The Molten Notebook

If Mario Puzo were a Japanese Buddhist who lived 800 years ago, he might have written the story of the Heike family.

The rise and fall of the proud and warlike clan forms the backbone of the medieval prose epic The Tale of the Heike.

For translator Hiroshi Kitagawa, the work ranks second only to The Tale of Genji as a classic of Japanese literature. And unlike that lyrical novel by a court lady, he writes, the Heike is “masculine.”

If assassins and strategists are the stuff of men, then manly it is. We meet Kiyomori, the Heike overlord whose conquest of rebels helped his family rise to power, even as they defy the throne to keep it.

Then there’s Yoshinaka, a hick samurai and inconvenient hothead from the rival clan, his cousins who were ordered to slay him — and behind it all, the ruthless Minamoto no Yoritomo.

The Heike leaves indelible images in the mind’s eye: skulls rolling across a courtyard in a horrific memento mori, warhorses thundering onto a beach amid the rising spray, the child-emperor leaping into the sea with his grandmother.

The stories that became the Heike were told by wandering monks in the centuries after the Gempei War (1180–1185 CE). (For a vision of a biwa hoshi straight out of “The Twilight Zone,” see the 1965 film “Kwaidan”). It’s no surprise that, swordplay aside, the work resounds with the traditional Buddhist theme of impermanence.

The most poignant expression of this theme comes from Kiyomori’s daughter, an empress who becomes a nun after the last battle. She had watched her mother and son drown themselves after the defeat of the Heike; she herself was pulled out of the water by her hair.

“As hard as I try not to think of it,” she says, “the image is ever before my eyes. Among those who remained alive there arose so great and horrible a cry that it seemed to exceed the shrieks of all criminals in the fires of hell.”

A dream enlightens her to the meaning behind this suffering: that in bearing witness she had passed through the “six realms” toward enlightenment.

The melancholy of life’s transience suffuses what remains, some eight centuries later, a gripping tale of pride and divided loyalties.

Translation: Hiroshi Kitagawa and Bruce T. Tsuchida (University of Tokyo Press, 1975). If you’re looking for a quicker read, check out Burton Watson’s translation of selected episodes (Columbia University Press, 2006).