Memoirs of the Warrior Kumagai. Donald Richie
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word came. Our troops were to move to the capital to protect his imperial majesty. It was, I remember, one of the last days of autumn, and I yet retain the musty smell of grain, the sudden scent of apples. We marched through forests, over mountains; we forded rivers and strode through villages much the same as those we had left.
When possible, we camped in these hamlets and treated the inhabitants not much differently from the way those traveling troops had treated us. Food, drink, even girls, we took. We were already soldiers: we ate what we had and fucked what we could.
I use the word precisely—that was the way we talked. Now that the late Yoritomo has so cleaned up the army—even instituted baths—such plain terms are no longer heard. But back then we farted at will, pissed where we were, shat where we slept, and smelled to high heaven. We were an unpretentious lot.
After days of marching, one cold, late afternoon, rounding a high crest, we saw lying in the valley the great capital, Heiankyō. It is now much changed, but I well remember my first sight of the city, lying there below us in the low sun of early winter.
The city was square, which surprised us, and it had long, straight avenues, quite different from the straggling roads of even our larger towns. And these cut through each other, creating great rectangles. The city was so large, so planned, that we stopped to gape.
It lay there before us and we could see, tiny in the distance, the gates and the larger roofs of temples, the squares of green lawns that held the palace enclosures, and block upon block of dwellings. The smoke from the cooking fires rose into the air and the late sun turned it to gold.
This was a view with which I was shortly to become very familiar and eventually much irritated by. This was because it was there, in that pass, that we stayed. The ostensible reason was that we were to stand guard lest armies of mountain warrior-monks, suborned by the Fujiwara, should attempt to storm this pass into the capital. The real reason was that this Hōgen Incident (as it is now called, having been downgraded from being called a war) was essentially a local fracas. Calling in the troops from as far away as Musashi had not been warranted. Therefore we were kept out.
My reader will understand our chagrin as we observed the battle laid out before us yet remained stuck up on the hill, unable to descend into the capital to make our fortunes. All we could see were the fires as they blazed, though occasionally we made out the lines of soldiery and the scattered ranks of the fleeing populace.
Later we learned what had happened. Our war had been occasioned by disagreements within the imperial house. Emperor Toba had retired—as was the custom. This common process of retirement was variously seen as a Fujiwara ploy intended to weaken the imperial house and strengthen this family line, and as a reasonable imperial decision. Reasonable because the ceremonial duties of an emperor were such that the only possibility of actually having the leisure to rule was to abdicate and then, in time-honored fashion, wield power as retired authority.
The now-retired Toba announced the ascension of another son, Go-Shirakawa, who duly took the throne at the age of twenty-eight in the second year of Kyūju [1155]. No sooner was this decision made than ex-Emperor Toba died and his son, Lord Sutoku, at once challenged Go-Shirakawa. This rivalry between the two was soon known to all. Nothing like this had ever before occurred, though the court librarians at once embarked on fruitless search for precedents. Each of the two claimants had his own faction. The Fujiwara believed that strength lay with Sutoku, as did the Minamoto, already agreeing with these regents whom they were eventually to supplant. The Taira, on the other hand, lent their support to Go-Shirakawa. Thus, though troops were there to defend the emperor, the problem was which emperor. All parties were thus to a degree rebels, and which side had been all along truly loyal would be determined only by victory.
It was this process that I impatiently watched from my hilltop perch, looking with longing at the billowing flames and straining my ears to hear the distant neighs and cries. Then it was over. One morning I awoke and saw only smoke and the tiny lines of the military, like ants at parley. These were the victorious supporters of the Emperor Go-Shirakawa. This meant that the Taira had won: the Taira, Kiyomori, Yoshitomo, and myself—for at once I saw the advantages of being by birth a Taira, despite my presently wearing Minamoto colors.
Down below there seemed to be much activity. I could not decipher it from my distance, but it turned out to be the executions. There was such a blood-letting in the capital that back on the farm that year even the tax collectors failed to appear. Everyone was busy at the execution grounds.
Among those being dispatched was Tameyoshi, the father of my commander, who had been on the losing side. Yoshitomo pleaded for his father's life; but Taira no Kiyomori sensibly asked him how otherwise the victors were to deal with that pretender, Sutoku, and strongly suggested that he do something about his troublesome parent. I was told that the son was forced to call the palanquin into which his father was placed and carried off. To safety it was assumed, but the soldiers stopped the palanquin on a mountain path and made the old man get out and kneel. Following orders, they then cut off his head. Tameyoshi was said to have behaved in a composed manner and occasioned no difficulty, and the head was then brought back to the capital but not displayed.
Other heads certainly were. Soon most of Tameyoshi's sons— Yoshitomo's brothers—all had their faces on view. One who had escaped, the eighth and last son, Tametomo, famous as the greatest archer of his day, was soon captured, the tendons of both arms were severed and he was banished to the distant island of Ōshima, never again to bend the bow.
This living death excited favorable comment, since it was not bloody. Both the imperial house and the Fujiwara regents had been taken aback by all this post-battle carnage. For centuries, punishment had been by custom restricted to flogging and banishment. Now, however, the law having been changed, something as permanent as beheading was becoming so common that people no longer even turned to look at the staring eyes of former acquaintances.
Thus, while we were perched up on our hill over a hundred had their heads chopped off. It was said that the executions halted only because no more necks were available. As for my commander, Yoshitomo, he became infamous as the man who had executed his own father. The Fujiwara minister Michinori, due to marry, had refused the proffered hand of Yoshitomo's daughter and accepted that of Kiyomori's.
Our forgotten band on the hill was also disappointed, because we had attached ourselves to a now disgraced leader.
When Lord Yoshitomo finally remembered us and came to review our resisting ranks, we were a sullen lot. I no longer gazed at him with shining eyes. He had lost all attraction since he could no longer assist me—could not even get me into Heiankyō. I was ready to seek my fortune elsewhere. This resolve proved fortunate, for it was not four years before the man lost his own head as well.
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Here, now, as I write in these newly spartan times, the Minamoto—the reigning family I later had the good fortune to join for a second time, otherwise I would not now be sitting here—have simplified history by smoothing the complications of what actually occurred.
Earlier political machinations are not now mentioned, since it was, you see, the will of Hachiman, great god of war, that occasioned the Minamoto rise. With the imperial family now so tractable here in ruined Heiankyō, where foxes walk the boulevards and badgers roam the palaces, the rise of the Minamoto is seen as something preordained, the defeat of the Taira certain from the beginning.
The Minamoto may have saved the country as they claim, but they also ruined it. Much that was natural, innocent, and simple, vanished when the Taira were finally run to ground. A new suspicion, complicated by political considerations, by distrust, entered when the Minamoto acquired more power than had even the once powerful Fujiwara.
This I know I should not ponder, much less write. It is careless of me. After all, it was the Minamoto clan that won this war. For me to feel this fondness for another time, an era beyond recall, can obtain me no gain. But then I am sometimes like that: practical, looking properly to my own interests and then, in a moment of weakness, feeling for the lost, the gone—the vanished world of the Taira, even the head of little Atsumori bobbing in the surf. It is doubtless a grave defect.
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