Shizuka Gozen

Her years of birth and death are not clear. She is said to have been born in the latter half of the twelfth century as the daughter of the shirabyōshi Iso no Zenji.

A shirabyōshi was a female performer who sang and danced imayō in men's dress. Shizuka inherited her mother's calling and became a dancer renowned throughout the capital, and from that fame she was noticed and made a beloved consort by Minamoto no Yoshitsune (this site's id 51).

In 1185 (Bunji 1), Yoshitsune, who had destroyed the Taira at Dannoura, broke with his brother Yoritomo (this site's id 23), became a hunted man, and fled the capital.

Shizuka followed him, but in the first month of 1186 she parted from Yoshitsune on Mt. Yoshino, which was forbidden to women.

This became their parting for life. Robbed of her valuables by an attendant in the mountains and captured, Shizuka was sent to Kamakura.

That year, when she offered a dance at Tsurugaoka Hachimangū at the request of Yoritomo and Masako (this site's id 24), Shizuka danced songs of longing for the hunted Yoshitsune and enraged Yoritomo.

But through Masako's mediation her life was spared. Shizuka was carrying Yoshitsune's child, and gave birth to a boy in Kamakura, but the child was sunk at Yuigahama by Yoritomo's order.

Having lost in succession the man she loved and her own child, Shizuka was sent back to the capital with her mother, the Azuma Kagami records.

Of her later fate there is no certain record, and legends and graves connected to Shizuka remain in various places.

“At Yoshino they took him from me; on this shore, my child. All that is left to me now is to dance.”

Shizuka Gozen appears in certain records for only about a year. Even so, as the tragic heroine of the story of Minamoto no Yoshitsune, she has captured the hearts of the Japanese for eight centuries.

The Azuma Kagami anecdote — that she danced her longing for Yoshitsune before the enemy's commander Yoritomo at Tsurugaoka Hachimangū — has been depicted, as a symbol of devoted love that does not bow to power, in countless performing arts, beginning with the Noh 'Futari Shizuka' and the kabuki 'Yoshitsune Senbon Zakura.

' Shizuka's life as history was a succession of losses: parting from the man she loved at Yoshino, and having the child she bore taken from her at Yuigahama.

Because of the depth of that sorrow, people of later ages mourned Shizuka and raised mounds called Shizuka's grave in various places — Kyoto, Nara, the Kantō, the northeast.

That certain historical fact is scarce has, rather, stirred people's grief and given birth to countless legends. The tragedy borne by the shirabyōshi hailed as the finest of the capital conveys to the present the voices of the countless women who vanished in the shadow of the tale of power.