The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Anonymous · Heike monogatari · a war tale in twelve books and the closing Initiates’ Book, made for recitation · scored on the Kakuichi text, completed in 1371, in its Japanese, read from knowledge; no text in hand, Japanese quoted in romanisation only where its words are certain, each quotation with a plain English rendering beneath, and no published translation quoted
Mode
War tale (gunki monogatari) made high literature: chronicle, elegy, sermon and heroic narrative in one cycle of recitation
Mythos
The rise and fall of a house under karmic law; the proud man; the sacred sword traced to the serpent of the age of the gods and given back to the sea; a capital beneath the waves; the six realms of rebirth and the Pure Land
Phase
Kiyomori’s ascendancy and pride, the Genpei War from 1180 to 1185, the extinction of the Taira line, and a closing retreat and death at Ōhara
Presentation
Twelve books and the Kanjō no maki, each book divided into named episodes, each episode a unit of recitation to the biwa; prose in the mixed Japanese and Sino-Japanese style, with passages in seven-and-five metre and waka set into the narrative
Register
From the comedy of manners of Kiso Yoshinaka at court to the arming catalogues and single combats of the battlefield, the elegy of parting, and the liturgical stillness of the close
Scale
Three generations of the Taira, the court and the cloistered emperor, the warrior houses, the armed temples, women of every station from dancers to an empress, and the provinces from an island of exile to the inland sea
Governing Proposition
The rise of Taira no Kiyomori and his house to the height of power at court, and its destruction in the Genpei War, told episode by episode for blind reciters: the flight of the Taira from the capital, the battles of Ichi-no-tani, Yashima and Dan-no-ura, where the child emperor goes into the sea, the hunting down of the last heirs, and, in a closing book, an empress turned nun at Ōhara, who tells her life as a passage through the six realms of rebirth. The wager of the work is that the destruction of a house in a national war can be heard as one law, that all things are impermanent and the prosperous must fall, and that a warrior’s death can be told in the grammar of elegy, with its sympathy given to the defeated.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Before any story is told, the work names its law. “Gion shōja no kane no koe, shogyō mujō no hibiki ari”
(The voice of the bell of Gion Shōja has the sound of the impermanence of all things). The sal flowers show “jōsha hissui no kotowari”
(the law that the prosperous must fall). The proud do not last, “tada haru no yo no yume no gotoshi”
(only like a dream on a spring night); the strong fall at last, “kaze no mae no chiri”
(dust before the wind). Four clauses stand in strict parallel, the bell’s voice against the flower’s colour, the proud against the strong, and each pair closes on an image. Japanese schoolchildren still learn the passage by heart.
The tale took its first forms in the early thirteenth century. A tradition recorded in Tsurezuregusa holds that a former official, Yukinaga, wrote it and taught it to a blind man, Shōbutsu, to recite; that is a tradition, not a record. What is certain is how it lived: as a cycle recited to the biwa by blind performers, in many versions, recited and read. In 1371 the reciter Akashi Kakuichi dictated the text that his guild was to keep as its authority. That text is the unit here: twelve books, each divided into named episodes, each episode a unit of recitation, and a closing Initiates’ Book, the Kanjō no maki, which is the Kakuichi text’s own ending.
The language is the mixed style of Japanese and Sino-Japanese diction, prose with passages in a metre of seven and five syllables and waka set into the narrative. The matter is the rise of Taira no Kiyomori and his house and its destruction in the Genpei War, from 1180 to 1185. The order is set by the opening. Everything the work will tell, the proud man, his house, its fall, is already inside the sound of the bell.
Movement II
The first six books belong to Kiyomori. He is the proud man of every literature, and he is also a particular old man with a temper and a favourite dancer. Giō and Hotoke, dancers who have known his favour, leave it for a hut at Saga. It is the first statement of the close, the first retreat from a world that discards those it raises, and the work will answer it at its end.
His anger has its measure. In Book 3 Shunkan, an exile on the island of Kikai-ga-shima, stamps on the shore as the boat leaves without him. Around these episodes run the business of the court and the armed temples of Mount Hiei and Nara, appointments and processions, the long penance of Mongaku at a waterfall in Book 5, and Chinese exempla set into the stories of exile: matter that each recitation carried on its own, and that the composite carries with it.
In Book 6 Kiyomori dies. His fever is so great that water poured on him turns to steam, and his last wish is that Yoritomo’s head be hung before his grave. The death is dreadful and it is also a hinge. The man who raised the house is gone, the retribution the work lays on him is spoken, and the house he raised is left to pay.
Movement III
In Book 7 the Taira flee the capital. Among them is Tadanori, a warrior and a poet. His poem, left with Shunzei in Book 7, is found in his quiver in Book 9, with the line “hana ya koyoi no aruji naramashi”
(the blossoms would be my host tonight). The waka set into the narrative let the warriors die as poets, and the passages of travel and parting move into seven-and-five verse, as when Shigehira is carried captive down the Tōkaidō.
At Ichi-no-tani, in 1184, Kumagai Naozane pulls off an enemy’s helmet and finds a boy of about his own son’s age. He cannot spare him, because his own side is coming, and he kills him. In the boy’s sash he finds a flute. The boy is Atsumori. Kumagai leaves arms for the religious life. The code of the warrior, at the moment it triumphs, is unbearable to the man who keeps it; the doctrine of the bell had not said so.
Kiso Yoshinaka, the upstart from the mountains, takes the capital and is undone by it. In Book 8 his boorish dinner with the Cat Counsellor is a comedy of manners; in Book 9 he makes his last ride with Imai Kanehira at Awazu, his horse sunk in a frozen paddy, and an arrow takes him in the face. He falls in mud as the Taira fell from their height. The work holds the comedy and the death under one law.
Movement IV
At Yashima, in 1185, a fan stands on a boat, and Nasu no Yoichi, with both armies watching, puts his arrow through it. The arming catalogues, the naming of lineage before combat, the cut from the field to a single face: the battle pieces are built with exactness, and the work gives them its greatest craft. Whether it is a sermon on the vanity of arms or a celebration of them, it does not say.
At Dan-no-ura the Taira are destroyed at sea. Lady Nii takes the child emperor, eight years old, in her arms, and tells him that beneath the waves too there is a capital, “nami no shita ni mo miyako no sōrō zo”
(beneath the waves too there is a capital), and the sea takes them. The sacred sword goes down with them; the text traces it to the serpent slain in the age of the gods, and gives it back to the sea, so that the regalia themselves enact the fall. Tomomori says “mirubeki hodo no koto wa mitsu”
(I have seen what there was to see), and goes into the sea weighted with armour.
Book 12 hunts down the last of the Taira heirs and ends with the execution of Rokudai and the end of the line. The victors are under the same law: the text lets the reader see past its own end, in Yoritomo’s ruthlessness to the Taira children and the shadow that falls over Yoshitsune. A tale made under rulers who claimed Minamoto descent gives its love to the Taira, and no one has settled why.
Movement V
The Kakuichi text does not end on Rokudai. Its closing book follows Kenreimon’in, an empress who has become a nun, to her retreat at the Jakkōin at Ōhara. The retired emperor comes to visit her, and she gives him an account of her life shaped as a passage through the six realms of rebirth, so that one woman’s life carries the whole Buddhist cosmos. She dies there. The chronicle of an extinction has become a path to release.
The close answers the opening. The bell that sounded impermanence at the beginning is heard in its own world at the end, and Giō’s hut at Saga in Book 1 is answered by Kenreimon’in’s at Ōhara across the whole length of the work. Everything that rises falls; the falling is the occasion of clinging or of release, and those who leave the world before it leaves them, Kumagai and Kenreimon’in, are the work’s answer to its own law. Whether Ōhara redeems the war or only lays it to rest is left open.
The recitation was itself a pacification of the dead, and the work did not stay with its reciters. The Taiheiki follows its model; Zeami’s warrior plays take their matter from it, Atsumori, Tadanori, Kiyotsune, Sanemori and Yashima among them; kōwaka, jōruri and kabuki rework its episodes, and fiction, film and the schoolroom have kept it at work. The voice of the biwa that first carried it is now nearly silent. The text has outlived it.
Act III · The Twelve
Subtract and see. The spine is required: Kiyomori’s pride through Books 1 to 6, the flight of the Taira from the capital in Book 7, the battles of Books 9 and 11, the extinction of the line in Book 12, and the Initiates’ Book, which turns extinction into salvation. Take out Giō in Book 1 and the close at Ōhara loses its first statement; take out Shunkan on the shore of Kikai-ga-shima and Book 3 loses its measure of what Kiyomori’s anger costs. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is accretion. The temple wars of Mount Hiei and Nara, Mongaku’s long penance at the waterfall in Book 5, the Chinese exempla set into the exile episodes, the court appointments and processions, and several captivities of Book 10 could go without the knowledge changing. Each was a recitation that stood on its own, and the composite shows it.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The opening states the doctrine before any story is told: the bell of Gion Shōja sounds “shogyō mujō”
(all things are impermanent), and the sal flowers show “jōsha hissui no kotowari”
(the law that the prosperous must fall). Stated so, it is inherited Buddhist teaching. The disclosure is in what the episodes show that the doctrine does not say: that the warrior’s code, at the moment of its triumph, is unbearable to the man who keeps it. Kumagai Naozane kills a boy of about his own son’s age because his own side is coming, finds a flute in his sash, and leaves arms for religion. And the price of a public order is paid by women and children. Held below the top because the frame names its truth before showing it, and the retribution laid on Kiyomori is asserted more than disclosed.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Height is frequent and comes in every key. The dreadful: Kiyomori’s death in Book 6, his fever so great that water poured on him turns to steam, his last wish that Yoritomo’s head be hung before his grave. The heroic: Nasu no Yoichi’s arrow through the fan on the boat at Yashima, both armies watching. The tragic: Kiso Yoshinaka’s last ride with Imai Kanehira at Awazu, the horse sunk in a frozen paddy; Tomomori at Dan-no-ura going into the sea weighted with armour. The highest: Lady Nii taking the child emperor in her arms and telling him that beneath the waves too there is a capital, and the sea taking them. Then the stilled height of Ōhara. Held off the top by the flats between, the temple disputes and court procedure of the early books.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Myth built, and load-bearing. The structure is the rise and fall of a house under karmic law, announced by the bell of Gion Shōja and closed in the bell’s world at the Jakkōin. Kiyomori is the proud man of every literature and stays a particular old man with a temper and a favourite dancer. The archetypes are fastened to objects: the sacred sword lost at Dan-no-ura, which the text traces to the serpent slain in the age of the gods and gives back to the sea, so that the regalia enact the fall; the child emperor going down to a capital under the waves. At the close a woman tells her life as a passage through the six realms of rebirth, carrying the whole Buddhist cosmos, and the recitation was itself a pacification of the dead. Held a step below the top because some of the myth is laid on as doctrine.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The inheritance is wide: the court tale and its lyric pathos, the waka, the Buddhist sermon and the collections of tales, Chinese history, and the earlier war tales, the Hōgen and Heiji monogatari, shorter and nearer to chronicle. The turn joins them: the warrior made the subject of court pathos, the battle told in the grammar of elegy, a mixed language of Japanese and Sino-Japanese that became a ground of later literary prose, and a national war made into a cycle for blind reciters whose sympathy runs to the defeated. That is a real departure. What holds it lower is the stake. The swerve was made by accretion, over a century and a half and by many hands, and the Kakuichi text perfects a tradition already proven in performance. A turn this large with no single wager on it is discounted for the risk it did not visibly run.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The episode, each one a unit of performance, gives every life its own rise and fall within the larger fall: impermanence is not only said but is the rhythm by which the work is heard, story after story closing on a death, a vow or a departure. The alternation of prose and seven-and-five verse marks travel and parting, as when Shigehira is carried captive down the Tōkaidō, and the waka set into the narrative let warriors die as poets: Tadanori’s poem is found in his quiver. The closing book changes what the whole knows. The Kakuichi text ends not on the execution of Rokudai and the end of the line, as Book 12 does, but on a woman’s salvation. Held off the top because the episodic form is also a container, holding digressions the design does not need.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Evidence over promise: six and a half centuries of recitation, the Noh drawn from it, commentary, and a modern scholarship of the variant texts and of the work’s meaning that has not closed. The questions stay open in the text. Is it a sermon on the vanity of arms or a celebration of them, since it gives the battles its greatest craft? Is Kiyomori damned by the work, or its tragic centre? Does Ōhara redeem the war, or only lay it to rest? Why does a tale made under rulers who claimed Minamoto descent give its love to the Taira? The form yields too: Giō’s retreat at Saga answers Kenreimon’in’s at Ōhara across the whole length, and Kumagai’s renunciation is answered by others in Books 10 and 12. Held below the top because its questions lie nearer the surface than the deepest, and much of the scholarship is textual.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The field is Japanese literature of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the age of the warrior houses, with the court tradition of The Tale of Genji and the waka anthologies as the standing measure. The force: it made the war tale into high literature, fixed its form, its language and its ethic of pathos, and gave the Japanese imagination its picture of the warrior in defeat. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Taiheiki follows its model; a large part of Zeami’s warrior plays take their matter from it (Atsumori, Tadanori, Kiyotsune, Sanemori, Yashima); kōwaka, jōruri and kabuki rework its episodes; and modern fiction, film and the schoolroom keep it at work. Within its language only Genji reaches as wide. Held below the top because its reach beyond its language is narrow, and part of its force is the gathering of a form others began.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Survival over centuries, weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the Kakuichi text survives whole, in manuscript and in print, and was fixed by its maker as the authoritative text of his guild of reciters; there is no recovery and no fragment to charge, and the many variant texts are a fact of its tradition, not a loss of this one. Presence: continuous for six and a half centuries, first as recitation to the biwa, then in print, in the Noh and the popular stage, and in the schools, where the opening is learned by heart. Abroad it is narrower and mostly academic, in the translations of Sadler, Kitagawa and Tsuchida, McCullough and Tyler. Fabric: the recitation that carried it is now nearly extinct, the smallest charge, since the text long ago outlived its first vehicle. Set above the middle of its band, its long span against its narrower presence abroad.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Judged on the Japanese as far as this reading can judge it; the music of the recitation is neither credited nor charged. The opening is a made thing: four clauses in strict parallel, the bell’s voice against the flower’s colour, the proud against the strong, each pair closing on an image, “tada haru no yo no yume no gotoshi”
(only like a dream on a spring night) and “kaze no mae no chiri”
(dust before the wind). The battle pieces are built with exactness: the arming catalogues, the naming of lineage before combat, the cut from the field to a single face. The range of register is wide and commanded, from Yoshinaka’s boorish dinner with the Cat Counsellor in Book 8 to the liturgical close. Charged: the formulae of an oral composite, armour and horse described to pattern, doublets and seams where versions were joined, and the procedural flats of the early books.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Yoshinaka’s comedy of manners at court, and Lady Nii going into the sea with the child emperor. One law holds them: everything that rises falls, and the falling is the occasion of either clinging or release. The upstart from the mountains is undone by the capital as the Taira were; Yoshinaka dies in mud at Awazu, Tomomori by choice in the sea, and Kumagai and Kenreimon’in leave the world before it leaves them. The Genji are under the same law, which the text lets the reader see past its own end: Yoritomo’s ruthlessness to the Taira children, and the shadow over Yoshitsune. The range is very wide and governed. Charged: seams of accretion, inconsistencies of chronology, repeated matter, and a tension between the retribution that damns Kiyomori and the pathos that pities his house, which the work holds more than resolves.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Held, not listed. The state: the cloistered emperor against the regent house, and the passage of power from the court to the warriors. History as agent, not ground: an epochal change of order told as it happened to people. The family: three generations of the Taira, Kiyomori and his sons Shigemori and Munemori, fathers and children down to Rokudai. War: armies, strategy and the single combat. The sacred: Hiei and Nara as armed powers, Kumano, Itsukushima, the Pure Land, the six realms. Women: dancers, consorts, an empress, a nun. Exile and the provinces, from Kikai-ga-shima to the Tōkaidō. The natural order: the seasons in every parting, and the sea at the end. Consciousness, in Kumagai, Shunkan, Koremori at Kumano and Kenreimon’in. All held under one law and one cadence. Held below the top because inner life is rendered more by gesture and poem than from within.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.4 and The Encompassed at 9.3, then The Sublime, The Archetypal Deep and Pressure on Tradition at 9.0. A text fixed whole in 1371 and read without break in its language for six and a half centuries; the state, history, the family, war, the sacred and women of every station held under one law and one cadence; heights in every key, from Kiyomori’s fever to Nasu no Yoichi’s arrow, Awazu, Dan-no-ura and the stillness of Ōhara; a myth of the rise and fall of a house fastened to a bell, a sword and a capital beneath the waves; and a work that made the war tale high literature and gave the Noh a large share of its warrior plays.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.9, held by accretion: the temple wars of Hiei and Nara, Mongaku’s penance, the Chinese exempla, the court processions and several captivities of Book 10 could go without the knowledge changing, each a recitation that once stood on its own. Next above it, The Swerve at 8.6, a large turn made by many hands over a century and a half with no single wager on it, and The Living Form at 8.7, an episodic form that is also a container. The sound of the original and the music of its recitation are beyond this reading, and are neither credited nor charged.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.9 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.7, The Made at 8.9, The Inner Law at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.4, The Archetypal Deep at 9.0, Pressure on Tradition at 9.0, The Unconcealment at 8.8 and The Swerve at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, the last by one tenth. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 7.9, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 9.3. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, which The Inevitable, The Swerve and The Living Form hold down.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the Heike monogatari, scored on the Kakuichi text (Kakuichi-bon), the recension dictated by the blind reciter Akashi Kakuichi and completed in 1371 to be kept as the authoritative text of his guild: twelve books (maki), each divided into named episodes (ku), and the closing Initiates’ Book (Kanjō no maki), which is scored as part of the work. The variant lines, the read texts such as the Engyō-bon and the Genpei jōsuiki and the other recited texts, are context only. The account in Tsurezuregusa of the tale’s first making is given as a tradition, not a record. Every score is judged on the Japanese original, which is not in hand. Japanese is quoted on this page in romanisation only where its words are certain, and beneath each quotation stands a plain English rendering in parentheses, made for this page and not taken from any published translation. The heikyoku recitation to the biwa is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged. Translation · Helen Craig McCullough’s The Tale of the Heike (Stanford, 1988), a complete and close version of the Kakuichi text, is the version best known to this reading and was used for sense. Royall Tyler’s (2012), which sets the recited passages as verse and follows the units of performance, was used beside it; Kitagawa and Tsuchida’s (1975) is named. None is in hand, none is quoted, and nothing in any of them is charged to the work. Names follow the usual romanised forms. Citations are by book. Facts that could not be verified, among them the exact number of episodes and some details of the closing book, are not given.