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Now, Minamoto no Yorimasa had long kept his peace and might have done so still, and yet this year he incited rebellion. Why? Because Lord Munemori, Kiyomori’s second son, had done what he never should have done. Yes, it behooves the great in this world to think long and hard before doing or saying, on impulse, things better left unsaid and undone.
There was also the morning when Lord Kiyomori stepped from his curtained bed and threw open the double doors only to see, heaped in the inner court garden, dead men’s skulls beyond counting, rolling and churning, up and down, in and out, rattling against one another with a huge clatter. “Attendant! Attendant!” he called, but, as it happened, no one came. Meanwhile the skulls clumped into a great mound, bursting the bounds of the garden, some hundred and fifty feet high— a mountain of skulls, now suddenly crammed with living eyes, all of them training on Lord Kiyomori an unblinking glare.
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In fact, it was in somewhat more recent times that Emperor Daigo visited his Shinsen-en garden [r. 897–930] and spied there, beside the pond, a white heron. He summoned a chamberlain. “Catch me that heron,” he said, “and bring it here.” How to go about catching it, the chamberlain had no idea, but His Majesty had spoken. The man started toward it. The heron spread its wings, preparing for flight. “I bring you His Majesty’s command,” the chamberlain announced, at which the bird folded its wings and bowed low. The chamberlain picked it up and took it to the emperor. “It is wonderful, indeed,”
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neck. His Majesty had no need, none at all, for the heron. He had simply wanted known the weight of an emperor’s word.
He whose fame had so resounded the whole length and breadth of Japan, who had wielded colossal power, Kiyomori, in an instant floated as smoke into the sky over the city, while the remains mingled soon with the sands of the shore, and all he had been returned to earth.
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