The Tale of the Heike (Penguin Classics)

by Royall Tyler

The Tale of the Heike <> Paperback <> RoyallTyler <> PenguinBooks

Genres: Japan, Fiction, Classics, Literature, Japanese Literature

Unknown Binding

About the author

Born in England in 1936, I was educated in the US and France. During my academic career I specialized in Japanese literature. My last teaching position, after stints in Canada, the US, and Norway, was at the Australian National University in Canberra. After that I retired with my wife to a farm in in New South Wales. We've bred alpacas here for over twenty years, although our herd is smaller than it used to be. And I've continued to publish books. In summer we see blue-tongue skinks--a big, slow lizard that really does have a blue tongue. So I named my own book imprint (Blue-Tongue Books) after one that scrabbled at my window, wanting to come in.

I'm descended from two other authors named Royall Tyler, both listed on Goodreads and Amazon. The first (1757-1826) was the American jurist and playwright best known as the author of The Contrast. The second (1884-1953) was my grandfather.

Reviews

[Mads Dan Eriksen · Rating 3 out of 5]

antiquated language

[Paul Narvaez · Rating 4 out of 5]

At something like 700 pages, I admit that I read some sections, and merely perused others.

I just wanted to get a feeling for it. This edition is really good. The way that it is typeset on the page makes for dynamic reading. There is a huge cast of characters and clans to keep straight. I suspect, for Japanese literature, this probably reads like The Iliad which is also a lot of loosely arranged sections which often deal with bloody violence.

I'm a novice at this sort of stuff and feel ill-equipped to really judge it. You can seemingly, kind of pick it up anywhere, and just read.

[J Alistair · Rating 1 out of 5]

To describe this book in a single word..."painful". I don't know who the author of the book is, so this very well could be a translation issue and not a problem with the tale itself. Eji Yoshikawa also has a rendition of this tale. Perhaps one day I will read his version, but for now, I'm simply glad it's over.

Additional comment 26 May 26. While looking at some other books I was surprised to see this book boasts a 4.1 rating! So I clicked on the book to look at the reviews. An interesting observation is that as of today, all reviews of the book are actually negative, even the only 4 star review. So why would a book receive such high ratings when the written reviews are so bad? After all, this book has a higher rating than most on GoodReads. My conclusion? It's two fold. 1. This book is listed as a classic and is long. So who wants to say that a classic is a horrible book? Heaven forbid! 2. This book is about Japanese culture and when coupled with the length of the book and the "classic" status, who want's to appear dismissive of another culture?

Read the reviews, not just the ratings folks!