The Tale of the Heike: Selected Episodes

The bell of the Gion temple tolls the impermanence of all things. The Tale of the Heike is Japan's national epic: the rise of the Taira under Kiyomori, their arrogance, and their annihilation by the Minamoto at the sea-battle of Dan-no-ura in 1185, where the child emperor is carried into the water in his grandmother's arms and told that there is a capital beneath the waves.

This is a selection of its greatest episodes: Aoi no Mae, the girl an emperor loved and gave up for fear of gossip; Kogō, hunted by the sound of her own koto; the drowning of Kozaishō; Atsumori, the boy flautist killed by a man who could not bear to kill him; Kiyomori's death in a fever no water could cool; the last of the Heike women, living out her life in a hut behind Ōhara.

The novelist Miyamoto Yuriko made this selection in plain modern Japanese early in her career, and it keeps what the schoolbook versions lose: the speed, the cruelty and the enormous pity of the original. Eleven episodes complete, with 47 notes on the offices, ranks and history behind them.