Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 2.djvu/246

 an ideal, continence a duty, or conjugal fidelity a law. The Taira chief, Kiyomori, regarded women as mere playthings, and indulged the caprices of his passion with absolute shamelessness. After he had overthrown his enemy Yoshitomo, the head of the Minamoto clan, he succumbed to the beauty of the latter's concubine, Tokiwa, and in order to purchase her complaisance saved the lives of her three sons, by whom the power of his house was subsequently crushed. Yoshitsune, the so-called Bayard of Japanese history, left a very tarnished record. In the days of his insignificance he won the love of Torurihime, whose sorrows endowed her country with a new branch of dramatic literature. From her he transferred his affections to the daughter of Kiichi Hōgen, for the sake of gaining access to a strategical treatise in the possession of her father. At the battle of Dan-no-ura he appropriated the wife of an Imperial prince, and his escape from Kyōtō in the hour of his broken fortunes received a special tinge of romance from his parting with the beautiful dancing-girl Shizuka. Yoshinaka, the first of the Minamoto to shake the Taira's power, derives something of his fame from the military prowess of his concubine Tomoye, but his biographers take little notice of the fact that his infatuation for Matsu, a lady of noble lineage, contributed to his downfall. Even when the enemy were at the gates he could not tear himself from her pillow, nor