Yuigahama: In 1186, Shizuka Had Her Newborn Child Taken from Her

In the intercalary seventh month of 1186 (Bunji 2), in Kamakura. Shizuka Gozen bore Yoshitsune's child.

But joy was not permitted. Yoritomo had decreed in advance that if the child were a girl it would be spared, and if a boy, killed.

He meant to leave no male of Yoshitsune's blood as a future source of trouble. What was born was a boy.

An official took the infant from the mother's arms and carried it to the water's edge at Yuigahama (present-day Kamakura City, Kanagawa Prefecture).

For Shizuka, sent to Kamakura while heavy with child, the birth was at once a joy and a terror.

If Yoshitsune's child were a boy, it would be killed. That decree Shizuka knew even as she held her full-term belly.

The life growing larger by the day was, in that very growth, drawing nearer to death.

The joy of becoming a mother and the foreboding of having her child taken were torn apart within Shizuka.

As if in prayer, she kept wishing it to be a girl.

Once it was known that the child born was a boy, Yoritomo's order was carried out at once.

It is transmitted that Shizuka desperately held her child and would not let go.

Her mother Iso no Zenji soothed her, and the infant, taken at last, was sunk in the sea at Yuigahama.

It was a life not even a few days old. Torn from the man she loved, she had even the one proof of that man taken from her.

Yoshitsune at Yoshino, her child at Yuigahama — twice, Shizuka lost what was most precious before her very eyes.

Afterward, Shizuka was sent back to the capital with her mother, the Azuma Kagami records.

But of her fate beyond that, no certain record remains. It is transmitted that she became a nun in the capital, or that she wandered the land after Yoshitsune and perished, and mounds called Shizuka's grave are scattered throughout Japan.

The historical Shizuka appears in the records for only about a year; the rest dissolved into legend born of people's grief.

The tragedy borne by the finest shirabyōshi of the capital has, for that very reason, kept striking people's hearts for eight centuries.