One of the masterworks of Japanese literature, ranking with The Tale of Genji, in a groundbreaking new edition

From the acclaimed translator ofThe Tale of Genji, a groundbreaking rendering of Japan's great martial epic

The fourteenth-centuryTale of the Heikeis Japan'sIliad-a moving depiction of the late twelfth-century wars between the Heike and Genji clans. No work has had a greater impact on later Japanese literature, theater, music, film, and manga-indeed on the Japanese people's sense of their own past. It has also been a major source for medieval-Japan-based fantasy in English. With woodcuts by nineteenth-century artist Teisai Hokuba, a major student of the great Hokusai, Royall Tyler's stunning presentation of this touchstone of Japanese culture recreates the oral epic as it was actually performed and conveys the rich and vigorous language of the original.

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