Days in Green

1. A ghost lady appears before ex-Emperor Kazuhito.

On a late spring night in 1353, ex-Emperor Kazuhito[1] had a nightmare.

Of course, many nightmares had annoyed him for a long time. Samurai cut their stomachs or throats themselves, staring without tears into him; a pond of blood filled with soldiers' bodies; a dead man and his little son stood in the garden, full-blooming aconite flowers; or a rain of sounds fell from arrow strings under a shiny blue sky. However, this spring night's dream differed from any of them.

"Kazuhito."

He heard a familiar whisper, the voice of his deceased uncle, Retired Emperor Hanazono[2]. It sounded to him like an alert, something to make him take notice of approaching danger.

"Father?" He called his uncle like that because Hanazono was his stepfather. His real father was Retired Emperor Go-Fushimi[3], who had made his younger half brother Hanazono educate his crown prince. Kazuhito used to call both of them Father.

Kazuhito opened his eyes. A slight metallic sound was clattering. He raised his upper body from the bedclothes. The moonlight entered through a skylight on the thatched ceiling.

His bed was in a corner of "the palace." In actuality, it was an old farmhouse. Maybe a wealthy farmer had lived there in the old days, but it was so humble compared with the real emperor's palace in the capital, Kyoto. Now, the imperial heirs were captured and jailed in Anou, which was a small village deep in the Yoshino Mountains in Yamato[4].

These days, Japanese royal families were divided into two parties, the Northern and the Southern Courts. Kazuhito was the head of the Northern Court.

The farmhouse had two rooms, one of which was the small bedroom for him (but also the storeroom), and the other was the living room. Curtains and wooden screens provided narrow private spaces for his family and court ladies[5]. The royal home doctor slept on the straw bed in the empty old stable outside the house.

Kazuhito heard the faint clattering again. Those were not earthquakes. His hand reached for a low shelf on the bedside. The ebony shelf contained some scrolls, writing tools, and a small urn made of copper containing part of the bones of his adored uncle.

He tried to open the shelf to check the palm-sized urn covered in its gold-brocaded cloth bag. The clattering sounds seemed to come from the lid. Just then, he noticed someone was on his feet.

She was weeping.

He didn't know when she had come into the room. He'd heard no other noise before he saw her. The moonlight through the skylight spotted her figure. Her sobbing voice was not that of one of the women sleeping in the next room.

Her face was hidden by a long sleeve, layered with blue-to-green silk robes resembling shades of willow leaves. She had long, silky black hair trailing down the back of her gown, like a noble lady. He couldn't guess her age, but she seemed not over thirty by her weeping voice.

"Lady, why have you come here at such a time?" Kazuhito asked her calmly and kindly as the royal patriarch.

And the woman was just crying.

Kazuhito tightly fixed the loosened collars of his nightrobe and rubbed his tonsured head. "Lady, it's unfit for a young woman like you to visit a monk's bed."

He was forty years old and had begun practicing Buddhism the previous year because he needed to indicate that he wasn't ambitious enough to become the head of the imperial government again to his opponent, the Southern Court. That was the only way to protect the future of his sons.

The woman said, "Ah, Your Majesty. Please help me. She will split me!"

Then, again, she wept quietly.