The Tale of the Heike (Heike monogatari) is the medieval Japanese war tale, recounting the Genpei War of 1180 to 1185 and the fall of the Taira, or Heike, clan to their Minamoto rivals. Compiled in the thirteenth century from earlier oral accounts, it passed through recited and written lineages, chiefly the blind lute priests, the biwa hoshi, and became a foundational classic of Japanese literature and the great source of samurai legend. Its keynote is Buddhist impermanence, sounded in the famous opening on the bells of Gion Shoja, the Jetavana monastery of Buddhist India. Its authorship, its date, and the relation among its many versions all remain debated.
The Tale of the Heike opens by telling you how it ends. The bell of Gion Shoja, it begins, sounds the passing of all things, and the color of the flowers proves that the proud do not last. That bell hangs not in any Japanese temple but in Jetavana, the Buddha's monastery in India, whose name Japanese Buddhism carried home as a byword for impermanence. Then it spends its whole enormous length watching one dazzling family climb to the top of Japan and be destroyed. This is a war story chanted, for centuries, by blind priests who traveled the roads with a lute, singing the defeat of a clan that everyone in the audience already knew was doomed. The greatness is not the suspense, because there is none. The greatness is the sorrow. The tale looks straight at power at its most glittering and insists, in scene after scene, that it is already turning to dust.