The Tale of the Heike (平家物語, Heike Monogatari) is an epic account compiled prior to 1330 of the struggle between the Taira clan and Minamoto clan for control of Japan at the end of the 12th century in the Genpei War (1180–1185). It is written in the form of a gunki monogatari.
It has been translated into English at least five times. The first translation was by Arthur Lindsay Sadler, in 1918–1921. A complete translation in nearly 800 pages by Hiroshi Kitagawa & Bruce T. Tsuchida was published in 1975. It was also translated by Helen McCullough in 1988. An abridged translation by Burton Watson was published in 2006. In 2012, Royall Tyler completed his translation, which, he says, seeks to be mindful of the performance style for which the work was originally intended.
Historical novelist Eiji Yoshikawa published a serial prose rendering in the Asahi Shimbun in 1950, under the title Shin Heike Monogatari. This literally means “the new tale of the Heike” and it was an absolutely massive work of what in English amounts to approximately 1.58 million words.
Castalia House has already published the first volume of its original translation of Shin Heike Monogatari on Amazon. More will be published soon, but due to the new two-book-per-week limit, it will take three months for all 24 books to be published there.
Fortunately, as you can see from the screenshot below, all 24 books, from The Book of Wild Grasses to The Book of the Yoshino Dolls, are already translated, prepared, uploaded, and ready on Castalia Unlimited. There are already another 59 Japanese translations on the site, many of which have never been translated before, and we expect to launch with around 175 total titles available for download.
We expect to launch Castalia Unlimited within two weeks, with books available for download in English, German, Spanish, and Japanese. Most of them will be in English, but as you can see, there will be a number of translations from English available to subscribers as well.
However laughable it may sound at the moment, we anticipate that Castalia Unlimited will become one of the most significant publishing organizations in the world in the next five years. Thanks to recent developments in open source AI, we now believe we will be able to add an audiobook subscription before the end of the first year, but that’s not something we’re going to address for in time for the launch.
We hope you will support us and participate in this endeavor.