Genpei War: the Death of Kiso Yoshinaka at Awazu, 1184 (MED0109)

Awazu, 1184: the death of Kiso Yoshinaka

Snow over stubble and half-frozen mud, four riders in laced armour, and on the left a man taking an arrow through the face while his horse founders. On the right the archer who loosed it is still at full extension on a pale horse. Nothing here is a battle line: it is the end of a pursuit, three or four men against three or four men, in a rice field outside the capital.

The man dying is the one who had won

Kiso Yoshinaka came out of the mountains of Shinano, beat the Taira in the north, and in 1183 entered Kyoto in triumph. It was the high point of the Minamoto cause and it lasted about six months. His provincial troops requisitioned food in a starving capital, he handled the court badly, and the court began looking for someone to remove him. The someone was his own cousin.

A war inside one family

The Genpei War is remembered as Minamoto against Taira — the two names, Gen and Hei, are in the word itself. What actually decided it was a Minamoto settling accounts with other Minamoto. Yoritomo, sitting in Kamakura, sent his half-brothers Noriyori and Yoshitsune against Yoshinaka and destroyed him at Uji and Seta; a year later he would turn on Yoshitsune too, the brother who had won the war for him. The victory belonged to whoever ended up with no rivals, and that was a matter of politics rather than of battle.

Mud, and a horse that stops

The detail that kills him is agricultural. A rice paddy in winter is soft under a thin crust, and a horse carrying an armoured man goes in to the hocks. Mounted archery needs a horse that can move; the moment the horse is stuck, the rider is a target at a range at which nobody misses. The tradition says exactly this: Yoshinaka’s mount went into the frozen mud and an arrow took him in the face.

Named men, named arrows

These are not anonymous soldiers, and that is the point of the picture. A warrior of this period announced himself before shooting — lineage, name, deeds — because the value of the day was in who you had beaten and who could confirm it. It is also why the Tale of the Heike remembers the name of the man who shot Yoshinaka, and why it remembers Tomoe Gozen, the woman who rode with him and whom he sent away before the end so that his last stand would not include her.