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And once in the darkness of the morning, before the breaking of the day, in the hour when the crows first begin to fly abroad and cry, the dead mother of Shuntoku came to him in a dream. And she said to him: "Son, your affliction has been caused by the witchcraft of your wicked stepmother. Go now to the divinity of Kiyomidzu, and beseech the goddess that you may be healed."
And sometimes they would pass a day together at Maiko, by the sea, where the pines seem to sway like dancing girls; or an afternoon at Kiyomidzu, in the old, old summer-house, where everything is like a dream of five hundred years ago, and where there is a great shadowing of high woods, and a song of water leaping cold and clear from caverns, and always the plaint of flutes unseen, blown softly in the antique way, a tone-caress of peace and sadness blending, just as the gold light glooms into blue over a dying sun.
Then, having filled her sleeves with stones, she was about to leap into the water, when there appeared suddenly before her a venerable man of seemingly not less than eighty years, robed all in white, and bearing a tablet in his hand. And the aged man said to her: "Be not thus in haste to die, Otohime! Shuntoku whom you seek is at Kiyomidzu San: go thither and meet him."
Shuntoku arose, wondering, and took his way toward the city of Kyoto, toward the temple of Kiyomidzu. One day, as he traveled, he went to the gate of the house of a rich man named Hagiyama, crying out loudly: "Alms! alms!"
And he made the picture in a very little time. It was much like Shuntoku-maru; and the woman rejoiced as she departed. With that picture of Shuntoku she hastened to Kiyomidzu; and she pasted the picture upon one of the pillars in the rear of the temple. And with forty-seven out of the forty-nine nails she nailed the picture to the pillar; and with the two remaining nails she nailed the eyes.
She said to him: "Before being wedded to my lord, I made a vow to the August Deity of Kiyomidzu; and now I desire to go to the temple to fulfill that vow." Said the master: "That is well. But which of the man servants or maid servants would you wish to go with you?" Then she made reply: "Neither man servant nor maid servant do I require. I wish to go all alone."
So she cast away the stones she had put into her sleeves, and donned again the outer robe she had taken off, and rearranged her hair, and took her way in all haste to the temple of Kiyomidzu. The simple style in which the hair of dead woman is arranged. See chapter "Of Women's Hair," in Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, vol. ii. At last she reached the temple.
And he drove her out, and she could not help herself, and she went away crying, and striving to hide her face from the sight of the neighbors. Otowaka led his blind mother by the hand; and together they went to Kyoto and to the temple of Kiyomidzu.
In the middle ages, during the civil wars between the houses of Gen and Hei, one Morihisa, a captain of the house of Hei, after the destruction of his clan, went and prayed for a thousand days at the temple of the thousand-handed Kwannon at Kiyomidzu, in Kiyôto. His retreat having been discovered, he was seized and brought bound to Kamakura, the chief town of the house of Gen.
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