a tenuous connection but was thought better than none. And there was not that much choice. All of Kiyomori's proper offspring were reserved for the imperial line.
Then too, we young officers were also occasionally invited to the imperial palace—not Emperor Go-Shirakawa's but Emperor Nijō's. While we did not view the young emperor himself—I was never to see him again after those early glimpses—we saw a lot of his court.
It was not all that much fun. There were moral readings and the slower of the court dances. Flirting was not encouraged. The Emperor Nijō had grown up serious. Far different, we heard, were the evenings at the retired emperor's palace. Here the rooms were brightly lit far into the night and the air rang with those popular tunes of the day, the imayō, which Go-Shirakawa so loved. There were contests where singers vied with each other, and dances to go with all the music. I imagine that dalliance was encouraged as well. To these, however, we were not invited—only the higher-ups from Kiyomori's court were.
At one of the imperial parties at Emperor Nijō's palace there was a pretty girl, daughter of a minor official, who had apparently been told to interest me. Though her parents were forward in their attentions, I grew to like her because she neither fawned nor complimented, but went about pouring my cup full just as she had been ordered.
After the graces of the others, her undemanding and straightforward manner was strangely attractive. Indeed, her very lack of interest interested me. Ten years as a rising and likely officer candidate in what had become an increasingly dissolute capital had accustomed me to easier conquests.
Most of our evenings out were given over to dissipations of various sorts. We young officers gambled, drank, quarreled, and ended up under the coverlet with someone we did not know and often enough did not even desire. Under such circumstances, making love becomes as ordinary as eating and when food is plentiful one does not think of hunger.
As a consequence of my disordered life, I was thinking of some alliance that would bring domestic comfort and at the same time would strengthen my chances of rising further in my career. So I looked into the background of this girl who, unlike the others, paid so little attention to me.
Her name was Ōto and she was of good Taira stock, of blood fine enough for her to serve as lady-in-waiting to Fuji no Kata, the wife of Tsunemori, a younger brother of Kiyomori.
He was, as I have indicated, encouraging courtly ways, so we now had our own nobility, and both Ōto and I were on the edges of it. Her parents thought that marriage to one of Kiyomori's lieutenants would forward their daughter in the world, and I believed that an alliance with a close associate to the wife of Tsunemori would elevate me. Consequently, it was a union made in heaven, as they say, and we were shortly wed.
It was winter, cold and dry, the air smelling of charcoal fires. She was in her red-brocade ceremonial garb and this brought out the color in her cheeks. On my side were a fellow officer and my old instructor, Kurō. On hers were her parents and her patron, the pregnant Fuji no Kata—though the lady's distinguished husband, brother to the Nation's Protector, as we were now styling the Lord Kiyomori, did not appear.
This wife of mine turned out to be as truly indifferent to me as she had originally appeared. She had married me because she had to marry someone and I seemed the best of the lot. I had a parcel of land in Musashi, I did not drink too much, and though I had a temper, I rarely quarreled. She had probably heard I slept about, but that was no problem. She now had her husband, her own small house, and the promise of a child. And she was, I must say, an excellent wife. They called us an ideal couple—and I suppose we were.
* * *
There they go again—always the same time, and every morning. Initially I thought their chantings were acts of devotion to allay the spirits of the dead. After all, these youngsters have the reputation of being able to appease the beyond. But now I am not so certain. Perhaps there is some popular demand for their efforts, since these are all war tales. But if so, the future audience is going to receive some peculiar historical information.
Right now they are still going on about times under Kiyomori. All obeyed his commands. As the grass bends before the wind, they received his favor as the earth welcomes the rain—pretty figures of speech. The singers down the hall are fond of the poetic; they are not, however, very accurate. No one welcomed anything—they were made to put up with it, but the methods used were much more subtle than those the scribes are busy ascribing.
The pageboy spies, for example. As they have it, if one word was heard against the Taira, the pretty horde would burst into the offending house, confiscate the belongings, and march the owner off under arrest. Not at all. Their methods were much more sure, and much more successful. I wonder why our young balladeers do not take the trouble to ascertain their facts.
Having just returned from down the hall, I now know why. As I was rounding the corner one of these musical youths ran into me. Blind as a bat. Turns out the majority of them are. Consequently, they can't ascertain anything.
Ah, there they go again. Singing away about a time they have never seen, and never could have.
* * *
When I remember those last days of the Taira at the capital, they have something about them of a golden autumn, of the fullness of an orchard just past its prime, where the late sun is reflected in the fat cheek of the apple and winter is still only a thought. It was the end, but none of us saw it, though it was plain, standing there before us.
It is said that when a man reaches his mid-term he falls prey to doubt. This afflicted Kiyomori in his later years. To find the answers to the questions plaguing him he was filling his chambers with shamans and rural magicians of various sorts; he even moved his palace (and hence the capital itself) for a time to far Fukuhara on the sea, certainly to attend to trade relations with China but perhaps also to escape from such doubts and demons as had possessed him. I remember the very stink of magic in the place, all that smoke and incense, the stench of burned hair and the smell of blood from the little animals he had slaughtered to placate those demons.
They possessed us all because this was a time of great doubt. The reason was that while we were lolling in the capital, the end of the world was approaching. Though we saw this shadow we did not yet guess its cause. We did, however, recognize our forebodings.
There were, I remember, signs of this event even when I was still a child. An oak, older than the oldest family, withered; a spring failed; a horse had a two-headed colt. In the second year of Kyūan [1146] there was a comet. It was viewed as a dire portent, coming at it did from the unfortunate northeast. I, being six or so at the time, remember it well as it sailed over us during the hot, late summer nights.
There were, in addition, other reminders: an intractable younger generation, a lowering of morals, an absence of bravery, things not as they had once been, and so on. These are all common enough events but we saw them as portents.
Nor were we wrong to, for we had divine proof. According to the Buddhist faith, we would pass through three ages—we had, in fact, already done so. First had been the era when there was divine law and enlightenment; then came the period when the laws existed but there was no more enlightenment; and, finally, this time, when the law itself dissolves and there is no enlightenment because we have fallen away in the far reaches of time from the Lord Buddha's example. Radiating from so long ago, his divine light can no longer reach us.
As to just when these latter days of the law were supposed to have begun there was disagreement. Chinese priests from long ago are said to have calculated that they were beginning even back then, but our own clergy seem to have early moved this unhappy era as far forward as possible. Even so, more recent clerics were eventually forced to conclude that the latter days could
