Review: The Heike Story: A Modern Translation of the Classic Tale of Love and War

The Heike Story: A Modern Translation of the Classic Tale of Love and War by Eiji Yoshikawa
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is reminiscent of Romance of the Three Kingdoms in that it is an epic about war and clans throughout the ages. In fact, it also reminded me of Samuel Hawley's book about the Imjin War because of the colorful characters and relations intertwining.

However, having said that I have to lower the rating because there is no mention of who the translator is. The name of Fuki Wooyenaka Uramatsu (thankfully mentioned here on Goodreads) is mentioned in the book, although her role isn't specified, even though the illustrator and writer of the introduction are.

It also cuts off rather abruptly at the end, and it seems like they decided to shorten the book overall, which is a shame.



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Review: Musashi

Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A really fun book. It is very long, but a great one to dive into in order to follow Musashi and others around 16th century Japan. The foreword called it the "Gone with the Wind" of Japan. I can't say I agree, but I see where the idea comes from. It is an epic, based on history, which became a classic, and rightly so (obviously the story is nothing like Gone with the Wind).

This can be divided into various episodes and adventures occurring (more or less) to the same small number of characters, so it's probably best to divide the reading up so it's more or less a collection of stories. In fact, the whole time I kept thinking how it seems perfectly written for an anime series (which obviously didn't exist when it was written). 

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