Sugawara no Michizane — The Man Who Was Bad at Being Alone

Where Is Haseo?

"Where is Haseo? Where is Haseo?"

In the mountains, a man raised his voice and called out those words again and again. He would not stop calling. So the record of that trip says.

It was the tenth month of the lunar calendar, in the year 898. The retired emperor Uda had gone on a trip to the mountains of Yoshino. The man was one of his attendants.

The mountain views were wonderful, but the people and the horses were slowly getting tired. The man was riding in a line of three horses, with a monk named Sosei and one other person. Sosei asked him, almost in passing,

"Where will we be staying tonight?"

The man answered on the spot, in a poem.

"I have not decided where to stay ahead. White clouds, trees turned red. That is a traveler's home."

When poets are together, they like to add the next line to the other person's line. But the mountain was deep, and there was no one to add one.

So the man began to call out his friend's name. The record adds that he was probably looking for that friend.

But a little earlier, the same record says something else. Ki no Haseo had had his right foot stepped on by a horse. He was hurt, could not go on, and had gone back to the capital.

The friend he was calling was no longer in the mountains.

The man's name was Sugawara no Michizane. He was fifty-four, counting the old Japanese way. He was a scholar at the imperial court, in the rank just below the ministers.

Later, as the god of the Tenmangu shrines, he would be prayed to by many students facing exams. But on this day, Michizane was in the mountains, shouting the name of a friend who had gone home.

Let me go back more than forty years.

Michizane's family was a family of scholars. We are not a family of warriors, he later wrote in a poem. We have plowed learning, generation after generation, like our fields.

When he was eleven, his father tested him. He asked a teacher named Shimada to set a topic. Looking at plum blossoms on a moonlit night.

Michizane placed the poem he made then at the very beginning of his own collection of poems.

"The moonlight is like snow on a clear day. The plum blossoms are like shining stars. What I love is the moon, like a golden mirror, moving along its way. In the garden, clusters of blossoms like jade give off their scent."

Tested by his father, an eleven-year-old lined up the moon, plum blossoms, snow and stars. That was the beginning of Michizane's poetry.

His mother also had hopes for him. On the day he became an adult, it is said, she wrote a poem. May you break a branch of the cassia tree on the moon, and make the wind of our family's learning blow. To break a branch of the moon's cassia tree meant passing an exam.

Michizane passed the state exams one after another. At twenty-six he took the hardest one. The examiner, it is said, was a scholar named Miyako no Yoshika.

A book written later tells of something that happened at Yoshika's house.

Yoshika's students were practicing archery. Michizane happened to come by. Yoshika thought: This man stays indoors, leaning on his desk all the time. He surely doesn't know how to hold a bow. So Yoshika hid behind a bamboo blind and had Michizane try a shot.

Michizane took the bow and arrow, looking reluctant, and shot at the target. Not one arrow missed, it is said.

In 877, at thirty-three, Michizane became a professor of letters. He taught poetry and history writing at the state university. It was the family job, one his grandfather and father had held before him.

Many people came, almost racing each other, to congratulate him.

Among them, only one person was surprised. Michizane wrote this later in a poem. It was his father, Koreyoshi.

Why was he surprised? In the poem, the father answers:

"I am sad that you will be left alone."

"Professor is not a low post. The pay is not light either."

Beside his son, surrounded by voices of congratulation, only the father worried about what lay ahead.

His mother died of a sudden illness when Michizane was twenty-eight, it is said. His father died less than ten years after that.

Twenty-one years since his father's words.

In the mountains of Yoshino, the son, with no one left to link a poem with, kept calling the name of the friend who had gone home.

Whose Is Tomorrow Morning's View?

In the first month of the lunar calendar, 886, an unexpected order came to Michizane, who was forty-two.

He was removed from his post as professor of letters and sent out of the capital as the governor of Sanuki province, a regional chief. Sanuki is today's Kagawa Prefecture.

This is how the farewell party before he left is told.

Fujiwara no Mototsune, the most powerful man at court, stood before Michizane with a cup in his hand. And he recited a line of poetry.

"Tomorrow morning's view: whose will it be?"

It was an invitation: Come, answer in a loud voice.

It was a line that asked a man leaving the capital whose the capital's view would be tomorrow.

The man who had been writing poems since he was eleven could not make a sound this time. He wept, choking on his tears, and even after he went home he could not sleep all night, it is said.

Tomorrow morning's view is no longer mine.

Fujiwara no Sukeyo, who was beside him, comforted him deeply, it is said.

He arrived in Sanuki on the seventh day of the fourth lunar month. Michizane walked around the government office.

A little north of the office there was a lotus pond. An elder who lived nearby said this, Michizane wrote:

"Until the Gangyō years, these lotuses had only leaves, no flowers. Since the Ninna years, flowers and leaves open together."

Ninna was the era name of the time when Michizane came to Sanuki. It was as if the elder had said: Flowers bloomed when your time came.

Michizane ordered his officials to pick hundreds, even thousands, of lotuses from the pond. He divided them among twenty-eight temples across the province and had them offered with scented oil.

But in a later year, no rain fell, the bottom of the pond dried up, and the lotus roots died.

Michizane wrote about this. It was not that the Buddha's power fell short, he wrote. It was that people's hearts did not believe.

In Sanuki, Michizane wrote a run of ten poems asking who feels the cold first. The answer is different in each one. A man who ran away and came back to the village. An old person whose wife had died. A child who lost both parents young. A person who lives by fishing.

In his fourth year in Sanuki, close to fifty, he also wrote a long poem titled "The Hard Days Are Long." It includes these two lines:

"The government is strict, and people do not come near. The office gate is shut, and no officials gather."

On the other hand, a biography put together later by the Kitano shrine writes that the people of Sanuki adored Michizane deeply and honored him like a god.

Letters came from the capital. A child was sick. Being an official in a faraway land is sad first of all, Michizane wrote in a poem.

At the end of the same poem there is this, too: living near the mountains, I am ashamed that I have come to look like a woodcutter.

While he was in Sanuki, a big dispute broke out in the capital. Mototsune disliked one word used in a document issued by the emperor, and stopped doing the work of government. It even came to talk of punishing a scholar named Tachibana no Hiromi, who had written the document.

At this time, it is said, Michizane wrote to Mototsune from Sanuki. If you punish Hiromi, it will not only be terrible for the court. Before long it will bring disaster on the Fujiwara family, too.

The punishment of Hiromi was called off, they say.

The man who could not make a sound before Mototsune at the farewell party was, from far-away Sanuki, giving that same Mototsune his opinion by letter.

In 890, he finished his four-year term and returned to the capital.

The next year, 891, Emperor Uda appointed Michizane chief of the emperor's secretaries. It was an important post at the emperor's side, running the work of the court.

Michizane asked to be let go right away. A man back from the provinces must not hold such a post. It would be like a lame turtle touching the railing of an immortal, or a rotten rat soiling the imperial court. He wrote this himself in his letter declining.

The emperor did not allow it. On the contrary, he piled more duties on him.

From here, in less than ten years, Michizane would rise all the way to Minister of the Right, one of the highest posts at court.

And just two years after that, he would lose everything.

Bai Juyi's Book Stays Closed

Emperor Uda did not let Michizane go after he came back to the capital.

A later book tells this story. About a year after the emperor had issued an order banning the killing of living things, he tried to go out hunting with hawks himself. Michizane stopped him, it is said.

"What fault did this year's birds and animals commit, that you go hunting so suddenly?"

The emperor thought he was right and gave up the hunt, they say.

Michizane was also tested by the boy who was then crown prince. In Tang China, the prince said, there is a man who writes a hundred poems in a day. Can you write ten in a single sitting? And he set ten topics. Michizane himself wrote this down.

Michizane finished all ten in two koku, about an hour by today's clock, and handed them over, it is said. The prince was delighted, and the next year he set twenty topics, they say.

In 897, the emperor handed his throne to his thirteen-year-old son. That crown prince was Emperor Daigo. In the advice he left for his son, Uda is said to have written that Michizane had warned him many times, and that this was why he had promoted Michizane past others who were ahead of him.

Two men were chosen to help the young emperor: Michizane and Fujiwara no Tokihira.

In 899, Tokihira became Minister of the Left, and Michizane became Minister of the Right. Tokihira was twenty-nine. Michizane was in his mid-fifties.

Michizane asked to be let go right away. It was not allowed. The second time was not allowed, nor the third. If I am told I must stand in the court's ranks, it is like crouching on burning charcoal and waiting to burn to death. He is said to have written this.

The next January, the emperor and the retired emperor called in only Michizane and proposed: from now on, run the government alone. Michizane is said to have refused that, too.

Both as chief secretary and as Minister of the Right, he was a man who wrote that he wanted to be let go.

In the eighth lunar month that year, Michizane presented to Emperor Daigo the poetry collections of three generations of his family. His grandfather's six volumes, his father's ten, his own twelve. Twenty-eight volumes in all.

The emperor read them and sent back a poem. The last two lines go:

"In the Sugawara house there is something better than Bai Juyi. From now on, let dust pile up in the box of Bai Juyi's books."

Bai Juyi was a great poet of Tang China. The emperor even added a note to the poem: this means the seventy volumes of Bai Juyi's poems that he had loved best. Because the Sugawara family's poems are here, I will not open them anymore.

It was the plain praise of an emperor who was sixteen, counting the old Japanese way.

The next month, on the tenth day of the ninth lunar month, at a banquet in the palace, Michizane wrote a poem on the topic "Autumn Thoughts."

"Since I became a minister, how many times have I felt happy? Tonight, whatever I touch, I feel sad all by itself."

"You are young, and I am slowly growing old. The favor you have given has no end, and my repayment has not caught up."

The emperor was moved, took off the robe he was wearing, and gave it to Michizane, they say.

The same poem ends this way: I do not know what to console this feeling with. I only drink wine, listen to the zither, and write poems again.

A month later, on the eleventh day of the tenth lunar month, a letter reached Michizane. It was from a scholar, Miyoshi no Kiyoyuki.

You rose from scholar all the way to minister, it said. Except for Kibi no Makibi of long ago, no one matches you. But next year falls in a cycle when the world is due to change greatly. After writing this, the letter goes on:

"Please know where to stop, see how far your prosperity reaches, and enjoy the elegance of mountains and mist. For later generations to look up to you would be beautiful, too."

The end of the letter was this. Please, please. Do not take my humble words lightly.

Michizane did not accept those words, it is said. He stayed as Minister of the Right.

It was a little over a month after he had written that the favor had no end and his repayment had not caught up.

Ten days later, Kiyoyuki also gave the emperor his opinion about the coming year being a shinyū year, one of the years thought to bring great upheaval.

When the new year came, it was that shinyū year.

Father and Sons, in Five Places

The twenty-fifth day of the first lunar month, 901.

Every gate of the palace was held by soldiers. Emperor Daigo came out to the front hall and gave an order.

Sugawara no Michizane, Minister of the Right, is appointed deputy governor of Dazaifu.

Dazaifu was the government office that ruled Kyushu. As one of its officials, he was told to leave the capital. The record says it was for a crime.

Michizane's children, too, were each moved to far-away provinces.

Hearing the news, the retired emperor Uda rushed to the palace. But the soldiers guarding the gate did not let him pass.

The retired emperor spread grass in front of the gate and sat, facing north, and did not move all day, the record says. Another record says he did not go home all night. The soldiers at the gate did not even get down from their seats before the retired emperor, it is said.

The rule is that once an emperor has handed over the government, he must not interfere. The retired emperor was told this and his plea was refused, a later history tells us.

In the guard post in front of the gate stood Ki no Haseo. The friend whose name Michizane had kept calling in the mountains of Yoshino.

What Haseo was thinking in front of the gate is not known.

Michizane wrote in a poem:

"Father and sons, all at once, torn apart to five places. The mouth cannot speak. In the eyes is blood."

The eldest son to Tosa, the second son to Suruga. The other sons to Hida and to Harima. And the father to Kyushu. That is what the five places were, it is said.

His wife stayed in the capital. He could take only a young boy and a young girl. The court allowed it, thinking small children would be fine, a later tale writes.

Around the time the demotion was decided, Michizane is said to have sent a poem to the retired emperor Uda.

"Even if I, being swept away, become trash floating on the water, please, be the weir, and hold me back." A weir is a fence of stakes set in a stream.

In the early part of the second lunar month, Michizane left the capital. Ten soldiers saw him off as far as Settsu province. There, Fujiwara no Saneoki, the officer who delivered the order, got down from his horse and shed tears in front of Michizane. The court's record says so.

The official sending out a criminal wept.

Soon after Michizane left the capital, the court sent messengers to shrines here and there to tell the gods that Sugawara no Michizane had been moved far away. The next day they told the tombs of the old emperors the same.

On the way, at Dōmyōji temple in Kawachi province, Michizane's aunt lived. He stopped there, and they are said to have talked all night.

The rooster that announces dawn crowed, and the time of parting came. Michizane is said to have composed:

"The rooster crows, so we must hurry our parting. If only there were a village where no rooster's voice could be heard at dawn."

Even after reaching Dazaifu, Michizane did not go into the town. He lived in a temple outside the town, it is said.

And he did not go out of the gate. A poem from that time says:

"The Tofuro: only a little of the color of its roof tiles can be seen. Kanonji: only the sound of its bell can be heard."

The Tofuro was a building of the Dazaifu office, and Kanonji was a temple next to it. Both were very close. Still, he could only look, only listen.

"In my heart, I want to follow a single cloud and leave this place. What I meet outside is only the full moon."

"In this place, nothing binds my body. And yet, how could I take even one step out of the gate?"

This Autumn Is Mine Alone

On the tenth day of the seventh lunar month that year, Fujiwara no Kiyotsura, who had gone to the Usa shrine in Kyushu on an errand, returned to the capital and reported to the emperor.

Kiyotsura had also looked in on Michizane at Dazaifu. The court's record keeps his words from then.

The deputy governor of Dazaifu, that is, Michizane, seemed badly pressed. From what he had said the day before, it even looked as if he had already admitted his guilt. With this, Kiyotsura passed on Michizane's words.

"I planned nothing myself. It is only that I could not escape the invitation of Lord Yoshi."

Lord Yoshi is thought to be Minamoto no Yoshi, who was moved to Izumo on the same day as Michizane. What he was invited to do is not clear.

On the night of the tenth day of the ninth lunar month, Michizane remembered the banquet of a year before and wrote a poem.

"Tonight last year, I was at the emperor's side in the Seiryōden hall. I recited a poem of autumn thoughts, and alone I felt my insides torn. The robe I was given is here now. Every day I hold it up in both hands and bow to its remaining scent."

The one who gave the order to send Michizane to Dazaifu was the same emperor.

Five days later, on the night of the fifteenth, he wrote another poem.

"A yellowed, withered face, hair white as frost. And thrown out a thousand ri (an old unit of distance) and more, far from home. Once I was bound by the cap-strings of high rank. Now I am a prisoner chained in a wasteland."

"The moonlight is like a mirror, but it does not make my guilt clear. The wind is like a blade, but it does not cut my sorrow."

"Everything I see and hear hurts. This autumn is my autumn alone."

The words that he could not escape the invitation, and the poem that the moon does not make his guilt clear. In the same year, two sets of words remain.

In his autumn poem from his days in the capital, the comforts had been wine, the zither and poetry.

The Tang poet Bai Juyi has a poem that calls the zither, wine and poetry his three friends. Reading it, Michizane counted his own three friends.

"No wine. No zither. Then what would be enough? A purple swallow's chick, and a young yellow sparrow."

The three friends of the past were a lifetime of joy. The three friends now are a lifetime of sorrow. So the poem says.

There were some happy things, too.

An interpreter named Li Yanhuan sent him a stool strung with bamboo rope. It was a product of Tang China.

Without spending a single coin, he had gotten something from Tang China, Michizane wrote in the poem. A trader may have left it behind when he parted, he added.

A man who had been Minister of the Right was making a proper poem about a single stool he had been given.

News of a friend's death came by letter from the capital. Fujiwara no Shigezane, who had once worked with him close to the emperor. He died at the post he had gone to as governor of Mutsu province.

Michizane wrote a long poem to mourn him. He could not attend the funeral. At the end of the poem he wrote:

"With these clumsy words, four hundred characters, I let them stand for my words of remembering you."

He also wrote about the two small children he had brought.

"The boy and the girl came along with me, and we can talk together. By day they are always before my eyes, and at night they sleep in the same place."

"When it gets dark, there is a lamp. When it gets cold, there is cotton."

There is a lamp. There is cotton. So it will be all right.

That boy would die at Dazaifu, still very young.

Snow Like Plum Blossoms

The new year came: 902, the first day of the lunar year.

On Michizane's New Year table were greens. On his desk, white plum blossoms. He pressed his hands to Kannon, the goddess of mercy, and did not pick up the cup of toso, the spiced New Year wine, the poem says.

Around then, a letter came from the family home in the capital.

It said the tree at the western gate of the house had been moved and taken away by someone. A package came with the letter. Ginger wrapped in paper, labeled "medicine." Kelp in a bamboo basket, labeled "for a meatless diet."

Not a word about the hunger or the cold of his wife and children. That makes me worry all the more, Michizane wrote in a poem.

They could not send luxuries to a man who had been exiled. So perhaps that is why they wrote that it was medicine, and food for a meatless diet.

On a rainy night, he made another poem. The roof leaks. The clothes on the shelf are damp, and the letters in the box are going bad. The child in the kitchen complains that the stove fire has gone out. He also has a bad foot, and itchy skin.

His chest felt blocked, so he got up and drank a cup of tea. It did not go away. He warmed his stomach with a heated stone. It did not work. He forced himself to tip back half a cup of wine, and prayed the Buddha's name.

The cup he had not picked up on New Year's Day.

In a poem of one autumn night, Michizane wrote:

"On my bed, I keep tossing and turning. The night is late. With a small lamp against the wall, I cannot even dream. The call of the early geese, the voice of the cold insects, sound the same as always."

"Only the sound of a child reading a book is missing."

A note is attached to the poem. The child is the young boy. He died recently.

The man who had written that there is a lamp when it gets dark now had only a small lamp against the wall.

At the end of the ninth lunar month that year, Michizane wrote this poem.

"Today is the last day of the ninth month of the second year of Engi. I am meeting my fifty-eighth autumn. What am I thinking, standing in the middle of the garden? The last yellow chrysanthemums, and a white-haired head."

His body grew weak. In a poem from his last period, he wrote:

"Sickness came chasing after old age. Sorrow followed me to this place of exile. From these thieves there is nowhere to run. I pray once to Kannon."

The poems he wrote at Dazaifu were gathered in the Kanke Kōshū (Sugawara's Later Collection). The last poem in it is a poem about spring snow.

"The whole town, overflowing out, so many plum blossoms. And yet it is still the scene of the beginning of the year."

He saw the falling snow as plum blossoms.

"When I see it stuck on a goose's foot, I think it must have come tied with a letter. When I see white spots on a crow's head, I think of going home."

In old China there is a story of a hostage who was told he would be sent home when a crow's head turned white. The snow turned the crow's head white. So perhaps that is why he thought of going home.

In his first poem, at eleven, he compared moonlight to snow and plum blossoms to stars. In his last, he compared snow to plum blossoms.

Michizane is said to have gathered the poems he wrote at Dazaifu himself, sealed them, and sent them to Ki no Haseo in the capital.

On the twenty-fifth day of the second lunar month, 903, Michizane died at Dazaifu. He was fifty-nine, counting the old Japanese way.

Two years later, a disciple who had come with him from the capital, Umasake no Yasuyuki, built a shrine at the place where he was buried and worshipped him, it is said.

Twenty years after his death, in 923, the court restored Michizane to Minister of the Right and gave him a higher rank. It had the order that sent him to Dazaifu thrown away.

Before long, stories linking a thunderbolt that struck the capital to Michizane's grudge spread, and Michizane came to be worshipped as Tenjin, the god of heaven. A story that when leaving home he sang to the plum tree in his garden, "When the east wind blows, send me your scent," and a story that the tree flew to Dazaifu, also appear only in books of later times. They do not appear in his own poems.

The retired emperor Uda, who sat all day before the gate. The officer who got off his horse and wept. The family in the capital who wrapped ginger and wrote "medicine." The interpreter who gave him a stool. The disciple who built a shrine after he died.

In the mountains of Yoshino, with no one to link his lines, Michizane kept calling his friend's name.

Where is Haseo?

To that Haseo, the poems of Dazaifu reached in a single bundle, it is said.

Haseo saw them, looked up at the sky, and sighed, it is said.