Penguins on Parade: The Tale of the Heike!

Some Penguin Classics feel practically inevitable. When the great translator Royall Tyler brought out his groundbreaking edition of the fourteenth-century Japanese epic The Tale of the Heike in 2012 from the Viking press, it became one of that category, and now it’s arrived: a beautiful big paperback Penguin Classic of the Heike edition, which so handily surpasses all other English-language versions of this long and complicated story of the clash between the Heike and Genji clans.

The Penguin editors have made the wise decision to retain the generous illustrations that so helped to bring the original Viking hardcover to life. These reproduced woodblock illustrations remind modern-day readers that the Heike story has had an enormous cultural resonance in its centuries of life prior to this particular coronation. In fact, that long cultural resonance can be so daunting on its face that simply explicating it becomes something of a terrifying burden for any modern reviewers of Tyler’s book. This new Penguin Classics volume comes festooned with blurbs from the hardcover (although not, curiously enough, one from either esteemed London Review of Books or the scrappy-but-formidable National out of Abu Dhabi – two grievous omissions), all gleaned from much longer reviews that virtually bent over double in their efforts to talk readers out of their natural impulse to bolt for the door.

The standard shorthand is “a Japanese Iliad,” and although that isn’t a particularly precise equivalence, it works in summoning the flying violence and heightened passions of the book. The Heike story was very likely far more complex than Homer’s epic in context of its performance history, and Tyler leaps into this essentially alien history with a huge amount of energy: he infuses his Heike with a wide range of vocalities and then plays them expertly against each other. His innovations here are groundbreaking for specialists and very nearly incomprehensible for the common reader – there are paragraphs here, wider stanzas, and narrower stanzas, all alternated by a schema Tyler sets out in his masterly Introduction and presumably follows scrupulously throughout his text.

Fortunately, the common reader need not pay much mind to Tyler’s layout of scansion in order to enjoy the daylights out of his work. His Heike story rolls along with such effusive vitality from the very first page that the alien strangeness of it all quickly falls away, and the intense dramas at the heart of the epic – intensely human dramas – boil to the surface. Taking up this Penguin Classic paperback a couple of years after last reading Tyler’s stunning follow-up to his gigantic translation of The Tale of Genji, I was struck even more powerfully by the consistent insights of his work even on a line-by-line basis.

So many of the poem’s hundreds of vicious, vital scenes are turned out in gaudy, barbaric splendor in this version. Take as just one example the glorious end of the tough-as-nails Heike retainer Seno-o no Taro Kaneyasu who fights with his opponent Kuramitsu no Jiro Narizumi at the bottom of the Itakura River and punches through his chest with both sword and fist. Seno-o emerges alone from the water, victorious but still compelled to flee the pursuing enemy hordes, which fills his warrior’s heart with gloom. “Normally,” he tells us, “when I fight an enemy in the thousands, the world seems bright around me, but now everything ahead seems dark.” Seno-o has always been disappointed in his fat, unworthy son Kotaro Muneyasu, who’s also fleeing with him, but in the end Seno-o gruffly decides to make up their long-standing quarrel at the last moment – and Tyler captures the shifting, conflicting emotions of the moment absolutely perfectly:

He found his son lying there with terribly swollen feet.

“I came back to die fighting with you, since you couldn’t keep up. All right?”

Tears streamed down his son’s cheeks.

“I am so hopeless,” he answered,

“that I should have killed myself.

And now you, too, because of me,

At any moment will face death –

Which makes me guilty, it seems to me,

Of the foul crime of patricide.

Turn back! Flee! There is no time to lose!”

“No,” said his father, “my mind is made up.” As they waited,

Imai Kanehira bore down on them at the head of fifty howling riders.

Seno-o shot his last arrows,

Seven or eight of them, rapidly –

Five or six riders fell, stricken,

Dead or not, there is no telling –

Drew his sword, beheaded his son,

And charged into the enemy,

Slashing at every man around him.

They answered with many blows,

Until at last they struck him down.

While his man’s valor rivaled his lord’s,

Weakened by his grievous wounds,

He failed to kill himself, as he wished,

And instead was taken prisoner.

Only a day later, he died.

They hung the heads of all three men

In Sagi-ga-mori of Bitchu.

Lord Kiso inspected them.

“Ah,” he sighed, “these were true warriors,

each worthy to face a thousand.

What a shame I could not spare them!”

All the strangeness and weird beauty, all the alien fidelity of the passage, is neatly twisted in that quick, precise line “Drew his sword, beheaded his son …”

The Heike story is now a Penguin Classic at last! It’s dark and bloody and in the fine point mainly hopeless – but it’s also endlessly interesting and moving, and now it’s a lovely, flexible, black-spined paperback for your library.