Book one of Heike monogatari describes a failed plot against the Taira family. The conspirators met in the mountain villa (sansoo) of a high-ranking Buddhist priest called Shunkan. The site of his villa is in present-day Higashiyama, the mountains on the east side of Kyoto. In the text of the Heike monogatari (1.12) the placename is read "Shishi-no-tani" ("Deer Valley"). On present-day maps it is "Shishi-ga-tani."
I took these pictures of the road leading to the villa in March, 1997. The road crosses the "Tetsugaku no komichi" (Philosophy Path), just south of Hoonen'in. In the first pictures, the temple on the left is Ryookanji, burial place of Emperor Reizei. The stone marker on the right, shown in close up in the second picture, indicates that the the road leads to the site of Shunkan's villa.
The road to Shishi-ga-tani today |
kono saki Shunkan sansoo... (?
can anyone confirm?) Japanese: 此先俊寛山荘… |
Shunkan was exiled to the island of Kikaigashima, somewhere to the south of present-day Kyushu. Unlike two other banished conspirators, he was not pardoned, and died in his place of exile (see sections 2.15-16, 3.1-2, 3.8). There are famous dramatisations of the Shunkan story for noh and kabuki.
Visual representations focus on the scene where he is left behind on the island. The mid-17th century illustrated scroll now in the Hayashibara Museum, Okayama, is the most detailed. The "Ashizuri" ("foot drumming") scene shows Shunkan both sitting on the beach, weeping, and on a hill, arms raised high (Heike monogatari emaki, ed. Komatsu Shigemi, Chuo koronsha, vol. 3). The text does describe him climbing a hill to look out at the ship but the later popular imagery of Shunkan on rock, arms stretched forward probably derives from the final moment of the Kabuki play. (For more about Shunkan's pictorialization, see pmjs mailing list archive 5.)
Japanese keywords: 鹿谷(鹿ヶ谷)、俊寛、平家物語