Memoirs of the Warrior Kumagai by Richie Donald;

Author:Richie, Donald;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 744742
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing

I have it right here with me still—have just copied it out. Of course it arrived only when I was already a Minamoto veteran. Such was the Kamakura bureaucracy, even back then, that it took years for a simple commendation and land award to find its way from commander down to loyal retainer.

This piece of paper then meant that I was again master of my own land and was hence free from Naomitsu. At the same time the grant gave me a portion of his own land, or so he later maintained. Perhaps it did. He certainly put up a good argument when much later Lord Yoritomo, bored and irritated, had to sit there and listen to the two of us squabble over boundary lines— a result of his own policy of arbitrarily rewarding new recruits.

I often thought of that Musashi tract of mine while I was marching under Lord Kiso through the devastated lands around the capital. It was not, I hoped, like these I now saw. There, in the several years of fighting, no cultivation was done. The fields had gone to weed and then, in that summer's terrible drought, to dust. Great reddish clouds were blown into the sky and fell on our advancing forces, the dust sifting under our armor and into our eyes and mouths—a taste it had: dry, bitter.

It was the taste of hunger because with no cultivation there was no food and a great famine descended on the lands around Heiankyō. We soldiers were kept going through our rations, brought from some distance. But those we passed had no such.

I saw whole farmer families sitting by the roadside, stunned, hands in their laps; too weak to move, with eyes already dark as they watched us pass. And I saw an old couple under a tree, sitting there as though witnessing our grand advance, and then I saw that their eyes were sightless, dead. And a young girl, thin as a spear, who feebly tried to keep up with us, baring her pathetic breasts all the while in hopes of attracting one of us enough to feed her.

And so I thought during that dry and dusty march of my own green and fertile land, which I had not for so long seen. Not since I had been a raw recruit—and now I was a proper officer, cutting, I am told, a fine figure.

* * *

Here I will again digress to describe the grand sight we made, since military fashions are now so different, and since thus will be illustrated one of my themes, the transience of all earthly things, even the hem of armor skirts.

These used to extend all the way down to the knee and much hampered running away, something which the later Taira discovered. The new design, seen nowadays in Kamakura is cut much higher; troops are still expected to run, though now toward the enemy rather than away from it. Indeed, most of the new fashions are designed to accommodate troop movements.

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