The Tale of the Heike

From the acclaimed translator of The Tale of Genji, a groundbreaking rendering of Japan’s great martial epic

The fourteenth-century Tale of the Heike is Japan’s Iliad—a moving depiction of the late twelfth-century wars between the Heike and Genji clans. No work has had a greater impact on later Japanese literature, theater, music, film, and manga—indeed on the Japanese people’s sense of their own past. It has also been a major source for medieval-Japan-based …