty of no fault, I was driven out of the house. And now I find that even the seat I had occupied has been demoted! This is too heartless! What am I to do?” In an effort to hide her confusion, she covered her face with her sleeve, but the trickle of tears gave her away.

  Moved to pity by the sight, Lady Hotoke appealed to Kiyomori. “What is the meaning of this?” she asked. “If this were someone who had never been summoned before, it might be different. But surely she should be seated here with us. If not, I beg your permission to go where she is.”

  “That will not be necessary!” replied Kiyomori, and Hotoke was thus helpless to move.

  Later, Kiyomori, apparently quite unaware of Giō’s feelings, asked how she had been faring since they met last. “Lady Hotoke seems so terribly bored,” he remarked. “You must sing us an imayō.”

  Having come this far, Giō did not feel that she could disregard the prime minister’s wishes. And so holding back her tears, she sang the following song in the imayō style:

  Buddha was once a common mortal,

  and we too one day will become buddhas.

  All alike endowed with the buddha nature,

  how sad this gulf that divides us!

  Weeping all the while, she sang the song two more times. All the members of the Taira clan who were present, from the ministers of state, lords, and high-ranking courtiers down to the lowly samurai, were moved to tears. Kiyomori himself listened with keen interest. “A song admirably suited to the occasion,” he commented. “I wish we could watch you dance, but unfortunately today there are other things to be attended to. In the future you must not wait to be summoned but come any time you like and perform your imayō songs and dances for Hotoke’s amusement.”

  Giō made no answer but, suppressing her tears, withdrew.

  Reluctant to disobey her mother’s command, Giō had made the trip to the prime minister’s mansion, painful as it was, and exposed herself a second time to callous treatment. Saddened by the experience and mindful that as long as she remained in this world similar sorrows likely awaited her, she turned her thoughts to su
icide.

  Ordered by Kiyomori to return to his residence, Giō (left) appears and dances before Kiyomori and Lady Hotoke (right).

  “If you do away with yourself,” said her sister, Ginyo, “I will do likewise!”

  Learning of their intentions, their mother, alarmed, had no choice but to plead with Giō in tears. “You have every reason to be resentful,” she said. “I forced you to go and thereby inflicted this pain, though I could hardly have known what would happen. But now, if you do away with yourself, your sister will follow your example, and if I lose both my daughters, then old and feeble as I am, I would do better to commit suicide myself rather than live alone. But by inducing a parent to carry out such an act before the destined time for death has come, you will be committing one of the five deadly sins. We are mere sojourners in this life and must suffer one humiliation after another, but these are nothing compared with the long night of suffering that may await us hereafter. Whatever this life may entail, think how frightful it would be if you should condemn yourself to rebirth in one of the evil paths of existence!”

  Faced with these fervent entreaties, Giō, wiping back her tears, replied, “You are right. I would be guilty of one of the Five Deadly Sins.8 I will abandon any thought of self-destruction. But as long as I remain in the capital, I am likely to encounter further grief. My thought now is simply to leave the capital.”

  Thus at the age of twenty-two, Giō became a nun and, erecting a simple thatched retreat in a mountain village in the recesses of the Saga region,9 she devoted herself to reciting the Buddha’s name.

  “I vowed that if you committed suicide, I would do likewise,” said her sister, Ginyo. “If your plan now is to withdraw from the world, who would hesitate to follow your example?” Accordingly, at the age of nineteen she put on nun’s attire and joined Giō in her retreat, devoting all her thoughts to the life to come.

  Moved by the sight of them, their mother, Toji, observed, “In a world where my daughters, young as they are, have taken the tonsure, how could I, old woman that I am, cling to these gray hairs of mine?” Thus at the age of forty-five she shaved her head and, along with her two daughters, gave herself wholly to the recitation of Amida Buddha’s name, mindful only of the life hereafter.

  And so spring and the heat of summer passed, and as the autumn winds began to blow, the time came for the two star lovers to meet, the Herd Boy poling his boat across the River of Heaven, and people gazed up into the sky and wrote down their requests to them on leaves of the paper mulberry.10

  As the nuns watched the evening sun sinking below the hills to the west, they thought to themselves that there, where the sun went down, was the Western Paradise of Amida. “One day we, too, will be reborn there and will no longer know these cares and sorrows,” they said. Giving themselves up to melancholy thoughts of this kind, their tears never ceased flowing.

  Milky Way, in his boat. Another version of the legend has him crossing over a bridge formed by sympathetic magpies. This occasion, known as Tanabata, takes place on the seventh night of the seventh lunar month, at which time celebrants write their wishes on leaves and dedicate them to the lovers.

  When the twilight hour had passed, they closed their door of plaited bamboo, lit the dim lamp, and all three, mother and daughters, began their invocation of the Buddha’s name.

  But just then they heard someone tap-tapping at the bamboo door. The nuns started up in alarm. “Has some meddling demon come to interrupt our devotions, ineffectual as they are?” they wondered. “Even in the daytime, no one calls on us in our thatched hut here in the remote hills. Who would come so late at night? Whoever it is can easily batter down the door without waiting for it to be opened, so we may as well open it. And if it should be some heartless creature come to take our lives, we must be firm in our faith in Amida’s vow to save us and unceasingly call his holy name. He is certain to heed our call and come with his sacred host to greet us. And then surely he will guide us to his Western Paradise. Come, let us take heart and not delay pronouncing his name!”

  When they had thus reassured one another and mustered the courage to open the bamboo door, they discovered that it was no demon at all but Lady Hotoke who stood before them.

  “What do I see?” said Giō. “Lady Hotoke! Am I dreaming or awake?”

  “If I tell you what has happened, I may seem merely to be making excuses,” said Lady Hotoke, straining to hold back her tears. “But it would be too unkind to remain silent, and so I will start from the beginning. As you know, I was not originally summoned to the prime minister’s house but went of my own accord, and if it had not been for your kind intervention, I would never have been admitted. We women are frail beings and cannot always do as we wish. I was far from happy when the prime minister detained me at his mansion, and then when you were summoned again and sang your imayō song, I felt more than ever the impossibility of my position. I could take no delight in it because I knew that sooner or later my turn would come to fall from favor. I felt it even more when I saw the poem you wrote on the sliding panel with its warning that ‘come autumn, all alike must fade!’

  “After that, I lost track of your whereabouts. But when I heard that you and your mother and sister all had entered religious life, I was overcome with envy. Again and again I asked the prime minister to release me from service, but he would not hear of it.

  “What joy and delight we have in this world is no more than a dream within a dream, I told myself—what could such happiness mean to me? It is a rare thing to be born a human being and rarer still to discover the teachings of the Buddha. If because of my actions now I were to be reborn in hell or to spend endless aeons transmigrating through the other realms of existence, when would I ever find salvation? My youth could not be counted on, that I knew, for neither young nor old can tell when death may overtake them. One may breathe one instant and then not live to breathe the next: life is as fleeting as the shimmering heat of summer or a flash of lightning. To revel in a moment’s happiness and not be heedful of the life to come would be a pitiful course of action indeed! So this morning I stole away from the prime minister’s mansion and have come here.”

  With these words she threw off the cloak that she had around her. She had assumed a nun’s tonsure and habit.

  “I have come dressed in this fashion,” she told them, “because I wish to ask pardon for my past offenses. If you say you can forgive me, I would like to join you in your devotions, and perhaps we may be reborn on a single lotus leaf in the Western Paradise. But if you cannot bring yourself to forgive me, I will make my way elsewhere. Wherever I may settle, on a bed of moss or by the roots of a pine tree, I will devote what life is left to me to reciting the Buddha’s name, hoping, as I have done for so long, for rebirth in his paradise.”

  Near tears, Giō replied, “I never dreamed you felt this way. In a world of sadness, we all are, no doubt, fated to endure such trials. And yet I could not help envying you, and it seemed that such feelings of envy would prevent me from ever achieving the salvation I yearned for. I was in a mean and merely half-resolved frame of mind, one suitable for neither this life nor the life to come.

  “But now that I see you dressed in this manner, these past failings of mine fall away like so much dust, and at last I am certain of gaining salvation. Hereafter, all my joy will be to strive for that long-cherished goal. The whole world was puzzled when my mother and sister and I became nuns, deeming it an unprecedented step, and we too wondered in a way, and yet we had good reasons for doing what we did. But what we did was nothing compared with what you have done! Barely turned seventeen, with neither hatred nor despair to spur you on, you have chosen to cast aside the world of defilement and turn all your thoughts toward the Pure Land. How fortunate we are to meet such a fine guide and teacher! Come, we will work toward our goal together!”

  So the four women, sharing the same hut, morning and evening offered flowers and incense to the Buddha, all their thoughts on their devotions. And sooner or later,
it is said, each of the four nuns attained what she had so long sought, rebirth in the Western Paradise.

  Thus, on the curtain that lists the departed in the Eternal Lecture Hall founded by the retired emperor GoShirakawa are found, inscribed in one place, the names of the four: “The honored dead, Giō, Ginyo, Hotoke, Toji.”

  Theirs was a moving story.

  The stability in the capital gradually breaks down. Disagreements erupt within the imperial family as well as among temple-shrine complexes. In addition, tensions between Kiyomori, head of the now ascendant Taira clan, and the imperial court, led by the retired emperor GoShirakawa, peak in the Shishi-no-tani incident, in which Narichika, a Fujiwara courtier favored by GoShirakawa, becomes the principal conspirator in a plot to eliminate Kiyomori. He is joined by Shunkan, Yasuyori, and Saikō, a member of GoShirakawa’s staff. A conflict breaks out between the court and Mount Hiei, a key Buddhist center, over a delayed court decision in which the warrior monks of Mount Hiei are routed. In 1177 a great conflagration consumes much of Kyoto and its cultural treasures.

  1. According to Buddhist legend, the Gion monastery, which was built by a rich merchant in a famous garden in India, was the first monastery in the Buddhist order. It also is said that the temple complex included a building known as Impermanence Hall, which contained four silver and four crystal bells.

  2. The Buddha is said to have died under sala trees, at which time the trees’ blossoms, ordinarily yellow, turned white to express their grief.

  3. Unfigured hunting robes are clothes worn by people of the sixth rank and below. With the exception of some chamberlains (tenjōbito), only those of the fifth rank or higher could enter the Seiryōden, the emperor’s private residence.