Originally I was going to read Saikaku's Five Women Who Loved Love, from 1686, as my second book. That would have been a good choice too (and much shorter and easier to read), but I decided to switch to the Heike because as I read more about it, it seemed like a very important work in Japanese literature. Royall Tyler says, "No work of Japan's classical literature influenced more pervasively the art, literature, and drama of later centuries." I think it is something like Homer's Iliad, which is both a history of the Trojan War and a work of fiction. (I've never actually read The Iliad, but I think I'm now going to have to. Maybe next year.) It is also often compared to the 11th-century French epic poem The Song of Roland, about Charlemagne, which I have also not read. Hmm.
It took me a full three weeks to read my first Challenge book of 2022, The Tale of Genji, but Heike took me even more time, even though it's about 400 pages shorter (710 pages of text plus 50 pages of explanatory matter). I don't know exactly how long I spent reading it. I know I picked it up at the library on March 5th and started reading it that day, and I finished it today, April 2nd. Though I didn't read it every day, it was my faithful companion for much of March. I even took it on our trip to Nebraska, though I don't usually travel with library books, and I didn't read much of it on the trip. During the week I was sick with a bad cold, I found it absolutely essential for putting me to sleep. I would read a couple of pages and then I'd be snoring.
After this, the books will get easier, I promise. Many of the remaining books on my list are actually quite short.
Before going any further, I need to say that I did not understand this book very well. I found it so difficult to keep track of the characters. The Tale of the Heike is divided into 12 "books," plus one extra one at the end, so 13. Each book has several chapters, as many as 20, though the last extra one has only 5. The first five and a half books are mostly about the extremely bad behavior of the Heike, especially the tyrant Kiyomori (pictured on the cover having a nightmare). In the 6th book, Kiyomori dies a gruesome death -- he gets very hot:
From the very first day of Lord Kiyomori's illness, nothing passed his lips, not even water, and his body burned like fire. The heat within twenty-five or thirty feet of where he lay was unbearable. His only words were "Hot! Hot!" This was clearly no common affliction. When he stepped down into a stone basin filled with water from the Senju spring on Mount Hiei, to cool himself, the water bubbled furiously around him and soon boiled.
He is a very evil man and is obviously on his way to some sort of Hell. But after his death I kind of lost the thread of the story. The Genji start to be more important, and the focus turns more to their leaders, and I just couldn't keep them straight. Eventually a Genji warrior called Yoshitsune began to take over the story, and I liked him, so I paid more attention. But I can't tell you how many times I had to re-read passages, because I had not understood a word of them, and how many times I had to go back to Tyler's helpful list of "Principal Figures in the Tale" to figure out who on earth I was reading about. It was rough going.
Finally the Genji triumph over the Heike, and the last few books are about the mopping up process, chasing down Heike remnants who are trying to hide, executing all their children so they won't rise up later on, etc. Interestingly, although the Heike are certainly the villains early on, by the end of the book you feel sorry for them and wish the Genji would stop murdering them.
Long stretches of the book are so boring I couldn't keep my eyes open -- I don't know what I'll do to put myself to sleep after this -- but they're interspersed with very amusing stories. Tyler, in his introduction, says that the entire work was probably almost never performed; rather, people had their favorite stories and the blind Heike performers would just do a selection of the favorites in an evening. Of course, now I can't find the ones I liked. There was one about a horse that I liked a lot, but I can't find it.
One amusingly weird aspect of the book is how the warriors' outfits are described. For example, here is what the Heike warrior lord Shigehira wore on the day he was captured by the Genji:
That day he wore a dark blue hitatare embroidered with bright yellow plovers under armor with purple lacing darker toward the bottom and rode a superb steed named Doji Kage.
It's just not possible to make any sense of that. How can anyone have dressed up like that for battle and how can anyone else have remembered it and sung about it, or, conversely, how could anyone make up something like that? Purple lacing darker toward the bottom, give me a break. And then there are the endless pleas to various Buddhas and goddesses (the mix of Buddhism and Shinto that makes Japanese culture unique). And character after character renounces the world and becomes a monk or nun, if they don't kill themselves by jumping in the ocean or slitting their bellies open first. It's a window on a world that is so so so different from mine.
You may wonder why I kept reading, when the book was so difficult. I am perfectly capable of giving up on a book I don't like. I guess the answer is that I did kind of like The Tale of the Heike, impossible though it is. I'm not sure I would recommend this to anyone -- but if this sounds like something you might like, then you might like it.
No comments:
Post a Comment