A Tale of False Fortunes (22 page)

142
c
A Tale of False Fortunes
Though some time had elapsed since her passing, she
had not changed at all. Lying there in august repose, she
did not even seem to be a creature of this world, but
appeared as noble as if a bodhisattva had assumed the
temporary form of an empress. It was especially touching
when the Mistress of the Wardrobe [Mikushigedono]

stroked the deceased Empress Consort’s hair and said
through sobs, “His majesty has arrived. Please have an
audience with him now.” The Emperor shed no tears. As
he gazed at her, he could not escape the impression that her
spirit must be lingering in her remains. His pain was fath-omless.

His time was limited, and he left as if in a dream. The
Middle Counselor [Takaie] followed him to the cart and
said, “The late Empress Consort herself selected these old
letters from among scraps of her usual writing practice
and tied them by the cord of the curtain. She must have
wanted to make certain that the musings of her lonely,
everyday existence would come to Your Majesty’s attention. Since they are reminders of the deceased, they are
inauspicious, but it must have been the wish of the
Empress Consort that you take these back with you and
read them.” The Emperor nodded vacantly and put the
letters in the breast of his robe.

After they returned, the Emperor’s mood became somewhat more tranquil, and the Lord Regent’s worries were
put to rest. At length, the pale light of dawn ended the
long winter night.

After retiring to his bedchamber, the Emperor took out
Teishi’s jottings and read them. He found odds and ends
of diaries filled with elliptical accounts of things, but there
was not a trace of any bitterness. Among the passages
yearning for the Emperor, she wrote that she did not
expect to survive the loneliness of this year, a year that had
required her utmost circumspection. To that she added the
poem of the previous day, and also described her circumstances:

Chapter Six
c
143

Shiru hito mo

Now is the time

Naki wakareji ni

That I must hasten,

Ima wa tote

Alone and wretched,

Kokorobosoku mo

Down the Path of Parting

Isogitatsu kana

Where all are strangers

Kemuri to mo

Though my body

Kumo to mo naranu

Will not be one of smoke

Minari to mo

Or clouds—

Kusaba no tsuyu o

Remember me when you look

Sore to nagame yo

At dew upon the grass.

They managed to carry out the untimely imperial excursion without anyone finding out, but Michinaga had secretly included the secretary of the imperial police, Yukikuni, among the party that went to pay its condolences. It was necessary to conceal the emperor’s grief from outsiders, but among those who were privileged to know, there was an unrestrained and overt display of mourning. Since hearing of the empress consort’s demise, it was as if a black curtain had been drawn over Yukikuni’s heart. He was unable to confide his feelings to anyone, and his secret grief caused him great anguish of mind.

Through his connections as an official at the Bureau of Imperial Police, Yukikuni learned that Kureha had been arrested for the crime of falsely claiming possession by the empress consort’s living ghost, thereby bringing disgrace upon her highness.

According to what Yukikuni had heard, keen-eyed Michinaga had seen through Kureha, who, acting out of resentment toward the empress consort, had taken advantage of her knowledge of her highness’ voice and mannerisms to feign possession and to curse the Fujitsubo empress. Kureha had been charged with lèse majesté and falsely acting as medium. Those who heard about it praised Michinaga’s magnanimous disposition and integrity in taking action to clear the tarnished reputation of the empress consort, who was his own daughter’s rival. However, Yukikuni could not help being suspicious about many points in the story.

When Kureha had come to his house for the last time and had broken their relationship, she had not concealed her jeal-144 c
A Tale of False Fortunes
ousy toward Empress Consort Teishi and had cursed her very existence. Then, relying on her ties with her sister, Kureha had allied herself with the Michinaga camp and used her thorough knowledge of the empress consort’s deportment and words to become a false medium. Yukikuni was also able to sense that it was Michinaga who had made use of Kureha’s knowledge. He had used Kureha as a false medium, but then when things had gone awry, he charged her with the crime of lèse majesté while at the same time making a pretense of liberality toward the empress consort. Even those who had firsthand knowledge of his character—a combination of grandiose stateliness with a gentleness that charmed even little girls—would doubtless be unaware of the many tricks hidden in his heart, or of how adroitly he manipulated things. If Yukikuni himself had not felt so keenly an unrequited love for Empress Consort Teishi, he certainly never would have fathomed what was at the bottom of this great politician’s shrewd heart.

With all due respect, it must be said that the emperor, the empress dowager, the crown prince, and all courtiers were nothing other than puppets whose strings were controlled by the grand character of Michinaga. How much more, then, were people such as himself and Kureha like insects in Michinaga’s eyes, inconsequential creatures that he could let live or kill without so much as moving a finger.

Yukikuni finally realized the true nature of the politics that moved the world. He felt apprehensive about that power, and rather than draw closer to Michinaga, he began unconsciously to cast about for a way to distance himself.

He thought he might go to the eastern provinces. Yukikuni was able to learn something of Taira no Masakado, who, though perishing in the end, had managed to become a local magnate in the eastern provinces and defy the power of the Fujiwaras.

The night after Empress Consort Teishi’s death, it so happened that Yukikuni was attending the regent. As he walked along the grand avenue of the capital, he felt as if a fragrance of blossoms penetrated his breast; he mused that the fragrance was like that of the empress consort’s robes when he gathered her into his arms in the conflagration at the Nijò mansion. He
Chapter Six
c
145

muttered to himself, “She was the only strong one who did not become entangled in the lord regent’s manipulative strings.” Though her life had ended in a state of utter loneliness and with no support, Yukikuni could not think of her as a wretched object of pity.

In accordance with the empress consort’s often expressed wish, she was buried instead of cremated.

They went to a place about two hundred yards south of
Toribeno and there built a mausoleum, surrounded by a
roofed wall, to be the resting place of the Empress Consort. Everything was decorated in a very dignified manner.

All things had been considered and were taken care of in
an extraordinary fashion.

When that evening arrived, the Empress Consort was
put into a cart decorated with gold threads. The Lord
Governor-General [Korechika] and other nobles of high
rank attended the procession. That evening a heavy snow
was falling, and the mausoleum where she was to be laid
to rest was completely buried. They went and had the
snow cleared away, and then put all of the interior furnishings in order. At length, they unyoked the ox, lowered
the coffin, and placed it inside. When they were about to
leave, all the nobles—including Akinobu and Michinobu

—were weeping, utterly distraught. In the meantime, the
mausoleum had again vanished beneath the snow. Out of
grief, the Middle Counselor [Takaie] recited:
Shirayuki no

No trace remains

Furitsumu nobe wa

On fields deeply blanketed

Ato taete

In the falling snow—

Izuku o haka to

To visit you, how shall we know

Kimi o tazunen

The whereabouts of your grave?

It was all very moving. Would that the events of that night
could be painted in a picture and shown to others.

146
c
A Tale of False Fortunes
That night, the emperor sat watching the snow pile up in the front garden and would not even enter his bedchamber. When he closed his eyes, he could see vividly Teishi’s reclining form, clothed in a dress of white figured cloth and laid within the cart decorated with gold threads, her face and head shaking like that of a living person every time the cart shook, and Korechika and her younger sister steadying her, weeping all the while.

A vision opened to the emperor’s mind: after the coffin had been moved into the mausoleum and artificial lotus flowers had been placed around the remains, the lid was placed on the coffin. As the sutra chanting continued, snow fell through the roof, scattering like flower petals on Teishi’s remains. It was as if, mingled with those snowflakes, his own love was being scattered over her.

Nobe made mo

Only my heart

Kokoro bakari wa

Traveled to that lone field

Kayoedomo

To pay last respects,

Waga miyuki to wa

But you no doubt were unaware

Shirazu ya aru ran

Of my visit to you.

Steeped in a tranquil sorrow, at daybreak the emperor entered his bedchamber. He dreamed that he was sleeping wrapped in cool, black hair. Upon awakening, he reflected that he must have been recalling that day in his own youth when Teishi had just washed her hair and he had wrapped himself in it before it had dried. He muttered to himself as he pressed his fingers against both of his eyes, “Teishi warned then that I would become the ‘frozen emperor,’ but now she is the frozen empress. . . .” His heart felt strangely satisfied.

It was about three days after her release from prison that Kureha hanged herself in a pine grove near Empress Consort Teishi’s new grave.

During her brief term in prison, she felt deep sorrow for having repaid kindness with enmity by playing the false living ghost of the empress consort. It was rumored that, now that her
Chapter Six
c
147

noble former mistress was in the grave, Kureha was unable to beg her forgiveness, and the “false medium” was no doubt resigned to the fact that there was no other way to expiate so grievous a crime.

After having consummate success as a false medium in deceiving the emperor on the first night, why on the next occasion did Kureha deliver opposite lines, incurring Michinaga’s wrath?
A
Tale of False Fortunes
gives that account in the last section where Yukikuni—then serving as a samurai near the Iruma River in his native province of Musashi—was out hunting and met Kureha’s elder sister, Ayame, among a group of itinerant shrine maidens.

More than thirty years had passed, and both Yukikuni and Ayame were beyond middle age.

Yukikuni despised the likes of shrine maidens as mortal enemies and was about to rout the group of women resting in a field of pampas grass. When he recognized Ayame, he took her to his mansion, gave her clothing, dined with her, and talked with her through the entire night.

The detailed account Yukikuni heard from Ayame was, in fact, an outline of
A Tale of False Fortunes.
It was only then that Yukikuni learned that, on the last evening when Kureha acted as medium, she had prepared her lines in advance, but when she buried her head in Emperor Ichijò’s lap, her words stuck in her throat, as if she had become mute. She fell unconscious and did not remember anything at all until she was dragged outside the curtains.

“My sister said before she died that the empress consort’s living spirit must have come to the Fujitsubo Pavilion just that once to put the emperor’s troubled heart to rest. For my sister, whom you had abandoned and who had betrayed the empress consort, maybe the happiest thing was to hang herself near the mausoleum.” Ayame, advanced in years and with sunken eyes, spoke with her shoulders hunched over, warming her hands at the fireplace where the savory aroma of roasting wild fowl was wafting.

148
c
A Tale of False Fortunes

“My tendency to single-mindedness when I was young was also the cause of much that I regret. But as I think about it, there would probably be just as much regret even if I had married Kureha and brought her with me to this rustic eastern province, where she would have spent her time around uncouth soldiers, war horses, and farming. The fact that a petty official like myself harbored an unrequited love for the empress consort was the source of both Kureha’s and my unhappiness. But, Ayame, you seem to have gotten around a good deal, too. The world and the fortunes of people in it have changed a lot in the more than thirty years since then, haven’t they?”

“I live, as you see, the life of a drifter and know nothing of court life, but I do know that the man who was then regent—

the one who enjoyed such prosperity and who was lionized by the world as the ‘Buddha-Hall Lord’—died not long ago.”

“That’s right. Two ministers and four imperial consorts came from his family. His strong fortune and confidence in his position in the world was even reflected in a poem he composed:
Kono yo o ba

When I consider

Waga yo to zo omou

That the full moon up above

Mochizuki no

Lacks nothing at all—

Kaketaru koto mo

How like this present world,

Nashi to omoeba

All my very own!

. . . And then, his eldest daughter, Jòtòmon’in [Empress Shò-

shi]—that is, the rival to Empress Consort Teishi—has the supreme honor of being the mother of two emperors, Go-Ichijò and Go-Suzaku. But I wonder how happy she was. Emperor Ichijò passed away when he was not much beyond thirty, and though the two princes inherited the throne one after the other, both were sickly and died young. I hear that their mother is now very lonely. When I consider that, I cannot easily forget the personal character of Empress Teishi. In her short life of twenty-five years, she so captivated the emperor’s heart. Of all the women of those times, she was the only one able to counter the Buddha-Hall Lord.”