[In the following essay, McCullough considers the political and social changes taking place in twelfth-century Japan which inspired the creation of the Heike Monogatari.]

As the twelfth century waned, no thoughtful Japanese could have failed to recognize that the long Heian interlude of peace, economic security, and cultural florescence was nearing its end, and that a new political force was threatening the imperial court's hegemony. The signs were unmistakable.

In the countryside, there had been a steady evolution away from the institutions established by the seventh-century Taika Reform, which had brought all rice lands under state control and had created organs of local government to collect taxes and maintain order. At the time of the Reform, some powerful families had stayed on the land, where they had typically occupied subordinate government offices; others had moved to the capital and, as members of a new aristocracy, had helped create the brilliant civilization depicted in the eleventh-century Tale of Genji.¹ Over the years, the court's preoccupation with the immediate concerns of aristocratic life had led to the discontinuance of the periodic land allotments on which the Taika economic system was based; to the widespread growth of private landholdings, known as shōen; and to the rise of a provincial armed élite, brought into existence by the government's military impotence.

Many among the new warrior class traced their roots to pre-Taika forebears who had remained in the provinces; others were aristocrats who had come from the capital as shōen managers and provincial officials, or were the descendants of such men. The court had become accustomed to calling on them in case of need, and during the tenth century, in particular, had used some of their prominent leaders to quell two protracted civil disturbances in eastern and western Japan, the rebellions of Taira no Masakado and Fujiwara no Sumitomo, respectively. The result had been a great increase in the power and prestige of two warrior clans of aristocratic lineage, the Taira, or Heike (“House of Taira”), and the Minamoto, or Genji (“Minamoto Clan”), whose chieftains had become actual or potential overlords for large numbers of local warriors and warrior bands. The main Minamoto strength was in the east; the Taira had established themselves both in the east and in the west, where they had enriched themselves through the China trade.

In the capital, little heed had been taken of the potential threat such power bases represented. The court aristocrats had continued throughout to view the rural warriors as bumpkins, useful for punishing rebels, furnishing guards to make city life safer, and repulsing incursions of soldier-monks from the Enryakuji, Kōfukuji, and Tōdaiji temples (which had developed a tendency to press their grievances by marching on the imperial palace), but otherwise unworthy of serious notice, except insofar as the economic resources of the wealthier ones might be tapped. Their attention remained fixed on the annual round of public and private ceremonies, amusements, and religious observances in the capital, and on the ceaseless quest for influence and preferment in the Chinese-style central bureaucracy, which was another Taika legacy.

In theory, the Taika Reform had made the Emperor the supreme court figure, the source of all social status and bureaucratic position. As early as the ninth century, however, one clan, the Fujiwara, had succeeded in controlling the sovereigns—many of them children who either died young or abdicated after a few years—by providing them with Fujiwara mothers, uncles, grandfathers, and Regents; and had consequently monopolized the desirable offices, acquired large numbers of shōen, and otherwise prospered. Their ascendancy had endured until late in the eleventh century, when Emperor Go-Sanjō, the able, mature offspring of an imperial princess, had abdicated and established what was thenceforth to function as a second center of prestige and power, the Retired Emperor's Office (Innochō), with edict-issuing authority comparable to that of the Emperor.

The principal figures in an Innochō were a small group of from five to twenty kinshin (“close attendants”), who typically included rich provincial Governors, relatives of the former sovereign's nurses, talented figures with no future in the bureaucracy, and men who enjoyed the Retired Emperor's personal favor. Rivalries and shifting alliances involving the kinshin, the members of the regular bureaucracy, the Fujiwara Regent, and the reigning and retired sovereigns had exacerbated the already fierce competition for rank and office, affected the distribution of economic plums, and, in the absence of a rule of primogeniture, vastly complicated the selection of new Emperors.

It was under such circumstances that the imperial succession fell vacant in 1155. Complex, deep-seated animosities flared after the Retired Emperor of the day, Toba, chose the future Emperor Go-Shirakawa, and Toba's death in 1156 set off the brief armed clash known as the Hōgen Disturbance. (See Appendix A.) With the aid of the Minamoto and Taira clan chieftains, Yoshitomo and Kiyomori, Go-Shirakawa's supporters triumphed over their opponents, who had relied on Yoshitomo's father, Tameyoshi (the former Minamoto chieftain), and a minor Taira named Tadamasa. But in a larger sense both sides lost, because the affair brought the warrior class forward as an independent force, capable of determining events at the highest political level.

Less than four years later, Go-Shirakawa, by then the Retired Emperor, encountered a second challenge from a faction resentful of the privileges granted to his kinshin, and Kiyomori again defeated the insurgents, whose chief military support had come from Yoshitomo, Kiyomori's erstwhile ally. In that clash, known as the Heiji Disturbance, the Minamoto were rendered leaderless, bereft of Tameyoshi, Yoshitomo, and Yoshitomo's heir, Yoshihira. It was only thanks to the plea of a compassionate Taira woman, Lady Ike, that the next in line for the chieftainship, Yoshitomo's fourteen-year-old son Yoritomo, was spared and allowed to live in exile in eastern Japan. Kiyomori and his relatives, on the other hand, entered a period of prosperity such as no military clan had dreamed of.

The groundwork for the Taira ascendancy had been laid by two members of the clan's western branch, Kiyomori's father and grandfather, Tadamori and Masamori, who had managed to break into court society as kinshin of Go-Shirakawa's great-grandfather and father, Retired Emperors Shirakawa and Toba. As a result of their military services, and of their lavish expenditures on projects dear to the imperial hearts, Kiyomori himself had received significant preferment in office and rank from his twelfth year on. His exploits in the Hōgen and Heiji disturbances were rewarded with substantial appointments: by 1160 he had already joined the exalted ranks of the senior nobles (kugyō), and in 1167 he advanced from the lowest ministerial office, Palace Minister, to the pinnacle of the bureaucracy, the chancellorship, without passing through the intermediate positions of Minister of the Right and Minister of the Left. Following the usual practice of ambitious courtiers, he also established kinship ties in high places. His principal wife was sister to Go-Shirakawa's favorite, Kenshunmon'in, and thus aunt to Kenshunmon'in's son, Emperor Takakura; one of his daughters, the future Kenreimon'in, became a consort of Emperor Takakura; and other daughters married important Fujiwara noblemen.

Retired Emperor Go-Shirakawa, under whose auspices Kiyomori's spectacular rise occurred, seems to have been willing enough to bring the Taira leader and his relatives forward. The clan's military support was vital to the former sovereign's position, and his interests and Kiyomori's coincided during the period when both were maneuvering to place Kenshunmon'in's son on the throne. Moreover, Kiyomori carried out his activities with considerable prudence—not only during the tense early 1160's, when Go-Shirakawa and the reigning Emperor, Nijō, were at loggerheads, but throughout his public career, which ended in 1168, within months of Emperor Takakura's accession, when he took Buddhist vows in consequence of an illness.

But Kiyomori's circumspection disguised the fact that his clan had become a potentially dangerous power center. By the mid-1170's, dozens of its members had acquired coveted offices, profitable provincial governorships, and extensive shōen; the Retired Emperor found himself competing with Emperor Takakura's Taira kinsmen for his son's ear; and Kiyomori's daughter was an imperial consort, the potential mother of a future sovereign. Members of the clan had begun to display an arrogance that was profoundly offensive to the established aristocracy, many of whom remained unreconciled to the presence of military upstarts in their midst. Kenshunmon'in's brother, Taira no Tokitada, had been heard to remark, “All who do not belong to this clan must rank as less than men,” and one of Kiyomori's young grandsons, Sukemori, had created a scandal in 1170 by insulting the Regent—an incident particularly galling because the boy's conduct had been defended by his father, Shigemori, Kiyomori's successor as clan chieftain.

In 1177, Retired Emperor Go-Shirakawa attempted to neutralize the Taira threat. With his encouragement, a group of kinshin planned a military action against the clan, relying on the assistance of Yukitsuna, a minor Genji from nearby Settsu Province. The plot collapsed when Yukitsuna betrayed his associates, and the kinshin were arrested and punished as Kiyomori saw fit.

No issue was made of Go-Shirakawa's involvement, but the affair left an irreparable breach between the Retired Emperor and Kiyomori. There was a period of uneasy truce, during which the two came together in a show of amity for the birth of their mutual grandson, the future Emperor Antoku, in 1178. Then, in 1179, the Taira suffered a devastating blow: Shigemori, their forceful, talented leader, died at the age of forty-three and was succeeded as chieftain by his brother Munemori, whose cowardice and poor judgment were to be among the causes of the clan's ruin. Go-Shirakawa seized the opportunity to deprive the clan of tax rights and properties to which Kiyomori felt entitled, and to decide against Kiyomori's candidate for an important court office. Kiyomori promptly took an army to the capital from his villa at Fukuhara (modern Kōbe), terminated the official appointments of more than three dozen of the Retired Emperor's kinshin and other supporters, and confined the former sovereign to the Toba Mansion, an imperial villa outside the city.

Kiyomori made his démarche toward the end of 1179. A few months later, he completed the sweep of actual and potential rivals by installing his one-year-old grandson on the throne, which Emperor Takakura was forced to vacate. But the Taira clan had become a vulnerable target for anyone who chose to put himself forward as a defender of the imperial house and the traditional order. At the instigation of Minamoto no Yorimasa, a respected elderly Buddhist Novice who lived in the capital area, one of Retired Emperor Go-Shirakawa's sons, Prince Mochihito, summoned the provincial Genji (Minamoto) to arms within two months of the infant Emperor Antoku's accession.

Before the year was out, two ambitious Genji, the now grown Yoritomo and his cousin, Kiso no Yoshinaka, were fighting Heike armies in the provinces. Yoritomo won an important psychological victory at the Fuji River in late 1180. He then retired to his headquarters in eastern Japan, where, as the “Kamakura Lord,” he concentrated on establishing feudal relationships with local warriors to whom he guaranteed land rights in exchange for allegiance (a tactic the Taira sought in vain to counter by recruiting men through bureaucratic channels).

In early 1181, the Taira, already at a disadvantage, were further staggered by the death of Kiyomori, which left the hapless Munemori in control of the clan's destinies. Widespread famine and pestilence produced a lull in the fighting, but by mid-1183 Yoshinaka was threatening the capital. Munemori fled westward at the head of his kinsmen, overriding the objections of his brother Tomomori and others who wanted to mount a last-ditch stand, and taking along Emperor Antoku in an attempt to legitimate the clan's status. The Retired Emperor promptly enthroned another of his young grandsons, the sovereign known to history as Emperor Go-Toba.

Meanwhile, three days after the flight of the Taira, Yoshinaka made a triumphant entry into the city, accompanied by his uncle Yukiie. Hailed as a savior at first, he soon wore out his welcome. His men foraged for provisions in the famine-stricken countryside, the volatile Yukiie slandered him to Retired Emperor Go-Shirakawa, his rustic ways alienated the snobbish aristocrats, and his efforts to launch an effective campaign against the Taira in the west failed miserably. Four months after his grand entry, the Retired Emperor mustered a ragtag collection of soldier-monks and local warriors and ordered the “savior” to withdraw from the capital. Yoshinaka crushed the imperial forces, carried out wholesale demotions of high court officials, made a futile attempt to persuade the Heike to ally themselves with him against his cousin Yoritomo, with whom the Retired Emperor was in active communication, and finally died at the hands of Yoritomo's eastern forces, which were commanded by two of the Kamakura Lord's half-brothers, Noriyori and Yoshitsune.

Less than a month later, the eastern forces attacked Ikuta-no-mori and Ichi-no-tani, the eastern and western entrances to a stronghold the Taira had established between the mountains and the sea, in what is now the Kōbe area. Thanks to a surprise assault from the mountains behind Ichi-no-tani, executed by Yoshitsune and a few of his men, the stronghold fell, and the Taira fled over the water to Yashima in Shikoku, crippled by the loss of many of their leading kinsmen and retainers.

Noriyori returned to Kamakura after the Ichi-no-tani victory, but in mid-1184, Yoritomo sent him westward again, with instructions to seek out and attack the Taira. Meanwhile, Yoshitsune had been guarding the capital. Yoritomo had indicated to Retired Emperor Go-Shirakawa that he would also send Yoshitsune against the Taira, but now he changed his mind, angered because the Retired Emperor had granted his brother two desirable court offices without consulting him. Noriyori therefore advanced alone to Suō and Nagato provinces, where he presently found himself bottled up by two Taira forces—one, under the able Tomomori, threatening the Kyūshū sea lanes from Hikoshima, and the other, imperiling his rear, dispatched to Kojima in Bizen Province from Yashima, where Munemori remained with Emperor Antoku. Further hampered by supply problems and a lack of boats, Noriyori idled away half a year in the vicinity.

Finally, in early 1185, Yoritomo ordered Yoshitsune into action. Yoshitsune crossed to Shikoku during a storm, took the Taira by surprise, and drove them from Yashima. Munemori joined forces with his brother Tomomori, and the opposing sides met in a last major engagement, the naval battle of Dan-no-ura, which ended with the defeat of the Taira and the deaths of Emperor Antoku, Kiyomori's widow, and most of the male clansmen. Thereafter, Yoritomo and Go-Shirakawa reached a tacit understanding, with ultimate authority exercised by the court in form and by the new Kamakura military government in fact. The Genji ruled Japan, and Kiyomori's descendants disappeared from the pages of history.

Like other dramatic events of far-reaching import, the rise and fall of the house of Taira, and particularly the protracted five-year struggle known to scholars as the Genpei War, constituted a rich source of materials for the storyteller. Even before the final Heike defeat in 1185, tales must have been circulating about isolated events in the conflict. And at some point, probably early in the thirteenth century, the ancestor of the present Heike monogatari made its appearance.

The Tale of the Heike is known today in numerous versions, probably dating from the thirteenth century to the Edo period (1600-1868): some are relatively short, some very long; some have variant titles; some are written in Chinese; some were seemingly designed to be read; and some contain internal evidence suggestive of use by Buddhist preachers (sekkyōji). By far the most characteristic, however, are texts of intermediate length, known to have been narrated by a class of blind men called biwa hōshi. Biwa is the Japanese name for the pipa, a Chinese musical instrument resembling a lute that had entered Japan with the introduction of Buddhism many centuries earlier; hōshi (“master of the doctrines”) designates a monk or, as in this case, a layman in monk's garb.

The biwa hōshi had appeared in the countryside several centuries earlier. Many of them frequented Buddhist temples, institutions traditionally hospitable to the unfortunate, where they probably learned to play the biwa, and where they may have acquired the habit of wearing clerical robes. Thanks to their attire, to their acute nonvisual senses, and to their mastery of the biwa—which, like other stringed instruments, was considered an efficacious means of establishing contact with unseen powers—they seem to have impressed country folk as capable of communicating with the otherworld, and they were thus called upon to drive away disease gods and pacify angry spirits. They also functioned as wayside entertainers, telling stories (often of a sermonizing nature), reciting poems, and singing songs.

By the thirteenth century, large numbers of such men had congregated in the capital, where they must have encountered a demand for stories about the Genpei War—in particular, tales of tragic or violent death, which, when related with sympathy, would serve to quiet the restless spirits of the deceased. Some of them are known to have frequented the Enryakuji on Mount Hiei, the home base of a school of preachers famed for their eloquence and erudition; some almost certainly used their art to become acquainted with mid-level court nobles, the kind of men who collected oral stories as a hobby. Although the details are elusive, the ancestral Heike monogatari almost certainly emerged from such circumstances—from a pooling of the talents and practices of religiously oriented professional entertainers with the literary skills of educated men.

Medieval writings proffer several explanations of our work's origins. The best known appears in Tsurezuregusa (Essays in Idleness), a collection of jottings set down around 1330 by Yoshida Kenkō, a monk and former courtier with a reputation as a scholar and an antiquarian:

In Retired Emperor Go-Toba's time, the Former Shinano Official Yukinaga won praise for his learning. But when commanded to participate in a discussion of yuefu poetry, he forgot two of the virtues in the “Dance of the Seven Virtues,” and consequently acquired the nickname “Young Gentleman of the Five Virtues.” Sick at heart, he abandoned scholarship and took the tonsure.

Archbishop Jien [the Enryakuji Abbot] made a point of summoning and looking after anyone, even a servant, who could boast of an accomplishment; thus, he granted this Shinano Novice an allowance. Yukinaga composed The Tale of the Heike and taught it to a blind man, Shōbutsu, so that the man might narrate it. His descriptions of things having to do with the Enryakuji were especially good. He wrote with a detailed knowledge of Kurō Hōgan Yoshitsune's activities, but did not say much about Gama no Kanja Noriyori, possibly for lack of information. When it came to warriors and the martial arts, Shōbutsu, who was an easterner, put questions to warriors and had Yukinaga write what he learned. People say that our present-day biwa hōshi imitate Shōbutsu's natural voice.

(Tsurezuregusa, Sec. 226)

If we assume Emperor Go-Toba's “time” to mean both his reign (1183-98) and his period of authority as Retired Emperor (1198-1221), and if scholars are correct in ascribing the original Heike monogatari to the early thirteenth century, then Kenkō's dating is approximately accurate. Moreover, Yukinaga is a historically identifiable figure of the right period. In the absence of independent evidence, we cannot go further, but Kenkō's statements probably reflect the kind of thing that actually happened, even though they may be wholly or partially inaccurate in their particulars. The same may be said of the attributions to other authors put forward in other sources, along with purported information about textual evolution. Although none of those attributions can be substantiated, they seem to support the assumption that a number of different people had a hand in the work's creation, and that some versions, at least, were the product of collaboration between biwa hōshi and mid-level courtiers or Buddhist monks (or both).

The available evidence also suggests that a number of Heike texts were in existence by the end of the thirteenth century. It is impossible to know how much the earliest versions may have resembled one another in content and style, or whether they all sprang from a single original, but we can say that any versions entirely unrelated to our present texts have disappeared without a trace. Although there are many points of difference between extant texts, they have all descended from a common parent, even the huge forty-eight-chapter Tale of the Rise and the Fall of the Minamoto and the Taira (Genpei jōsuiki), which bears a unique title and was once considered an independent work.

This Introduction is not the place for a discussion of the immensely complicated, ill-understood connections between surviving Heike texts. We shall be concerned only with the version perfected over a thirty-year period and recorded in 1371 by a man named Kakuichi, a biwa hōshi who took traditional materials, reshaped them into a work of great literary distinction, and established a standard text, memorized and narrated by many successive generations of blind performers.

By the first half of the fourteenth century, the biwa hōshi in the capital had become sufficiently specialized in what came to be called heikyoku, or “Heike monogatari narration,” to form a guild, the Tōdōza, with a noble house as patron. A court noble's diary tells us that Kakuichi was active in the guild by 1340, when he is conjectured to have been about forty years old. There is no reliable information concerning his earlier life—merely a legend preserved in a seventeenth-century collection of Tōdōza traditions and precepts, Saikai yotekishū, that identifies him as having been a Shoshazan monk.² According to that work, he became a biwa hōshi after the sudden loss of his vision, went to the capital, joined the Tōdōza, and rose to the guild's top ranks. Whatever his origins, by 1340 he was presenting heikyoku performances that the same noble diarist described as “different” (ikei), a comment probably inspired not only by his textual revisions but also by his performance style, which seems to have been more complex, colorful, and melodic than anything previously attempted by the guild members.

Some scholars have theorized that Kakuichi drew on the Buddhist chants (shōmyō) used at Shoshazan. We know that Shoshazan was a recognized center of Buddhist music by the fifteenth century, but it is not certain whether this was the case in Kakuichi's day—or, indeed, whether there is any truth in the legend associating him with the temple. Nevertheless, he undoubtedly revolutionized heikyoku performance. During his lifetime and probably soon after the appearance of the original Kakuichi text, the Tōdōza split into two schools, the Ichikata-ryū and the Yasaka-ryū. Personalities and other issues may have been involved, but the main reason for the disagreement seems to have been that a conservative faction, the future Yasaka-ryū, refused to accept the innovations introduced by Kakuichi and adopted by the rest of the community, who became the Ichikata-ryū.

Thanks largely to Kakuichi, heikyoku won upper-class acceptance and became recognized as the leading contemporary performing art. Both the Ichikata-ryū and the Yasaka-ryū continued to flourish in the so-called golden age of heikyoku narration, the century from Kakuichi's death in 1371 to the Ōnin War, which was fought in the capital between 1467 and 1477. Five or six hundred biwa hōshi are reported to have been active in the city in 1462, and the best of them enjoyed the patronage of aristocrats or leading warriors, for whom they sang on demand. But the Ōnin War marked a turning point in heikyoku history. Thereafter, other types of entertainment became more popular—for example, the noh drama, the comic kyōgen play, and the recitation by “narrator monks” (katarisō) of the military tale Taiheiki (Chronicle of Great Peace).

This does not mean that Heike monogatari fell into obscurity. Stories about the Genpei epoch were never to lose their appeal, and The Tale of the Heike, the principal repository of such materials, continued to attract readers. Heike monogatari also served as a model for medieval chronicles of later military campaigns, and as a point of departure for countless dramas and prose stories. Of the sixteen warrior pieces (shuramono) in the modern noh repertoire, a majority are based on Heike monogatari, and many follow its text closely, a practice specifically advocated by Zeami, the leading noh dramatist. Other types of noh plays retell Heike anecdotes about music and poetry, or center on some of the work's most pathetic figures. Heike heroes appear as protagonists in thirty-three of fifty extant ballad dramas (kōwakamai, a form prominent in the sixteenth century). They figure in innumerable kabuki and puppet plays (jōruri) as well, many of which continue to enjoy great popularity, as do modern films and television dramas dealing with the Genpei period. Heike characters also play important roles in all of the half-dozen or so popular prose-fiction genres of the Edo period. As a measure of the work's enduring appeal, we may note that a potboiler called Shin heike monogatari (New Tale of the Heike) was a national best-seller as recently as the 1950's. There are medieval and later Heike picture books, songs, comic verses, and parodies.

It would be wrong to claim direct influence from Heike monogatari for all of the hundreds of literary and artistic productions inspired by the Genpei campaigns. Some authors retold old anecdotes missing from Heike monogatari; others launched Genpei figures on adventures of their own devising. But we can probably say that no single Japanese literary work has influenced so many writers in so many genres for so long a time as the Heike, and that no era in the Japanese past can today match the romantic appeal of the late twelfth century. It is not surprising, then, that one of the two heikyoku performing schools managed to survive the medieval period despite the competition of newer forms of entertainment. The Yasaka-ryū dropped out of sight around 1600, but the Ichikata-ryū obtained shogunal protection, lingered into the twentieth century, and still claims a handful of performers.

In seeking an explanation for the Ichikata-ryū's greater longevity, we may note its tighter organizational structure, an advantage traditionally ascribed to Kakuichi, who is said to have created its four grades and sixteen subgrades of performers. The school also possessed a superior text, as is evident from a comparison with extant Yasaka-ryū texts. And, finally, it seems to have offered a more appealing performance style.

There are comments on performance in various Tōdōza documents, including extensive discussion in the seventeenth-century collection Saikai yotekishū,³ and there are also Edo-period scores, compiled when sighted amateurs took up heikyoku as a hobby. In view of the prestige enjoyed by Kakuichi and his text, and of the generally conservative nature of the Japanese arts during and after the medieval period, we can probably assume that such sources, and the modern performers who use them, reflect Kakuichi's own practice to a considerable extent.

Drawing on these sources, then, we can say that the performer was silent while the biwa was played; that the biwa music was relatively uncomplicated, as compared with, say, the samisen music in the jōruri puppet play; and that the biwa passages were short. The instrument sounded the opening pitch for a vocal passage, gave the pitch for the succeeding passage, or heightened the mood conveyed by the text. The vocal part of the performance was a combination of declamation and singing. For each section (ku)—that is, each titled subdivision of a chapter (maki)—there was a prescribed katari, or narrative, pattern, designed both to suit the context and to provide the variety and drama necessary to capture and hold an audience's attention. There are said to have been as many as thirty-three types of melodies in use at one time or another, of which some eight or nine were especially important.⁴ A brief look at four of them will give a general idea of their nature.

The most musical was the sanjū (“threefold”), used for passages that dealt with the imperial court, the supernatural, the arts, or the classical past, or wherever an effect of gentle, elegant beauty was desired. High-pitched and leisurely, it was compared in Saikai yotekishū to the flight of a large crane rising from the reed plains: the voice soared like the bird, wavered gracefully as though flapping its wings, and settled slowly to earth again.

A quavering, slow melody called origoe (“broken voice”) was employed in pathetic or tragic passages, such as the description of little Emperor Antoku's death, or to express heroic resolve on the part of a character, or to convey an address to the throne, or for letters, some kinds of dialogues, and soliloquies.

A livelier melody, hiroi (“picking up”), was associated especially with fighting and deeds of valor, but might also be prescribed for descriptions of disasters, scenes of confusion, or any other sort of dramatic action.

For straightforward narration, the performer might employ kudoki (“recitation”), a relatively fast, simple melody close to ordinary speech. (Narration was also rendered in shiragoe, “plain voice,” a brisk declamatory style making no use of melody.)

Kakuichi's art as a performer manifested itself not only in the development of a superior repertoire of melodies, but also, and more significantly, in the painstaking combination of individual melodic elements into patterns that were dramatically effective and appropriate to the content. Armed with the model he provided, which regulated every nuance of every section, the Ichikata-ryū rank and file enjoyed an invaluable advantage over their competitors. We cannot fully appreciate that advantage, nor can we recapture the medieval audience's experience, even if we are fortunate enough to witness a brief performance by a modern narrator. Limited for all practical purposes to the printed page, we find ourselves in the position of those who must read a script instead of seeing the play performed. But just as the best dramatists surmount such obstacles, so Kakuichi and his fellow authors have created an independent literary work of remarkable status. Appendix C, which can best be approached after an initial reading of the text, attempts to sketch some of the dimensions of their accomplishment. Here it is enough to say that it is the translator's fault, not theirs, if this English version fails to convey at least some of the heroic spirit, humor, pathos, and lyric beauty of the original.

Notes

1. After frequent early moves, the court had settled first at Nara (8th c.) and then at Heian[kyō] (794on; modern Kyōto).

2. Shoshazan was another name for the Enkyōji, a Tendai temple on Mount Shosha in Harima Province (now in Himeji City, Hyōgo-ken). Monk Jigu, Saikai yotekishū, ed. Tomikura Tokujirō (Tōkyō, 1956), p. 94.

3. Summarized in Makoto Ueda, Literary and Art Theories in Japan (Cleveland, Ohio, 1967), pp. 114-27.

4. Saikai yotekishū, pp. 48-55.