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  The Tale of the Heike

  Also translated by Royall Tyler

  The Tale of Genji

  The TALE of the HEIKE

  Translated by

  ROYALL TYLER

  VIKING

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in 2012 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Translation, introduction, and notes copyright © Royall Tyler, 2012

  All rights reserved

  Illustrations by Teisai Hokuba from Heike monogatari zue, text by Takai Ranzan, published in Japan in two parts, in 1829 and 1849

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Heike monogatari. English.

  The tale of the Heike / translated by Royall Tyler.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-60109-9

  1. Taira family—Fiction. 2. Japan—History—Gempei Wars, 1180–1185—Fiction. I. Tyler, Royall. II. Title.

  PL790.H4E5 2012

  895.6’32—dc23

  2012000598

  Printed in the United States of America

  Designed by Carla Bolte • Set in Adobe Warnock Pro with Adobe Charlemagne display

  Genealogies and maps by Jeffrey L. Ward

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  ALWAYS LEARNING PEARSON

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Principal Figures in the Tale

  THE TALE OF THE HEIKE

  BOOK ONE

  1. The Jetavana Temple

  2. The Night Attack in the Palace

  3. The Sea Bass

  4. The Rokuhara Boys

  5. One Man’s Glory

  6. Gi

  7. Empress to Two Sovereigns

  8. The Clash over the Name Plaques

  9. The Burning of Kiyomizudera

  10. The Heir Apparent Named

  11. The Collision with the Regent

  12. Shishi-no-tani

  13. The Fight over Ugawa

  14. The Vows

  15. The Palanquins of the Gods

  16. The Burning of the Palace

  BOOK TWO

  1. The Exile of the Abbot

  2. The Adept Yixing

  3. The Execution of Saik

  4. The Lesser Remonstrance

  5. The Plea for Naritsune

  6. The Remonstrance

  7. The Signal Fires

  8. The Exile of Narichika

  9. The Akoya Pine

  10. The Death of Narichika

  11. Tokudaiji Sanesada’s Pilgrimage to Itsukushima

  12. The Battle with the Rank-and-File Monks

  13. The Ruin of Mount Hiei

  14. Zenkji Destroyed by Fire

  15. Yasuyori’s Prayer

  16. Stupas Cast into the Sea

  17. Su Wu

  BOOK THREE

  1. The Pardon

  2. Stamping in Frenzy

  3. The Imperial Birth

  4. The Roster of Great Lords

  5. The Rebuilding of the Great Pagoda

  6. Raig

  7. Naritsune’s Return

  8. Ari

  9. The Death of Shunkan

  10. The Whirlwind

  11. To Consult or Not the Chinese Physician

  12. The Sword of Mourning

  13. The Lanterns

  14. Gold to China

  15. The Confrontation with Jken

  16. The Ministers Banished

  17. Yukitaka

  18. The Exile of the Cloistered Emperor

  19. The Seinan Detached Palace

  BOOK FOUR

  1. The Pilgrimage to Itsukushima

  2. The Return

  3. The Roster of Genji

  4. The Weasels

  5. Nobutsura

  6. Ki

  7. The Appeal to Mount Hiei

  8. The Appeal to Nara

  9. The Interminable Debate

  10. The Roster of Fighting Monks

  11. The Battle on the Bridge

  12. The Death of the Prince

  13. The Prince’s Son Leaves the World

  14. Tj

  15. The Nightbird

  16. The Burning of Miidera

  BOOK FIVE

  1. The Capital Moved to Fukuhara

  2. Moon Viewing

  3. Spirit Mischief

  4. The Courier

  5. The Roster of Imperial Foes

  6. The Xianyang Palace

  7. Mongaku’s Mighty Austerities

  8. The Subscription List

  9. Mongaku’s Exile

  10. The Fukuhara Decree

  11. The Fuji River

  12. The Gosechi Dances

  13. The Return to the Old Capital

  14. The Burning of Nara

  BOOK SIX

  1. The Death of Retired Emperor Takakura

  2. Autumn Leaves

  3. Aoi

  4. Kog

  5. The Circular Letter

  6. The Couriers

  7. The Death of Kiyomori

  8. Sutra Island

  9. Jishinb

  10. The Gion Consort

  11. A Roar from the Sky

  12. The Battle Beside the Yokota River

  BOOK SEVEN

  1. Shimizu no Kanja

  2. The Northern Campaign

  3. The Pilgrimage to Chikubushima

  4. The Battle at Hiuchi

  5. A Prayer to Hachiman

  6. The Rout Down Kurikara Ravine

  7. The Battle at Shinohara

  8. Sanemori

  9. Genb

  10. Yoshinaka’s Letter to Mount Hiei

  11. The Reply

  12. The Heike Appeal to Mount Hiei

  13. The Emperor’s Flight from the Capital

  14. Koremori’s Flight from the Capital

  15. The Honor of the Emperor’s Presence

  16. Tadanori’s Flight from the Capital

  17. Tsunemasa’s Flight from the Capital

  18. Seizan

  19. The Heike Flight from the Capital

  20. The Flight from Fukuhara

  BOOK EIGHT

  1. The Imperial Journey to Mount Hiei

  2. Natora

  3. The Reel of Thread

  4. The Flight from Dazaifu

  5. His Cloistered Eminence Appoints a Supreme Commander

  6. Nekoma

  7. The Battle at Mizushima

  8. The Death of Seno-o

  9. Muroyama

  10. The Tsuzumi Lieutenant

  11. The Battle at Hjūji

  BOOK NINE

  1. Ikezuki

  2. First Acros
s the Uji River

  3. The Battle Beside the River

  4. The Death of Kiso

  5. The Execution of Higuchi

  6. Six Clashes

  7. The Roster of Forces at Mikusa

  8. The Battle of Mikusa

  9. The Old Horse

  10. First or Second to Engage the Foe

  11. The Double Attack

  12. The Charge Down Hiyodori Ravine

  13. The Death of Moritoshi

  14. The Death of Tadanori

  15. Shigehira Taken Alive

  16. The Death of Atsumori

  17. The Death of Tomoakira

  18. Flight

  19. Kozaish Drowns

  BOOK TEN

  1. The Parade of Heads

  2. The Gentlewoman at the Palace

  3. Go-Shirakawa’s Decree to Yashima

  4. The Heike Reply

  5. The Precepts

  6. Down the Tkaid

  7. Senju-no-mae

  8. Yokobue

  9. Mount Kya

  10. Koremori Renounces the World

  11. The Pilgrimage to Kumano

  12. Koremori Drowns

  13. The Three-Day Heike

  14. Fujito

  15. The Enthronement Festival

  BOOK ELEVEN

  1. Bow Oars

  2. Katsu-ura and zaka Pass

  3. The Death of Tsuginobu

  4. Nasu no Yoichi

  5. The Dropped Bow

  6. The Clash at Shido

  7. The Cockfights and the Battle at Dan-no-ura

  8. Long-Distance Arrows

  9. The Drowning of Emperor Antoku

  10. The Death of Noritsune

  11. The Mirror’s Return to the Capital

  12. The Sword

  13. The Parade of Heike Captives

  14. The Mirror

  15. The Letters

  16. The Beheading of Fukush

  17 Koshigoe

  18. The Execution of Munemori

  19. The Execution of Shigehira

  BOOK TWELVE

  1 The Great Earthquake

  2 The Indigo Dyer

  3 The Exile of Tokitada

  4 The Execution of Tosab

  5 Yoshitsune’s Flight

  6 The Yoshida Grand Counselor

  7 Rokudai

  8 Rokudai at Hasedera

  9 The Execution of Rokudai

  THE INITIATES’ BOOK

  1 Kenreimon-in Becomes a Nun

  2 Kenreimon-in Moves to hara

  3 The Cloistered Emperor’s Visit to hara

  4 Passage Through the Six Realms

  5 Kenreimon-in Enters Paradise

  an 4, Third Month, Fifteenth Day

  GENEALOGIES

  The Imperial Lineage

  The Heike (Taira) Lineage

  The Genji (Minamoto) Lineage

  The Fujiwara Lineage

  MAPS

  The Provinces

  The Capital

  The Greater Palace Compound

  The Inner Palace Compound

  The Capital Area

  Central Honshu

  Shikoku and Neighboring Honshu

  Northern Kyushu

  HOURS, ERAS, AND EMPERORS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am grateful first to Michael Watson, who suggested the format for the translation, showed me where to find the required performance information, and helped me to obtain the source work for the illustrations. Tom Conlan, whose love of Heike monogatari provided enduring moral support, advised me on many matters from a historian’s perspective. Alison Tokita, Hugh de Ferranti, and Komoda Haruko provided information on music and performance. Susan Tyler proofread and edited successive drafts, meanwhile making valuable comments from her own knowledge of medieval Japan. I am grateful to them all.

  Wendy Wolf, my editor, is by now an old friend to whom I owe more than I can say. It is a pleasure also to thank, for their skill and enthusiasm, the whole Viking Penguin team: Bruce Giffords, the production editor; Carla Bolte, the designer; Maureen Sugden, the copy editor; Paul Buckley, the jacket designer; and others whose names and functions I do not know but who also played their part in making this book what it is.

  INTRODUCTION

  Richly varied in incident and mood, The Tale of the Heike (Heike monogatari) tells of a tyrant’s cruelty and overweening pride, his death, and the ultimate destruction of his house. No work of Japan’s classical literature influenced more pervasively the art, literature, and drama of later centuries. Heike is a seminal masterpiece of Japanese culture.

  The tyrant was Taira no Kiyomori (1118–81). “Heike,” pronounced hay-keh, means “Taira house,” especially (although not exclusively) Kiyomori’s extended family. In his time the Heike lorded it over their great rivals, the Genji (“Minamoto house”), and it is the Genji who rose up in the end to destroy them. The Genji leader Minamoto no Yoritomo (1147–99), another major figure in Japanese history, looms from a distance over the later sections of the work.

  The events related in the tale, with some dramatic license, convulsed late-twelfth-century Japan and left indelible cultural memories. Formal records confirm them in outline and often in detail, and knowledge of the historical background (see “Hgen and Heiji,” below) helps to explain the story’s force. Heike could be said to dramatize history as collectively experienced by the tale’s original audience and their recent forebears. It also answers a deep urge to pacify, by telling their story, the threatening spirits of the bitter, defeated Heike dead.

  An earlier masterpiece, The Tale of Genji (early eleventh century), left Japan an atmosphere of beauty and elegance that still enthralls countless readers. The legacy of The Tale of the Heike consists especially of dramatic episodes, touching or tragic. The most famous of these is perhaps the encounter of Kumagai and Atsumori (9:16). Others relate the trials of the dancers Gi (1:6) and Kog (6:4), the exiled Shunkan’s despair (3:2), the extravagant austerities of the monk Mongaku (5:7), the burning of the great temples of Nara (5:14), the deaths of Kiso no Yoshinaka and Kanehira (9:4), Yoshitsune’s dazzling victory at Ichi-no-tani (9:12), and Nasu no Yoichi’s exploit at Yashima (11:4). These and many others inspired centuries of theater (Noh, Bunraku, Kabuki) and visual art (painting, prints), followed more recently by film, television, modern retellings, manga, and warrior fantasies of all kinds. Awareness of transience, often cited as a governing theme in Japanese literature, received its most famous statement in the tale’s opening lines.

  AUTHORSHIP AND TEXTS

  Who wrote The Tale of the Heike? Essays in Idleness (Tsurezure-gusa, circa 1330, by Yoshida Kenk) identifies the author as one Yukinaga. This Yukinaga taught a blind man named Shbutsu to perform what he had written; then Shbutsu expanded the work on his own and had Yukinaga write his additions down. Nothing else confirms this account, and the development of the tale as we have it clearly followed a longer and more complicated path than that, but the passage is suggestive. For one thing, this reported give-and-take between an educated writer and a blind performer indicates an interplay between written and oral origins that is visible both in the character of surviving Heike texts and in the relationship between the work and its audience.

  Many versions of Heike survive. Some are shorter, some longer. They fall under two headings: those to be read (yomihon) and those to be performed (kataribon). The most important “reading” text is probably the Enky-bon (“the Enky [also read Engy] manuscript”), a copy made in 1419–20 from a manuscript dated 1309–10. The best-known performance text is the Kakuichi-bon, the one translated in this book. Akashi no Kakuichi, the head of his line of blind Heike performers, dictated it to a disciple in 1371, three months before his death.

  Historians value the expansively discursive Enky-bon because it contains a wealth of material not present in the performance versions. In contrast, the relative economy of performance texts like the Kakuichi-bon seems meant to hold the interest of an audience—or eventually of a silent reader, since even Kakuichi�
�s version came in time to be more read than heard. Most readers in modern Japan know no other.

  In comparison with the Enky-bon, the Kakuichi text therefore suggests sustained and effective editing. The story of Kumagai and Atsumori provides an example. In the Enky-bon, Kumagai tells Atsumori, “Yoritomo has decreed that any man who beheads a worthy enemy shall have in reward a thousand ch of land.” The beheading of a ranking opponent was formally recorded on the battlefield, and the victor was indeed rewarded in land. However, these words ill suit the more elevated tone of the Kakuichi account, which therefore omits them. It also drops both a chka (“long poem”) by Atsumori on the beauties of nature and his certainty of dying this day in battle, and an extended passage about Kumagai’s returning Atsumori’s head, with a letter, to Atsumori’s father. Finally, Kakuichi’s Atsumori carries a flute, the discovery of which moves Kumagai deeply. In the Enky-bon, however, he carries a hichiriki. This reed instrument was equally necessary to a musical ensemble of the time, but far less generally appealing.

  Perhaps editorial discernment also shaped the Kakuichi account of the death of the warrior Seno-o Kaneyasu (8:8). In the Enky-bon, Kaneyasu first slits his belly, and then a follower of his takes the point of his sword in his mouth and throws himself onto it. The follower’s dramatic suicide not only robs Kaneyasu’s of some of its dignity but also undermines the brilliance and horror of Imai Kanehira’s death in the next book. Some motifs are too strong to use effectively more than once in the same work. The Kakuichi Heike has Kaneyasu die fighting and his wounded follower survive until the next day.

  Above all, however, it is the thirteenth and concluding “Initiates’ Book” (Kanj no maki) that makes the Kakuichi Heike unique. Other versions scatter the content of this book, chapter by chapter in roughly chronological order, through the material covered by Kakuichi’s Book Twelve. They therefore end with the execution of Rokudai, the last scion of the Heike. So does the Enky-bon, apart from two concluding chapters on the death of Cloistered Emperor Go-Shirakawa and on the good fortune of Minamoto no Yoritomo. Only Kakuichi gathered this material into a separate, continuous story that ends his version and so became its trademark, as it were. The Initiates’ Book was a “secret piece” performed only by the most accomplished members of his guild. The “initiates” of its title were presumably those who had received kanj (“initiation,” properly a religious term) as masters in his line.