Tyler’s annotated list includes verifiable details of place and time. Japanese literature scholar and translator Royall Tyler prefaces his 2012 translation of The Tale of the Heike with a glossary of eighty-two “principal figures” the high number reflects the reality of many families with conflicting and shifting loyalties interacting at home and afield. This literary genesis led to narrative complexity. Written texts emerging in the fourteenth century linked stories focused on many different historical figures. Multiple oral storytellers over a 200-year period honed dramatic episodes into narrative arcs containing wit and humor, triumph and pathos. The magnificence of The Tale of the Heike as a work of literature has much to do with its origins. Over time, the portrait of Yoshitsune transforms according to different points of view and later appears more feminine or youthful, with the skills of an elusive underdog. I would argue that Yoshitsune was described as ethical and beloved, as well as a master of the art of war. Oddly, Yoshitsune, just as Genji, was not a muscle-bound figure, as students even nominally familiar with Gilgamesh, Achilles, or Beowulf might expect. After 1185, the winners of the Genpei War, and those who identified with them, created in the warrior/general Yoshitsune a new type of hero. 1 Despite the enforced peace of the Tokugawa period and in post-World War II Japan since 1945, warriors have fascinated writers and artists, first in popular drama and woodblock prints, and then in films, manga, anime, and games. By the Tokugawa period (1600–1868), samurai topped an official four-tiered social structure, stratified by regulations differentiating samurai from farmers, artisans, and merchants in matters of dress and freedom of movement. Court life in Kyoto continued, but the rise of a samurai class, skilled in arrow and sword, secured admiration. Īt the end of the Genpei War, Japan’s capital city moved from Kyoto to Kamakura, and political power shifted from an emperor to a shogun. Source: The Art Gallery of South Australia website at. Pair of six-panel screens, color and gold on paper. This article introduces teachers to the literature describing the warrior/general Yoshitsune, because the literature of Japan, perhaps more than that of the United States and most countries, illustrates a dichotomy between the attractions of peacetime and the attraction of, as well as the terrors of, war.īattle scenes from The Tale of the Heike. Yet a shift in societal values after the Heian period created a new type of Japanese hero, not displacing the literate and refined aristocracy, but captivating a much wider audience. Buddhist aesthetic values of sensitivity and transience have become considered essentially Japanese both by Japanese themselves and by Americans. Not only does Genji excel exclusively in the arts of peace, there is no glimpse of any warrior in Murasaki’s worldview. The fictional Genji himself, an emperor’s son, exemplifies the virtues of the Japanese elite class-he creates and appreciates subtle poetry and music, for example. In Murasaki’s time, an aristocracy dominated society, linked by family ties with the emperor’s court in Kyoto. This civil war ended four centuries of the Heian period (794–1185), characterized by the cultivated life described so beautifully in Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji (c. Its subject matter, the Genpei War (1180–1185 CE), marked a pivot in social, cultural, and political life in Japan. There are two main reasons to teach The Tale of the Heike, one literary and the other historical.
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