"We would bond in the face of oppression from big business and the deans"

[larryhammer]

Following up on my request, I went for The Tale of the Heike and Shahnameh. Since Heike arrived first, in Helen Craig McCullough's translation, I checked out the first paragraph:

The sound of the Gion Shoja bells echoes the impermanence of all things; the color of the sala flowers reveals the truth that the prosperous must decline. The proud do not endure, they are like a dream on a spring night; the mighty fall at last, they are as dust before the wind.

Ahhh -- this is the stuff. We are in the hands of a storyteller,* one who will now lead us through the fall of the Taira clan in the civil war that not so much ended Japan's Heian era as marked its death throes. A step-by-step leading, as it turns out: it takes 141 pages of inflamed pride and simmering resentments for a sword to finally get drawn, but when it does -- oh yeah, the story delivers. That particular sword is a ceremonial blade that gets quickly bent, but the wielder still takes out "fourteen or fifteen" policemen before it finally breaks and he has to escape out a side gate with a thigh wound and a new sobriquet. As the revolt boils over, we get more set-piece battles -- one-on-one, one-against-dozens, hundreds-against-all-odds, each starting with warrior vauntings and precisely described arms and armor. And everyone on the battlefield is a bad-ass. If this were set in the modern era, they'd all wear longcoats that flutter in the wind as they wipe the cut on their cheek, narrow their eyes to slits, and say, "Okay, now I'm going to have to get serious."

In short, epic. Not poetry, but 'twill serve quite well. Props to asakiyume for the suggestion.

I expect the Ninja Replacement Score to be very low on this one: there's hardly any characters who aren't bad-ass samurai, bad-ass warrior-monks, or members of the imperial family. Not to mention, ninjas would be anachronistic by a couple centuries. So far, I've only marked two possible replacements, both dancing girls, and it's not clear whether ninjification would improve the story as the result would be the premature death of the main villain (though it would be awesome).

* Interestingly, despite being the text used by a guild of storytellers, it does not keep this storyteller voice up nearly as consistently as the literary creation Journey to the West.

---L.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Hahaha! I win the Internet today :D

Enjoy.

[larryhammer]

Yes, but would Yotsuba like it?

---L.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

If Jumbo and her dad acted it out for her, you bet.

[larryhammer]

I'm having trouble imagining Dad going to that much trouble.

Now if Yanda got involved, she'd insist on taking part -- on the other side.

ETA: Now I want to read this fic.

---L.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

You're way fresher in both Heike and Yotsuba&--you need to write it :-)