The Tale of the Heike

Nov 15, 2025 9:44 PM

Author:Royall Tyler

The Tale of the Heike is Japan's great martial epic: a masterpiece of world literature and the progenitor of all samurai stories. This major and groundbreaking new Penguin translation is by Royall Tyler, acclaimed translator of The Tale of Genji.

First assembled from scattered oral poems in the early fourteenth century, The Tale of the Heike is Japan's Iliad - a grand-scale depiction of the wars between the Heike and Genji clans. Legendary for its magnificent and vivid set battle scenes, it is also a work filled with intimate human dramas and emotions, contemplating Buddhist themes of suffering and separation, as well as universal insights into love, loss and loyalty. The narrative moves back and forth between the two great warring clans, between aristocratic society and street life, adults and children, great crowds and introspection. No Japanese work has had a greater impact on subsequent literature, theatre, music and films, or on Japan's sense of its own past.

Royall Tyler's new translation is the first to capture the way The Tale of the Heike was originally performed. It re-creates the work in its full operatic form, with speech, poetry, blank verse and song that convey its character as an oral epic in a way not seen before, fully embracing the rich and vigorous language of the original texts. Beautifully illustrated with fifty-five woodcuts from the nineteenth-century artistic master, Katsushika Hokusai, and bolstered with maps, character guides, genealogies and rich annotation, this is a landmark edition.

Royall Tyler taught Japanese language and literature for many years at the Australian National University. He has a B.A. from Harvard University and a PhD from Columbia University and has taught at Harvard, Stanford and the University of Wisconsin. His translation of The Tale of Genji was acclaimed by publications such as The New York Times Book Review.

Reviews

In his elegant new translation, Royall Tyler divides the text into something resembling an opera libretto, with recitatives, arias and dialogue

—— L.A. Times

Longley’s 10th collection weaves his classical themes of war, family and flaura and fauna into measured songs of commemoration for those he has loved.

—— Paul McCartney , Sunday Times

A book of tiny, delicately lyrical commemorations and commendations.

—— Tablet

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—— Peter Scupham , Literary Review

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Gissing…deserves to be more widely read. He is at his best describing the hardship and disappointments faced by the less well-off, striving in the face of an unforgiving Victorian Society

—— Nicholas Lavender QC , Counsel

Gissing’s insights into both the media and the effects of poverty still seem astonishingly fresh and current… Utterly compelling

—— Sunday Business Post

Cynical, realistic and enjoyable

—— Alan Taylor and Rosemary Goring , Herald

I have wondered why the wit, warmth and energy of the West Midlands had no voice amongst the younger English poets. Now it has. Liz Berry is the Black Country’s shining daughter.

—— Alison Brackenbury

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It is unusual for a young poet to have such a developed sense of how questions of voice, identity, place and readership can be resolved in poetry

—— Paul Batchelor , New Statesman

An amazing debut that signals great things to come in the future from this original, proud poet

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Wonderful…incredible words

—— Birmingham Mail

Utterly beautiful poems of being in love, being a woman and being free. She is destined to be a star in the cosmos of poetry!

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Liz Berry has an ability to bring the Black Country dialect to life with her poems

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—— Jackie Kay , Observer

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—— Julie Myerson , Observer

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—— Craig Taylor , Observer

One of the most intelligent, inventive, downright impressive writers working anywhere in the world today. In Ali Smith we have a writer whose dazzling sophistication will surely be celebrated, studied and argues over hundreds of years after we're gone

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Ali Smith is a master of language. Vigorous, vivid writing that is Ali Smith incarnate

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—— Atlantic

Brilliant . . . the sort of death-defying storytelling acrobatics that don't seem entirely possible

—— Washington Post

Having read this now twice, in both directions so to speak, I've decided - and I do not write this flippantly - that Ali Smith is a genius

—— Susan McCallum , LA Review of Books

Approaches the world as only a novel can. The book moves not so much in a straight line as in a twisting helix pattern . . . delivers the heat of life and the return of beauty in the face of loss

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A unique conversation between past and present

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