Page:A History of Japanese Literature (Aston).djvu/167

Rh, consulted with a great many holy men, who by his advice, when they saw any one dead, wrote on his forehead the first of the Chinese characters for Amida [Buddha] and by this bond united him [to the Church]. The numbers of those who died in central Kiōto during the fourth and fifth months alone were 42,300. To this must be added many who died before and after; while if we also reckon those who perished in the various outlying quarters, the number has no limit. And then the provinces! I have heard that in recent times there was a similar famine in the reign of Sutoku, in the period Chōjō (1132–1135), but of this I do not know the circumstances. What I have described is the most lamentable state of things that I have myself witnessed."

Chōmei next describes the great earthquake at Kiōto of the year 1185, in which, when at its worst, there were twenty or thirty shocks a day, such as would be called severe in ordinary times. After ten or twenty days the shocks in one day were two to five, then one every two or three days. It was not until the third month that the earth had quite recovered its quiet.

The story of these disasters is introductory to an account of his own life, and is brought in to explain his resolve to abandon the city and to live the life of a recluse. He spent thirty years in a small cabin remote from Kiōto, but finding even this seclusion not sufficiently restful—

"Five springs and autumns," he says, "came and went to me making my bed among the clouds of Mount Ōhara. And now at sixty, when the dew does not easily evaporate, I again built myself a last leaf of a dwelling, something like the shelter which a traveller