On a late spring night in 1353, ex-Emperor Kazuhito[1] had a nightmare.
Of course, many nightmares had annoyed him for a long time. Samurai cut their stomachs or throats themselves, staring without tears into him; a pond of blood filled with soldiers’ bodies; a dead man and his little son stood in the garden, full-blooming aconite flowers; or a rain of sounds fell from arrow strings under a shiny blue sky. However, this spring night’s dream differed from any of them.
“Kazuhito.”
He heard a familiar whisper, the voice of his deceased uncle, Retired Emperor Hanazono.[2] It sounded to him like an alert, something to make him take notice of approaching danger.
“Father?” He called his uncle like that because Hanazono was his stepfather. His real father was Retired Emperor Go-Fushimi,[3] who had made his younger half brother Hanazono educate his crown prince. Kazuhito used to call both of them Father.
Kazuhito opened his eyes. A slight metallic sound was clattering. He raised his upper body from the bedclothes. The moonlight entered through a skylight on the thatched ceiling.
His bed was in a corner of “the palace.” In actuality, it was an old farmhouse. Maybe a wealthy farmer had lived there in the old days, but it was so humble compared with the real emperor’s palace in the capital, Kyoto. Now, the imperial heirs were captured and jailed in Anou, which was a small village deep in the Yoshino Mountains in Yamato.[4]
These days, Japanese royal families were divided into two parties, the Northern and the Southern Courts. Kazuhito was the head of the Northern Court.
The farmhouse had two rooms, one of which was the small bedroom for him (but also the storeroom), and the other was the living room. Curtains and wooden screens provided narrow private spaces for his family and court ladies.[5] The royal home doctor slept on the straw bed in the empty old stable outside the house.
Kazuhito heard the faint clattering again. Those were not earthquakes. His hand reached for a low shelf on the bedside. The ebony shelf contained some scrolls, writing tools, and a small urn made of copper containing part of the bones of his adored uncle.
He tried to open the shelf to check the palm-sized urn covered in its gold-brocaded cloth bag. The clattering sounds seemed to come from the lid. Just then, he noticed someone was on his feet.
She was weeping.
He didn’t know when she had come into the room. He’d heard no other noise before he saw her. The moonlight through the skylight spotted her figure. Her sobbing voice was not that of one of the women sleeping in the next room.
Her face was hidden by a long sleeve, layered with blue-to-green silk robes resembling shades of willow leaves. She had long, silky black hair trailing down the back of her gown, like a noble lady. He couldn’t guess her age, but she seemed not over thirty by her weeping voice.
“Lady, why have you come here at such a time?” Kazuhito asked her calmly and kindly as the royal patriarch.
And the woman was just crying.
Kazuhito tightly fixed the loosened collars of his nightrobe and rubbed his tonsured head. “Lady, it’s unfit for a young woman like you to visit a monk’s bed.”
He was forty years old and had begun practicing Buddhism the previous year because he needed to indicate that he wasn’t ambitious enough to become the head of the imperial government again to his opponent, the Southern Court. That was the only way to protect the future of his sons.
The woman said, “Ah, Your Majesty. Please help me. She will split me!”
Then, again, she wept quietly.
“Who is she?” he asked.
In the old days, when he was the crown prince, pretty grand or lesser noblewomen took turns sleeping with him in his bedroom every night. However, this weeping woman was not like those charming ones. The scent of ashes and burnt papers hung around her, and little blue flames fluttered on her gown. Maybe it was the fire from the inferno―a dead person, she was.
He felt a slight chill on his backbones, and he noticed green maple leaf patterns embroidered on the textile of her gown. No woman in the house had one like it.
“Don’t let me be killed, please. I know you are responsible for that,” she said.
“What is responsibility? Who are you?” he asked.
“Of course, you know both.”
She took her sleeve away from her face and stared at him. She looked not so ugly and like someone he had seen before, but Kazuhito couldn’t remember who she was.
“Help and remember me.”
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When Kazuhito awoke, the ghost had gone. It was a sunny morning.
He folded his blanket and bedclothes, stepped down to the kitchen on the beaten earth floor, and looked around on the shelf.
“Good morning. Your Majesty, is this what you are looking for?”
Akiko passed him a white facecloth and a wash bowl filled with water. She was the lady of honor, his old loyal mistress.
“Thank you. Good morning, Akiko-san.” He received them.
In the kitchen, court ladies were already working to cook breakfast. He sat down on the wooden edge of the floor by the kitchen to wash his hands and face. Akiko sat beside him with a toothpick box.
“Um, did you notice something unusual about me last night?” Kazuhito asked her, receiving a toothpick to clean his teeth.
“I didn’t notice anything,” she said. “But you groaned once, maybe at midnight.”
“No problems. It’s nothing unusual,” he said.
It was not so rare that Kazuhito groaned from nightmares. He had told the ladies and his family not to pay him any mind, even if they heard his groaning voice through the night.
“Haven’t you slept very well?” Akiko said, receiving the used toothpick in her hand.
“Yes, I have.” Kazuhito wiped his face, and he passed the used facecloth to her.
“Could I attend your bedside tonight for your safety from nightmares?” she asked.
“It’s not a very good idea. This is not the best place to nurture a newborn prince or princess. Don’t worry about me.”
Akiko covered her face under the cloth. “Oh, my priest. Surely you jest to such a granny!” She tapped his sleeve lightly with a chuckle.
She was the same age as Kazuhito and had four children in Kyoto; Kazuhito was the father of the two younger ones, and the elders by her ex-husband had already become adults. The prince, who was borne by her, was already living a religious life in a temple, so that the Southern Court did not capture him, and the princess was living in Kyoto with her half sister’s family. Also, Akiko was the nanny of the crown prince, her nephew Naohito. After Naohito was incarcerated with his father, Kazuhito, in Anou, she volunteered to care for them and came from Kyoto with other court ladies.
In those days, the women in the royal court were not always members of the emperor’s harem; they were secretarial teams of the imperial office. Some had their own husbands, and others had relationships with the other royals or nobles. Akiko’s elder sister, Saneko,[6] had also been one of these ladies and finally became the honorary empress of Retired Emperor Hanazono. She had children with Hanazono, and Crown Prince Naohito was Kazuhito’s son. When Naohito was born, Saneko was still one of the court ladies and did not have a formal marriage with Hanazono, so this wasn’t considered adultery.
“You’re not so old. It’s too bad now I’m in the carbon-black cloth of a monk, so I can only drink tea with you. You’d better find a new boyfriend when you return to the city.”
“Thank you, Your Majesty. I’ll do that,” she said.
A few silver strands had appeared in her hair, and she had become a bit thinner than when she was in Kyoto, but she still had her charming smile and dimples. Kazuhito looked at her profile briefly, trying to remember the ghost woman’s face. However, his memory of the crying woman had become ambiguous when he saw a living and smiling one.
“Your Majesty, shall I take the bowl away?”
“Thank you. Please bring new writing paper to my room after breakfast.”
“Yes, I will.”
He returned to his room and checked the urn on the shelf. Its braided cord and the covering cloth did not look strange.
He whispered to the urn in his palms.
“Father. What were you trying to say to me?”
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The two-party system collapsed, finally leading to a sixty-year civil war, even though the periodic government change worked well initially to compete to improve the governance system. This isn’t a story about our modern political situation. That was caused in medieval Japan in the 14th century, during the Nanbokuchō Period (Period of Southern and Northern Courts).
It’s a difficult age to explain in short. If you don’t have time, you can skip the rest of this chapter and move on to the next one. That’s OK. If you’re interested in one of the social examples after the two-party system had occurred and collapsed, the following text would be a reference.
The military government, the Kamakura shogunate, gained an advantage over Go-Toba,[7] the 82nd emperor of Japan, in the Jōkyū Disturbance in 1221. After the battle, the Kamakura shogunate (a city near modern Tokyo) began to control the national government and appoint the next emperor from the royal lineage. However, the emperor in Kyoto was not wholly the titular monarch, and he still had some authority, for example, regarding real estate suits and religious ceremonies.
The shogunate and the royal court were codependent because the military government lacked the justification to reign over Japan against their warrior-class rivals, and the emperor did not have enough violent force to conquer the domestic. This codependent relationship continued until 1945 and its consequences may still be seen in modern times. Various social groups have supported emperors in turn to justify their rights of governance, and the imperial system has been continuing by changing its patrons.
By the way, the royal family split into two parties due to a succession struggle between two brothers, the 89th emperor, Go-Fukakusa,[8] and the 90th, Kameyama,[9] in the second half of the 13th century. The shogunate tried to divide the power of the imperial court and had the two royal parties perform periodic government changes. The emperors were appointed from two families, taking turns.
In the same period, in the latter 13th century, the Yuan (Mongolian Dynasty in China) raided the Kyushu Islands. The shogunate and their warriors fought off the attacks after a big struggle. Still, the shogunate’s authority became weakened by disaffected warlords.
The 96th emperor, Go-Daigo,[10] the grandson of Kameyama, co-opted these unsatisfied people against the shogunate. When the shogunate noticed the rebelling activity, the battle between the emperor and the warrior government started again after a one-hundred-year interval. At first, the shogunate won, forcing Go-Daigo to move to Oki Island like his ancestor, Go-Toba. Then, the shogunate enthroned Prince Kazuhito of another royal family as the new emperor. He’s the protagonist in this story.
In 1333, Emperor Go-Daigo escaped from Oki and regained his throne. Commanders of his army destroyed the Kamakura shogunate, and Kazuhito was captured and forced to retire. However, that was just the first half of the long civil war. The conquest led to further conflicts. Soon, the war commanders opposed each other regarding who should gain the initiative in the military government. Go-Daigo and his courtiers didn’t believe the warrior-class retainers. Ashikaga Takauji,[11] an important general of Go-Daigo, rebelled against the emperor because Go-Daigo doubted him. The emperor ordered other generals to remove Takauji, so Takauji tried to connect with ex-Emperor Kazuhito to justify his situation. Kazuhito accepted that secretly.
Go-Daigo ran away to the Yoshino Mountains. Takauji and his brother Tadayoshi[12] built a new warrior government in Kyoto, the Ashikaga shogunate, in 1338. Kazuhito assigned his younger brother Yutahito[13] as the new emperor, and he began to organize a new imperial court collaborating with the Ashikaga shogunate. In those days, the ex-emperors, especially patriarchs of the family, were real decision-makers in the royal government more than the contemporary emperors. Today, we call Kazuhito’s dynasty the Northern Court and Go-Daigo’s the Southern Court. It was a difficult time. Yesterday’s friend became today’s enemy, and today’s enemy would become tomorrow’s friend.
Go-Daigo died in Yoshino in 1339 after he assigned his young son Noriyoshi to the following Southern emperor, halfway through his too-high ambition.
The new shogunate and the Northern Court were in a vulnerable state. The Southern Court still had good power near Kyoto and Kyushu, and its members had been secretly lobbying the shogunate commanders. Kazuhito and Yutahito enthroned Kazuhito’s son Okihito[14] to be the next emperor to ensure the hereditary stability of the new government. However, in 1351, the shogunate changed the emperor from the Northern to the Southern again because of the infighting of the warrior government. The Ashikaga brothers, who had been close, began to fight each other over whose son should be a successor of the shogun. The Northern family was forced to retire again.
The accommodation did not last as long as expected because the Southern Court and Takauji did not believe in each other. The Southern Court attacked the shogunate in Kyoto and captured the Northern heirs, including Emperor Okihito, as hostages so as not to reconnect the shogunate and the Northern Court.
Thank you, readers, for your patience in my instant Japanese medieval history class. That’s all the backstories. Now, I return to the ghost story.
[1] (1313–1364) The first Northern Court emperor, the son of Go-Fushimi. His emperor’s name is Kōgon. The emperors’ names are offered after their deaths. During his life, he is just called “the present emperor,” not his real first name or emperor’s name. In this story, for the convenience of readers, the living ones are called by their first names, and their emperor’s names are for the deceased ones.
[2] (1297–1348) The 95th emperor, the uncle of Kazuhito.
[3] (1288–1336) The 93rd emperor, the father of Kazuhito.
[4] Present-day Nara Prefecture.
[5] Female workers in the royal court were from noble families; their job was to steward the official work and private households of the Imperial families.
[6] Ōgimachi Saneko (1297–1360), the actual partner of Hanazono, although Kazuhito wrote Naohito was a son between her and him as an oath to the god of Kasuga.
[7] (1180–1239) The 82nd emperor was defeated by the Kamakura shogunate and was removed to Oki Island.
[8] (1243–1304) The 89th emperor; his concubine Nijō wrote an erotic relationship between her and him in her memoir Towazu-Gatari.
[9] (1249–1305) The 90th emperor was the younger full brother of Go-Fukakusa.
[10] (1288–1339) The 96th emperor, led to a long civil war in Japan in the 14th century.
[11] (1305–1358) The Ashikaga family’s first shogun (the Grand General, the top state of the warrior class).
[12] (1306–1352) The full younger brother of Takauji.
[13] (1322–1380) The full younger brother of Kazuhito. The second emperor of the Northern Court. His emperor’s name is Kōmyō.
[14] (1334–1398) The 3rd Northern emperor Sukō. He is a direct ancestor of the contemporary Japanese emperor, Naruhito.
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