Return to the index of "Other Women's Voices."
Updated 01-15-08
Daibu /Kenreimon'in
Ukyo no Daibu (d. aft.1232)
========================================================================
"WHATEVER I MAY CALL IT---DREAM, ILLUSION, TRAGEDY---NO
WORDS CAN POSSIBLY DESCRIBE IT."
========================================================================
From 1174 to 1178, Kenreimon'in Ukyo no Daibu, a member of the Fujiwara family, was an attendant to Empress Tokudu, consort of Emperor Takakura (1161-81). In 1180, the emperor abdicated, and the empress took Buddhist vows as Kenreimon'in (hence the first part of Daibu's name; "Ukyo no Daibu" refers to a position held by her father or sponsor).
Daibu left the court in 1178, but she continued to exchange poems with those she had known there, and she continued to see her lover, Taira no Sukemori (c.1161-1185), a leading member of the Taira family. The Taira had taken the place that the Fujiwara had held earlier, controlling the emperor and the court, and so holding ultimate power. Sukemori's grandfather was the most important person in Kyoto; because of his position, Sukemori had to marry as his family wished, and his affair with Daibu was conducted clandestinely.
Kenreimon'in Ukyo no Daibu shu opens in 1174, with Takakura on the throne and the Taira family at the height of their power; it ends in 1232, almost 60 years later. During that time, not only Daibu's life but also the history of Japan changed forever. A civil war, from 1180 to 1185, led eventually to the end of the Heian period and the move from court power to a military government. More immediately, the war killed Daibu's lover and most of the men she had known at court, turned Kyoto into an occupied city, and ended the kind of life Daibu had known.
In 1191, several years after the war had ended, Daibu briefly returned to the court, now dominated by a new power, the Minamoto family, but she could never reconcile herself to the new regime. So until 1232, she made pilgrimages, talked to old friends about the old days, and wrote poetry. We know nothing of her life after that.
In the prose parts of her shu (poetry collection) Daibu keeps saying of her experience of the civil war, "How can I describe this?" Her problem was that the language simply didn't exist. For 300 years the Heian courtiers, male and female, had not personally known war. There had been rebellions in the provinces, but provincial groups like the Taira and the Minamoto had dealt with them far from the capital. As a result, Daibu, a Fujiwara brought up on the poetry and the romantic tales of the 900s and 1000s, had no vocabulary to describe violence and the death that came with it.
On this page you'll find:
Links to helpful sites online.
Excerpts from a translation in print.
Information about a secondary source.
========================================================================
1. Poetry from Philip Tudor Harries' 1980 translation of Kenreimon'in Ukyo no Daibu shu, titled The Poetic Memoirs of Lady Daibu (for prose passages, see below, under "In print"):
(a) Use your browser's search function to go to the second use of "Daibu" for links to ten poems; the romanized Japanese of each is also given (the first link will take you to a brief biography).
(b) Go to "Daibu" for "That your heart may be compared" her response, in her early days at court, to a young man who had sent her a comb decorated with a boat and wrapped in scarlet paper.
(c) A later poem in which Daibu remembers her early, happy days at court, "Here above the clouds"; the romanized original is also given.
2. From other translators:
(a) At the bottom of the page, a poem written shortly after Daibu had left court in 1178, "I was sure I would never get lost," translated by Kenneth Rexroth and Ikuko Atsumi.
(b) Go to "Daibu" for lines written after Sukemori's death, remembering an orange tree branch he had once given her, "You, orange tree---please answer me this question."
3. Go to "Daibu" for a woodblock print (c.1847) by Utagawa Kunisada, showing Daibu afer the death of Sukemori.
4. For historical background, an essay by F.W. Seal on the Gempei War, the conflict that changed Daibu's life.
========================================================================
[This translation of Kenreimon'in Ukyo no Daibu shu by Philip Tudor Harries also gives the romanized original of Daibu's poems; the book has a useful introduction, notes, and appendices on the composition and textual history of the work:]
The poetic memoirs of Lady Daibu / translated, with an introd.
by Phillip Tudor Harries. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University
Press, 1980. (xii, 324 p.)
LC#:PL789.K4 A24; ISBN: 0804710775.
Includes indexes. Bibliography: p. [303]-309.
-------------------------------------------
"How blissful is this fate of mine."
-------------------------------------------
[The "poetic memoirs" open in 1174, with the Taira in power; the 17-year-old empress was the daughter of the leading Taira. Remember, though, that when, years later, Daibu was writing this scene, she knew that the 13-year-old emperor would be dead in seven years and that a few years after that, his empress would be taken unwillingly from the sea in which her son had just drowned:]
While his Majesty Retired Emperor Takakura was still on the throne... he visited the apartments of the Empress on the first day of new year. The two of them were, of course, always imposing, but on that day he in his normal attire and she in full court dress seemed quite dazzling, and as I watched from a passageway I felt in my heart:
Here above the clouds,
I gaze upon the brilliance
Of such a sun and such a moon,
And I can only feel
How blissful is this fate of mine.
[p.79]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"And in the darkness that is our reality we sit together
in this group."
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Until 1178, Daibu's chief concerns were the familiar ones of the Heian courtiers: attending the emperor and empress, writing poetry for herself and others, and being discreet about her love affairs:]
We had attended the Empress on her way over to the Emperor's rooms one night, and after our return some of us sat talking. The fire gradually died down, but we raked up the glowing embers in the brazier, and four of us who got on well together decided to confess to each other our inmost hearts and hold nothing back.
Yet we were not able to discuss openly the various secret
sorrows that we each kept locked inside us. I realized this because
of the feelings in my own heart, and I was deeply moved:
All with the same thought,
We rake up the dying embers
In the depths of night,
And in the darkness that is our reality
We sit together in this group. [p.181]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It was so confused that I cannot even say exactly what
occurred."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[In 1180, civil war began between the Taira and the Minamoto, who held power in the east of Japan. By 1183, it became evident that the Taira could not hold the capital against the Minamoto, whose troops were now very near the city:]
Such was the upheaval in our world... that whatever I may call it --- dream, illusion, tragedy --- no words can possibly describe it. It was so confused that I cannot even say exactly what occurred, and in fact right up until now I have repressed all thought of it.
What can I say, what am I to feel about that autumn when I heard that those whom I knew were soon to be leaving the capital? No words, no emotions can do it justice. None of us had known when it might happen, and faced with the actual event, we were all stunned, those of us who saw it with our own eyes and those who heard about it from afar. We could only feel that it was just some indescribable dream. [p.189]
-------------------------------------------------------------------
"There was no friend to whom I could open my heart."
-------------------------------------------------------------------
[Daibu's lover, Sukemori, was a leading member of the Taira.
Before he fled the city, he told her:]
"These troubles have now reached the point where there can be no doubt that I, too, shall number among the dead...."
[As part of the Fujiwara clan, and so unconnected with either of the warring clans, Daibu's family could survive only by being non-partisan:]
...[A]mong all the people that I knew, there was no friend
to whom I could open my heart. So I spoke of it to no one, I
brooded constantly, and when my feelings were more than my heart
could bear, I could only turn to the Buddha and spend my days
in tears. [p.191]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"How I wanted, just one more time at least, to tell him
how I felt!"
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[The Taira went west, followed by Minamoto soldiers, who had by now taken control of the city:]
One bright, moonlit night as I gazed out, musing on the sadness of the scene --- the sky, the shapes of the clouds, the sound of the wind --- I could think only of what Sukemori must be feeling, as he journeyed to his unknown destination beneath a traveler's sky....
At dawn, at dusk, no matter what I looked at, no matter what
I listened to, how could I cease to think of him even for a moment?
How I wanted, just one more time at least, to tell him how I
felt! [p.193]
Large numbers of fierce [Minamoto] warriors were leaving the
capital for the west. Whenever I heard any rumors, I wondered
in agitation what news would come next, and when.
[p.195]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What could he have done in a previous life to bring this
upon himself?"
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[By 1184, the Taira had created a stronghold in Kobe; in a battle there, many of their leaders were killed, while others escaped. Shigehira, the commander at Kobe and Sukemori's uncle, was captured, brought to the capital, and eventually executed:]
Among the ghastly and terrifying rumors I heard that [next]
spring came the painful and unspeakable news that great number
of my close friends had been killed, and that their heads were
being paraded through the streets of the capital. [p.197]
When I heard that Captain Shigehira had been taken prisoner and
had been brought back to the capital for a while, I thought dejectedly
of how among all those I had known he had been especially close
to me. He would say such amusing things, and even in the most
trivial matters he used to be so considerate towards other people.
He was indeed an exceptional person: what could he have done
in a previous life to bring this upon himself? [p.199]
--------------------------------------------------------------
"A world where life itself no longer counts as life."
--------------------------------------------------------------
[After escaping from Kobe, Sukemori's brother apparently committed suicide. Hearing of this, Daibu managed to get a letter to Sukemori, which included this poem:]
How wretched it is
To think that this is still
The same world as before,
A world where life itself
No longer counts as life. [p.203]
-----------------------------------
"A nightmare such as this."
-----------------------------------
[In 1185, the Taira were finally defeated in a naval battle, in which Sukemori was killed:]
In the spring of the following year I finally heard that he was in truth no longer of this world....
People are distressed and say how sad it is, even when they hear of someone dying at his natural and expected time; to what then, I wondered over and over again, could I compare this grief of mine:
Whoever called them sad,
This world's ordinary,
This world's natural deaths,
Must have been one who never knew
A nightmare such as this.
[p.205]
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The flower itself must have thought that man was indeed
just as short-lived."
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Many years later, Daibu looks back at an incident of the 1170s, when she was in her teens and traveling with the Empress:]
Once, when we were staying in a mountain village, we got up and went out in the dawn while the moon still lingered in the sky. Seeing a morning glory blooming on the fence just in front, I thought how sad it was that it should flourish for so short a while.
[Now] I feel as though it had only just happened, and I keep thinking how the flower itself must have thought that man was indeed just as short-lived, and how our own lives have been no ordinary example of impermanence:
Only could it have been
Through ignorance
Of how my own life would be
That I could call the morning-glory
A thing of transience.
Unforgettable!
That time I gazed
At the morning glory,
With the dawn moon in the sky---
But would I had some way to forget! [p.141]
========================================================================
[James G. Wagner has translated the section of Kenreimon'in Ukyo no Daibu shu (covering poems #204-258) which describes the period 1183-85: the flight of the Taira and Daibu's reaction to Sukemori's death. Wagner's introduction presents the historical background and discusses the structure of the work:]
Wagner, James G. The Kenreimon'in Ukyo no Daibu Shu: Introduction
and partial translation. Monumenta Nipponica, 31:1 (Spring
1976),11-27.
LC#: DS821.A1 M6; ISSN: 0027-0741
========================================================================
[Donald Keene's summaries and evaluations of Japanese diaries from the 800s to the mid-1800s includes a chapter, "The Poetic Memoirs of Lady Daibu." Keene finds the work an "unforgettable document" (p.91) and briefly compares it to other court women's diaries. Quoted passages are in Harries' translation. (See the book's table of contents online.):]
Keene, Donald. Travelers of a hundred ages: The Japanese as
revealed through 1,000 years of diaries. New York: Holt, c1989.
(xi, 468 p.)
LC#: PL 741 .K44 1989; ISBN: 0805007512
Bibliography: p. 443-449. Includes index
========================================================================
Updated 01-15-08