The Cambridge History of Japan, Vol. 3: Medieval Japan

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UNHEEDED VOICES, WINKED-AT LIVES 529

mined student. He became devoted to her. In a moving gesture some

ten years later, when she was in her eighties and had fallen ill,

Goshirakawa sat at her bedside and performed the imayo related to the

healing buddha, Yakushi Nyorai (song 32 in the Ryojin

hisho),*

a song

believed to help invoke a cure for serious illnesses. Greatly stirred,

Otomae wept at her student's (and her emperor's) effort and at his

faith.

Many of Otomae's imayo had religious themes. As generations

passed, however, the secular songs prevailed. The popular songs of the

Muromachi age can best be imagined from the 1518 collection, the

Kanginshu, which contains 311 of the most beloved songs covering the

350-year period following Otomae's death around 1169, when

Goshirakawa had completed the Ryojin hisho. The Kanginshu draws on

the great array of vocal music that circulated during the middle ages:

short songs, longer narrative songs, folk songs, songs from stage plays,

professional entertainer's songs, and dance songs. We do not know

how such songs were sung, as the melodies have been lost, and the

meter cannot be reconstructed. But we do know that most were accom-

panied by a hand drum or the tapping of a closed fan against the palm

of the hand.

The shirabyoshi and kusemai

dancers

Better known to history than are the kugutsu, the

shirabyoshi

dancers

are represented by many famous names: Shizuka Gozen, Gio, Hotoke,

Iso no Zenji, Ishi, Kamegiku, and so on; yet we understand and can

reconstruct little of their dance art. At the peak of its popularity

during the thirteenth century, it proliferated into various forms and

came to include not only solo but chorus dancing as well.

The unexpected boldness, the soft touch of the erotic, the

poignant - all these qualities in a woman putting on the garb of a

man and dancing, especially electrifying when the items of clothing

belong to her lover - are the elements, I would suggest, that inspired

Zeami, who added death and deranged passion to the formula. The

result was a riveting form of choreographed drama. In the noh play

that bears her name, Matsukaze, in desolate loneliness at having lost

him, puts on the robe and lacquered court hat left behind with her as

a keepsake by her lover Yukihira, now dead. Enclosed in his fragrant

robes,

she loses herself in derangement and in dance. In Izutsu, a

46 See ibid., p. 206, for the text of the song.

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53° THE OTHER SIDE OF CULTURE

young woman dons the hat and robes of her lost lover Ariwara no

Narihira and in lonely,

grief,

dances; the sight of her own reflection

glimpsed on the surface of the water in the well gives her the de-

ranged joy of believing it is Narihira himself returned. Indeed, her

dance persuades the viewer that she may, in shamanlike fashion, be

possessed by his ghost.

Although it has not been customary to view them so, Zeami's

woman plays should be regarded as a natural evolution of the

shirabyoshi

art.

Shirabyoshi

dancers themselves appear as heroines in

the plays of both Kan'ami

(Yoshino

Shizuka, for instance) and Zeami

(Futari Shizuka, Futari Gio, Hotoke no hara, and so forth). Indeed,

Zeami's father, Kan'ami Kiyotsugu (1333-84), was famed for his per-

formances portraying the dancer Shizuka, and Zeami, in his "Three

Elements" treatise of

1423,

puts

shirabyoshi

dancers such as Gio, Gijo,

and Shizuka on the same level of artistic accomplishment as such

Heian-period poetesses as Lady Ise and Ono no Komachi.

Out of the

shirabyoshi

dancer's art evolved the

kusemai

dance, a form

that more fully integrated dance and song. When Kan'ami adapted the

kusemai

musical style into his

sarugaku

noh performance, he revolution-

ized it and laid the foundation for the emergence of noh as Zeami later

developed it. Zeami made the famous

kusemai

dancer, Hyakuman, the

central figure in his play that bears her name.

The label

prostitute,

however, hangs over the lives of all of these

several types of medieval female artists in a way that it does not in the

lives of male artists who were sometimes also, like Zeami, involved

sexually with their patrons. Shizuka Gozen, for example, the most

outstanding

shirabyoshi

dancer of her generation at the time of the

Gempei War, is known to us primarily not as an artist but as

Yoshitsune's mistress.

Yet we would do well to notice that every

major vocal and choreographed genre of literature and music from the

twelfth century on (imayo, kouta, shirabyoshimai, kusemai, enkyoku,

heikyoku, noh, Kowaka bukyoku, etoki, goze-gatari, sekkyo-bushi,

47 Nosakusho, in Hisamatsu Sen'ichi and Nishio Minoru, eds.,

Karonshu,

Nogakuronshu,

vol. 65

of Nihon koten bungaku taikei (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1961), pp.

470-1.

For an English

translation of the whole work, see J. Thomas Rimer and Masakazu Yamazaki, trans., On the

Art of the No Drama: The Major

Treatises

of Zeami (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University

Press,

1984).

48 Not only entertainers and shamans but also merchants and proselytizers - as long as they

were female - were labeled prostitutes at some time in the medieval period. Itinerant mer-

chants called Kaisurame, women from Katsura who peddled ayu fish in Kyoto; Oharame,

women from Ohara who sold charcoal; Kumano bikuni, nuns from Kumano who performed

painting recitations and raised money for the religious centers on Mount Kumano; uta bikuni,

mendicant

singing-nuns;

goze, blind hand drum - playing singers of religiosecular narratives -

none has escaped the judgment of history that if not overt, then behind the scenes, their real

service was sex.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

AKASHI NO KAKUICHI 531

kojoruri, and, later, senryu, ningyo-joruri, kabuki, and samisen-gafari,)

bears the distinctive marks of the female entertainer.

"Tea, men, and poetry" has a very different ring than does "wine,

women, and song." The first three constitute the main ingredients in

the history of Muromachi Japan as commonly depicted today. Yet the

history of medieval hfe and literature, and indeed of Japanese culture

as we know it today, is inconceivable without the ceremonials and

liberations of sake, the fascinations of female artistry, and the social

bonding of song.

AKASHI NO KAKUICHI

The islands of our small country.

Scattered like grains of millet

At the ends of the earth,

Are poisoned by troubles.

Let me take you away

To paradise, where all is exultation.

If in our discussions of nuns and shamans, singers and dancers, we

have reviewed cases of historical apathy, inattention, and disregard,

they pale in comparison with the neglect showered on the creator of

Japan's greatest medieval narratives, The Tale of the Heike. On the

twenty-ninth day of the sixth month of 1371, one of the greatest

composer-performers in history died, and yet there are few today who

even know his name. Blind and no doubt sensing that he had little

time left, Akashi no Kakuichi had, three months earlier, dictated to

his chosen disciple, Teiichi, the mammoth libretto of the masterpiece

that had been the life work of his mature years and that he had spent

his last decades perfecting.

It has not been sufficiently appreciated

49 Kiyomori's widow to her eight-year-old grandson, Emperor Antoku. For the original, see

Takagi Ichinosuke et al., eds., Heike

monogatari,

vol. 33 of Nihon

koten bungaku taikei

(Tokyo:

Iwanami shoten, 1960), p. 438. I have modified Hiroshi Kitamura's and Paul T. Tsuchida's

translation, as found on p. 777 of their complete translation: The Tale of

ike

Heike (Tokyo:

University of Tokyo Press, 1975).

50 Takagi Ichinosuke et al., eds., Heike

monogatari,

vols. 32 and 33 of Nihon koten bungaku

(Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1959-60), pp. 51 and 443, respectively. Data are based on the

okugaki of Kakuichi's text as well as on information recorded in Jorakuki, an anonymous

fifteenth-century historical work. Biographical material on Akashi no Kakuichi can be found

in Takagi et al., eds., Heike monogatari, vol. 32, pp. 5-51; and in Tomikura Tokujiro,

"Akashi no Kakuichi o megutte," Kokugo kokubun 21 (1952): 37-46. The best works in

English on the Heike are by Kenneth Dean Butler. See particularly "The Texual Evolution of

the Heike

monogatari,"

Harvard Journal of

Asiatic

Studies 26 (1966): 5-51; and "The Heike

monogatari

and the Japanese Warrior Ethic," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 29 (1969): 93-

108.

In addition, outstanding scholars of the Heike whose works should not be missed are

Atsumi Kaom and Yamashita Hiroaki. (Helen McCullough's translation appeared after this

chapter was in page proofs.)

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532 THE OTHER SIDE OF CULTURE

that no single work of Japanese literature or music has had a greater

impact on subsequent literary genres, theater, and music - indeed on

the Japanese people's very sense of their own past history - than has

Akashi no Kakuichi's

Heike

monogatari.

In the six hundred years since

his death, alterations in his libretto have been small and subtle, not

unlike the changes that conductors and soloists today make in a com-

poser's work. In effect, with Kakuichi, the

Heike

was completed. Yet

today his great achievement as a national bard is relegated largely to

footnotes. I speak here not of cultural disappearance but of historical

neglect. The very popularity of Kakuichi's Heike as a musical art

meant that during the middle ages it lay outside the normal purview

elite scholars, whose interests centered on written canon designed for

reading and poetic study. Only after the

Heike

was published during

the Edo period as history to be read was it considered an appropriate

subject of scholarly examination. And not until the twentieth century

was it treated as literature, the only masterwork of classical literature

to have been ignored academically so long and to have been accepted

as a masterpiece so late.

Kakuichi's Heike is an oratoriolike work made up of some 182

cantatas for solo bass voice and

biwa

accompaniment, each lasting for

thirty to forty minutes. Its subject is the conditions leading up to and

following the cataclysmic Gempei War between the Genji and Heike

clans.

It recounts the rise to glory and then the decline and fall and

eventual annihilation of

the

Taira, the clan known as Heike. It sings of

the political maneuvering and subsequent rise of the Heike leader

Kiyomori (1118-81); his arrogance and obliviousness to criticism; his

clan's bloody battles with their rough, east-country rivals, the Mina-

moto clan, called Genji; and the lives of the men and women who

witnessed, and were caught up in, the havoc wrought by the pride and

vainglorious ambition of the powerful.

No one was unaffected by the battles. The Gempei Wars shocked

the nobility, cracked the social structure, disrupted normal agricul-

tural and commercial life, tore apart families on all levels of society,

and left whole segments of the country widowed, orphaned, or dis-

abled by the loss of economic support or normal employment. The

downfall of the Heike was everyone's history. As the generations

passed, however, it could have become mere history had not two

things happened. First, the wars of the 1330s divided the imperial

reign into two rival courts and brought the downfall of the shogunate

that had been established by the victors of the Gempei War. The old

story of the fall of the Heike thus gained a freshness and new rele-

vance. Second, Akashi no Kakuichi's great genius transformed the

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AKASHI NO KAKUICHI 533

story into art. Kakuichi's Heike sang so movingly about the Gempei

War that it became the war with which all subsequent wars were

compared. It brought both recognition and perspective to the present.

Though tradition assigns the Heike to the genre of war tales, the

work is so far superior in conception, scope, and quality to all others

in that category that it is better thought of as a unique work. Nor

should it be described, as it so often is, as a work representative of or

belonging to the warrior classes. Kakuichi grasped the essential qual-

ity of the terrifying historical event about which he sang: its generic

nature, its universality, and its metaphorical meaning for all Japa-

nese.

Yet he also knew the inherent power the story had to bring

healing, even beatification. His

Heike

was not mere narrative; it was

liturgy, sung before audiences when such liturgy was deeply needed.

The incantations abolished time. Its ritual retelling united hearers,

pulling them into participation in the past, causing them to "remem-

ber" things they had never experienced at first hand. It is fair to say

that the power of Kakuichi's great composition was such that it did

not preserve the past but, rather, replaced it with a redesigned collec-

tive memory.

Scholars generally agree that the first version of

Heike monogatari

was written between 1219 and 1222 by Nakayama (Hamuro) no

Yukitaka's son, Yukinaga (born around 1164), a minor court noble

who became a monk in 1218. Unfortunately, this

Heike monogatari

has

been lost, though several subsequent texts have survived.

One of Kakuichi's great achievements was to purge earlier, more

primitive versions of the narrative of much of their partisan defense of

ancestors and their oppressive sermonizing. The Buddhistic themes

and motifs that resound in his version give the work a reassuring

quality, a serenity and universality. Kakuichi attempts neither to glam-

orize nor to vilify: The great oratorio is on the side of all those who fell

and died.

One thousand or more people make their appearance in Kakuichi's

Heike. Some pass through quickly, but others have names that to this

day, owing to the work's influence on Japan's society and its perform-

ing arts, stir the hearts of all Japanese. Gio, Kumagai, Sanemori,

Tomoe, Atsumori, Nasu no Yoichi, Yoshitsune, Benkei, Shizuka,

Koremori, Kenreimonin: These names are beloved; they are Japan's

heroes and heroines of the past, not because they can be read about in

history (though of course most can), but because Kakuichi's Heike

thrust them into the mainstream of myth and somehow sanctified

them.

The historical truth of Kakuichi's

Heike

lies also in its inclusiveness.

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534 THE OTHER SIDE OF CULTURE

Labeled as a war tale, described as a story of the rise and fall of men, it

is fundamentally a tale about women. Although Kakuichi's version

supplements history by giving mythicofictional flesh to the bones of

historical men, he has also done something even more extraordinary.

Threading their stories throughout the work like beads on a rosary, he

has framed the entire

Heike

with the victorious salvation of women.

The chord is struck in the opening movement by the work's longest

single canto, which recounts the tragedy of Kiyomori's hetaera, the

professional

shirabyoshi

dancer Gio. Her downfall is Kakuichi's first

restatement of the major theme of impermanence that was announced

in the prelude's opening stanzas.

The Gio canto, too, with the tonsures of

Gio,

her mother, sister, and

her rival Hotoke, contains the first sounding of

the

salvation motif

in a

work that offers intricate variations on that theme. Kakuichi con-

cludes the Heike with the nun Kenreimonin, her tonsure, her retreat

to the Jakkoin cloister, the visit there of the ex-emperor, and her story

and confession. Kakuichi's finale presents the fall of the Heike -

indeed all that has come to pass - through this guiltless yet haunted

woman's eyes. It was her voice that spoke for the age. It is as if the

whole fall of the Heike, and indeed of humankind is subsumed into

her pain:

Verily, all this

That came to pass

Before

very eyes

Has been none other than

complete turning of

the

eternal wheel -

The Six Realms of sentient pain.

In the end there is salvation for the "mother of the nation" and her

two attendants. The imagery of the three women is reminiscent of

Amida and his two attendants, Kannon and Seishi. So powerful are

the five concluding movements that make up the

finale

that it has been

customary for a master to burn incense when teaching this canto to a

student.

In many ways, despite their different traditions and the fact that

Akashi no Kakuichi lived almost four centuries earlier, the role he

played in Japanese culture was not unlike that of Johann Sebastian

Bach (1685-1750) in the Western tradition. Both men lived in an

environment of sacred music. They began by following those tradi-

51 Takagi

et al.,

Heike

monogatari,

vol. 33, p. 439.

52 Kindaichi

Haruhiko,

"Heikyoku

sono rekishi

ongaku,"

Heike

monogatari,

vol. 9 of

Zusetsu Nikon

koien

(Tokyo,

Shuseisha,

I98o),.p.

11.

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AKASHI NO KAKUICHI 535

tions but in the end went further, to creative choice. They also were

exposed to the several secular and folk-music traditions within travel-

ing distance of their homes. Both were professional music makers,

for hire, who arranged and performed for a living. Although the

perspective of time permits us now to view each as the founder of the

musical tradition that flowed from their genius, in their own periods

they were admired primarily as outstanding performers, Kakuichi as

a virtuoso bard playing the biwa, Bach on the organ. Both men

appeared at propitious moments in time when their genius could

flower; both were men of great conceptual talent. Able to survey and

bring together the principal styles and regional manifestations of

music and vocalized texts that had developed before them, they en-

riched them all in a synthesis that set the future direction of their

national traditions.

The

biv/a-priests

Because it was the occupation to which Kakuichi turned to make a

living after he lost his sight, the profession of

biwa-playing

narrative

singers that nurtured the evolution of the

Heike

texts deserves a brief

note here. The biwa-priests

(biwa-hoshi)

were engaged in a service

profession whose origins lie in the obscurities of early history.

They

seem to have begun by performing rituals to placate unsettled spirits

attached to home or village, during which the plucking and striking of

the strident-sounding lutelike instrument, the

biwa,

played an impor-

tant

role.

Its sound was believed to reach across to the spirit world and

dissipate malignant forces (much as was the sounding of the string of

an archer's bow in other shamanistic connections).

Numerous medieval picture scrolls show

biwa-priests.

Their casual

appearance as part of the scenery must be taken as representative of

their ubiquitous presence in medieval Japanese life. The depictions

imply an itinerant existence on the edges of

poverty.

Invariably, biwa-

priests

are portrayed as blind, a misfortune attributed in those days to

karmic hindrances originating in a previous existence. Blindness was

certainly lamented, but it was also perceived as

sort of fortunate early

warning that in this life one should at once occupy oneself with activi-

ties conducive to improved karma and salvation, or rebirth in para-

dise,

depending on doctrinal proclivities. The

biwa-priests'

exorcistic

53 Barbara Ruch, "Medieval Jongleurs and the Making of a National Literature," in John W.

Hall and Takeshi Toyoda, eds., Japan in the Muromachi Age (Berkeley and Los Angeles:

University of California Press, 1977), pp. 279-309.

536 THE OTHER SIDE OF CULTURE

services, though surely intended to accumulate merit for themselves,

also provided spiritual service to a society that universally embraced a

belief in

onryo,

malignant spirits of the dead.

We do not know when or how biwa-priests changed from being

purely exorcistic mediums who chanted incantations and played the

biwa to being artist-performers of vocal narratives. Their function

both as local exorcists and eventually as chanters of sacred liturgies

over the dead on battlefields provided a natural background from

which might evolve the intoning of accounts of the last moments of the

dead and finally longer tales about these battles themselves. At least by

the tenth century, ira>a-priests who chanted narratives were noted as

mendicant street entertainers, though what they chanted we do not

know.

By the eleventh century there were at least two main strains of

biwa-

priests. One type, active especially in Kyushu and eastern Japan,

followed the troops and sang battle tales. The other type was attached

to temples, mostly around Kyoto, where they sang Buddhist pieces to

small audiences.

After the Gempei War many of the battle singers seem to have

gathered at Shoshazan, a Buddhist monastic center in Harima Prov-

ince,

west of the capital. Composed of several temples related to the

Tendai sect, Shoshazan was an enclave where interest in the composi-

tion of vocal narratives flourished and whose library would have con-

tained materials relevant to historic and religious accounts. A veritable

melting pot for different strains of chanting and instrumentalizing and

for tales from the widely separated battlefield regions from northeast

to southwest, the Shoshazan environment played a vital role in the

evolution of early versions of the Heike. It was also the monastery

where Kakuichi himself studied and where, after he lost his sight, he

trained to be a fciwa-priest.

During the same period in Heike history, temple priests in Kyoto

had begun to introduce canticles from other circulating

Heike

accounts

into their own singing, in which history was made an example and the

powers of Buddhism were offered as the answer to history's woes.

It is into this milieu that Kakuichi was born, a man who rose from

•the ranks of a thousand nameless composer-performers to become

bard to a whole nation. But his life remains mostly mystery. Because

he died in 1371 and was at that time over seventy, we may assume that

he was born shortly after Mugai Nyodai died, sometime around 1300.

We do not know his secular name, though records indicate that he was

AKASHI NO KAKUICHI 537

referred to as Akashi-dono.

Nor do we know the priestly name he

used when, at a fairly youthful age, he became a monk at Shoshazan,

which was located in the mountains not far from Akashi. Known as

"the western Mount Hiei," Shoshazan attracted traveling monks from

throughout Japan. Judging from the later quality of his literary and

musical genius, Kakuichi obtained a good liturgical and musical educa-

tion there. In addition to scriptural study, he probably also learned the

Shoshazan-style of Tendai shomyo, or liturgical vocal music for the

incantation of scriptural texts, as well as a rather fast-paced rhythmical

method of reading sutras, then considered a Shoshazan specialty. He

was surely also familiar with certain styles of enkyoku, or Buddhist

festive melodies, a kind of rhythmic prose song enjoyed by priests in a

party environment at the end of important religious services. Some-

how he also learned the songs called imayo, of the sort Otomae had in

her repertory, as he incorporated them into the Heike.

We have no way to resurrect the melodies or rhythms or the preferred

vocal timbres of these various works, as the system used at the time to

record them constituted merely signs to indicate relative durations and

the general direction of melodic line; music was learned orally by imitat-

ing a teacher. We can only hope that the conservative nature of religious

forms of music makes it possible to hear echoes of the past in the present

forms of Tendai shomyo and in the vocalization of such performing arts

as noh that were influenced by early Buddhist music.

After studying at Shoshazan for some years, Kakuichi lost his eye-

sight while he was still fairly young - no later than his early thirties -

under circumstances that cannot be reconstructed at the present

time.

For a priest in a scholarly center where sacred texts were

central to life's daily activities, the blow must have been great. None-

theless, Shoshazan was also a gathering place for fo'zua-priests; that

Kakuichi had readily available such a creative option to turn to and

that there were musician-chanters at Shoshazan under whom to study,

was a momentous confluence of circumstances and a turning point in

Japanese cultural history.

While still a Shoshazan, Kakuichi learned how to perform an early

version of the Heike, now called the Kamakura-fton Heike, that most

likely had been created by &ia>a-playing priests there when he was still

a child. In effect, it was a kind of Shoshazan Heike. After learning to

54 According to the fourteenth-century Heike kammon roku, quoted by Tomikura Tokujiro,

Heike

monogatari

kenkyu (Tokyo: Kadokawa shoten, 1967), p. 283.

55 From the Saikai yoieki shu, quoted by Tomikura, "Akashi no Kakuichi," p. 39.

538 THE OTHER SIDE OF CULTURE

perform it, Kakuichi left Shoshazan and moved to Kyoto, probably in

the 1330s. Despite the political turbulence, Kyoto was

good place for

fo'zua-priest

to make a living. The best talent was there, and audi-

ences were readily available.

Kakuichi may have been urged to come to Kyoto by Joichi, a biwa-

priest from Kyushu who had spent some time at Shoshazan; they

might have become acquainted there. By about this time Joichi had

become the most famous reciter in Kyoto of what is now called the

Yashiro-ion Heike, one of the earliest extant reciter's versions. He

must have been a talented innovator as well, as he and his associates

were responsible for creating sometime before 1340 what is now called

the Chikuhakuen-ion version.

Although he planned to make a living in Kyoto performing his

Shoshazan

Heike,

Kakuichi nonetheless apprenticed himself

Joichi,

which means he soon became familiar with at least the two other

Heike

compositions performed by his teacher. The association must have

been a felicitous one for the two talented men, as both were interested

in innovative composition and performance techniques. It is around

this time that Joichi and Kakuichi, with one or two others, took the

character ichi (first) as part of their names, a step that indicates an

important bond.

Kakuichi's talent flowered. Soon the new "Kakuichi variations"

were mentioned in diaries, and his name began to dominate the Kyoto

scene. In 1340, Nakahara no Moromori recorded his attendance at a

Heike

recital by Kakuichi and stated that it was a "different form" of

the work.

Moromori must have enjoyed it, as from then on until

1362 he attended numerous recitals of

this

new Kakuichi

Heike.

Recit-

als were held throughout the city, largely at such shrines or temples as

the Rokujo Mido, the Yata Jizo Hall, the Yakushi Hall at the corner of

Gojo and Takakura, and the Kitano Tenjin shrine.

By this time Kakuichi had attracted students. In the chronicle

Taiheiki,

written when Kakuichi was quite elderly, there is an account

of Kakuichi and another 2>m>a-priest, Shin'ichi, being called to the

bedside of Musashi no kami Ko no Moronao (d. 1351), who was then

greatly distracted from his discomfort by their performance of the

Heike canto concerning, appropriately, a terrible night spirit called

nue. Several nue had made an emperor ill until they were shot out of

56 Quoted from Moromori's diary, Shishuki, by Takagi et al., eds., Heike

monogatari,

vol. 32, p.

50;

and Tomikura, Heike, p. 284.