1185

The year 1185 enters this passage through the Battle of Dan-no-ura, whose catastrophe Fukaéri recites from The Tale of the Heike. As Tengo listens, an ancient defeat is not merely recalled: her voice gives it startling immediacy, joining the epic’s history of the Heike with the present encounter between the two characters.

The battle in the recitation

Tengo asks Fukaéri to recite another passage and, searching his memory for an episode from The Tale of the Heike, names the Battle of Dan-no-ura. After concentrating silently for about twenty seconds, she begins. The passage evokes Genji warriors boarding the Heike ships, where sailors and helmsmen lie dead from arrows and swords. The vessels are in disarray, and the battle’s outcome is turning against the Heike.

The recitation follows the counselor Tomomori as he reaches the imperial ship. He recognizes that the Heike’s time is nearly over and, in a striking gesture amid the wreckage, orders that anything offensive to the eye be thrown into the sea. He moves from stern to bow, sweeping, wiping, and gathering dust with his own hands. When the court ladies ask how the battle is going, he answers with lightly mocking humor, telling them they are about to meet the extraordinary men of Azuma. Their disbelief and cries expose the gulf between his composure and the disaster closing around them.

The fall of the Heike

The scene’s polished gestures and courtly speech give way to a decision about death. Tomomori urges the young emperor to take leave of the Grand Shrine of Ise facing east and invoke the holy name facing west, so that the Buddhas of the Pure Land will welcome him. He presents the country as a land of suffering and promises to take the emperor to a happier land, the Pure Land of Perfect Bliss. The passage then describes the Lady of the Second Rank taking the child in her arms and leaping into the deep sea, consoling him with the thought that another capital lies beneath the waves.

Tengo’s recollection supplies the wider catastrophe surrounding these words. Once the Heishi defeat is complete, Tokiko, Kiyomori’s wife, throws herself into the water with the very young Emperor Antoku in her arms. The court ladies follow, choosing death rather than capture by the eastern samurai. Tomomori conceals his grief and urges them toward suicide through a few lightly delivered words: waiting, he says, will give them a taste of hell while they are still alive, so it is better to die there.

Performance and historical memory

Fukaéri’s manner changes as she recites. Her everyday speech is flat, without accent or intonation; the epic instead emerges in a powerful voice rich in color. Listening with his eyes closed, Tengo feels as though he is hearing a blind monk chanting to the biwa. He remembers that The Tale of the Heike began as an epic poem transmitted orally, and her performance makes that mode of transmission palpable: the battle at sea in the Kanmon Strait is resurrected through a voice in the room.

The effect is so complete that Tengo imagines something has taken possession of Fukaéri. The recitation does not alter the historical outcome; it changes how the past is experienced in the present, as a scene made vivid through voice, rhythm, and remembered words. When Fukaéri asks whether she should continue, Tengo, astonished, tells her that it is enough and thanks her.