look closer

A command boat lies against the green shore, with a blue-striped sail and a carved phoenix head at the bow. Red banners are up and the deck is packed with armored men. The sword Kusanagi went over the side of a Taira boat in this fight and was never recovered.

On the twenty-fifth of April, 1185, two fleets meet in the narrows off the tip of Honshu, where the tide runs like a river through the Kanmon Strait. On one side is the Minamoto, closing out five years of civil war. On the other is the Taira, the clan that ran Japan for a generation, now fighting from crowded boats with the child emperor and the imperial regalia in their keeping. The boy is Antoku, six years old, an emperor since he was two, and his mother and grandmother are aboard with him. The morning tide favors the Taira, and for a while they have the better of it, raking the enemy boats with arrows as the current carries both fleets east. Then the water slackens and turns. Accounts written closer to the event blame the turn of the tide, and men changing sides. A Taira commander went over to the Minamoto and pointed out which ship held the emperor. The arrows then shifted to the rowers and helmsmen, the men who kept the boats under control. Once a boat could not steer in that current it was finished. The Taira line came apart from the middle. What happened next is the scene every Japanese schoolchild knows. Antoku’s grandmother, the widow of the Taira lord who had raised the family to the top, took the boy in her arms. He asked her where she was taking him. She told him there was a capital beneath the waves too, and went over the side with him and the sword. The great sword Kusanagi, one of the three treasures that made an emperor legitimate, went into the strait and was never recovered; divers looked, and the court eventually made do with a substitute. The mirror and the jewel were fished back. The emperor was not. The painter is Utagawa Sadahide, working in the 1850s, and he does not paint a single duel or a drowning. He paints the whole strait from above, a green-shored channel packed to both banks with ships and the red name-banners of the clans, as if the battle were a map you could walk. In the foreground the command boats ride with striped sails and phoenix-headed prows, decks stacked with tiny armored men. It is a battle rendered as geography, cool and total, the kind of picture you make when the outcome has been settled for 700 years. The loose thread is in the mud of the seafloor. The Heike crab, a small crab of the Inland Sea, carries a pattern on its shell that looks like a scowling samurai face. Fishermen there long said the drowned Taira warriors had come back inside them. They throw the human-faced ones back. Whether the throwing-back is what bred the resemblance is an argument biologists still enjoy having.