The Tale of the Heike
at Amazon.com
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| The cover of The Tale of the Heike |
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| The Tale of the Heike at Amazon.com |
Welcome to the book that obsessed me for more than three years, The Heike Monogatari. This is the book that haunted my dreams, filled my days, destroyed many a weekend where I wrangled with it, its critics and commentaries, its apologists and its detractors, in the Rutherford Library at the University of Alberta, my offices in Canada and Japan, and many a coffee shop. This is the book that I explored and wrote on for my dissertation for my Masters program in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Alberta. Many pounds of sweat were lost as I wrote, re-wrote, edited, and fussed over those pages here in Japan. But I got the job done, and I learned a few things too, and in retrospect I really enjoyed the study too.
But this text is not for the weak-willed. No, it is not. This text is meaty, thick with story, fable, history, conflict, politics, art, religion, and themes of reunification in a medieval nation torn asunder by war. This is a book that fuses history with the fantastic, politics with civil war, and beauty with a life that hurtles head long into death and oblivion.
This is the book about what it means to be a samurai, and thus, what it means to be a man. But since this text is so impacted with so many vying elements in its definition, the articulation of what it means to be a man, a warrior, a samurai is not only lost, confused, and befuddled, but it is primary subjected to the aesthetic reinterpretations of what that definition is as dictated by the necessary evolving social and political powers that created it.
In short, we cannot know what it means to be a samurai. We can only guess.
But does that mean all is lost? Does that mean that the samurai never existed? Does that mean that all is just a nice fantasy story and we had best leave it all behind us?
No. Not at all.
These stories are important, they are fragments of a past that is so alien to our own, that it behooves us to look more carefully at them. Just as we cannot take any single piece of this samurai epic and exclaim, "Aha! Now I know what it means to be a samurai!" we also cannot just step over these broken jewels and say they are worthless.
We need to piece it back together. We need to gather the poems, stories, accounts, histories, and legends of these samurai and lay them side by side. We need to examine carefully exactly how these great tales were told and preserved, how they were passed down through the ages and really learn how knowledge changes, is tweaked or twisted, and what the original intentions of early writers are. If possible, we need to separate the writer from the craft and see where there are gaps, where there are questions, and where we need further investigation.
Most certainly, this book is a wonderful literary history. No doubt it has profound impact on the Japanese interpretation of the medieval fighting man. But there is more, much more. And as long as you are able to live with more questions to these things than expected answers about the samurai, you will find the Heike Monogatari much like I do: haunting, fragmented, beautiful, literary, and a vehicle that makes the imagination soar, as well as a bag of half-guesses, half truths, and historical lies glossed over by poets and priests.
Not for the timid, but highly recommended reading.
Mark Groenewold
Kanazawa, Japan
February, 2004
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