From the acclaimed translator of The Tale of Genji, a groundbreaking rendering of Japan's great martial epic
The fourteenth-century Tale of the Heike is Japan's Iliad--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...

A Great Valley Under the Stars is the first book of poetry by Royall Tyler, the award-winning translator of The Tale of Genji, The Tale of the Heike, and other works of Japanese literature. Royall Tyler writes: "Distilled from notes and pages written decades ago in the New Mexico desert and during Midwestern winters, this suite moves from listening for the voice of the worthless - trash, stones, men in the least of places - to a vision of a great valley under the stars, the spell of love, and the music of the sky. It is all one." "Intimate and expansive, moving from a truckstop in the New...

"The Contrast" from Royall Tyler. Royall Tyler, american jurist and playwright (1757-1826).

Hino Nako (1310-1358) experienced the turmoil of the Japanese mid-14th century. In this moving memoir she sums up her life: her early years of court service, her cruelly brief marriage to Saionji Kinmune, her devotion to her son, the pilgrimages and Zen practice of her later years, and her sense of having done all she could amid chaos and loss to uphold the honor of her house. She omits the death of Kinmune, killed before her eyes in 1335, but the translation includes the Taiheiki account of it. Nako's confession of religious faith and her praise of the beauty of Kitayama, the Saionji estate,...