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Among the various threads that tie the narrative together, the first and overarching one, as I suggested above, is the folly of human vanity. The Heike begins with the tolling of the bell at the death of Buddha, in ancient India, and the tale ends with the frail sound of a tolling bell at Jakkōin, a small mountain temple buried away in the hills behind Kyoto, where the Empress, her husband and son now dead, lives out the end of her pitiful existence. (Incidentally, the temple was preserved since that time, and remained an important tourist attraction until a fire destroyed it in 1999. It is now being rebuilt.)
One side battles the other; each jockeys for power as the tale progresses. One way to examine the Heike is to observe the tensions which push against each other and so sustain the dramatic elements in the narrative.
A particularly significant tension is that between the mentality of the nobles versus the warriors. The nobles of the court, forced to flee Kyoto because of various battles that take place during the course of the story, mourn for the loss of their homes and stately possessions. Kiyomori makes the situation even more difficult by moving the capital from Kyoto to an area by the sea near the modern city of Kobe; this turned out to be a temporary move, lasting only from 1179 to 1180, but the intricately knit civilization of Kyoto was torn apart, as the eloquent description of the difficulties of the move in An Account of My Hut, mentioned above, makes clear. Courtiers and the nobility alike owe allegiance to the Emperor, while the samurai owe their primary loyalty to their individual clan leaders. They show a will to sacrifice everything, even their lives, for their lords, and they will fight to the death rather than surrender, even to a superior foe. The court, which has overseen a country at peace for some hundred years, is now forced to adopt some of those same tactics to stay alive. It is difficult for them to do so.
Another contrast revealed in the Heike is that between the introspection and aesthetic aspirations of the nobility and the pluck and bravado of the warriors. The supreme virtue of the nobility might be best captured in the term aware, a word virtually impossible to translate into modern English, but which might be described as a kind of epiphany of feeling when even a small thing can suggest vast, unarticulated issues at the root of human existence. Not surprisingly, such emotions are often captured in classical Japanese waka 31-syllable poetry, as well as in various scenes in The Tale of Genji. By way of example, here is a moment when Prince Genji, on his way to pay a social visit on a snowy day, is confronted with a rusty lock. His emotional response floods over him.
"It's very rusty," said the old porter dolefully, fumbling all the while with the lock that grated with an unpleasant sound but would not turn. "There's nothing terribly wrong with it, but it's terribly rusty. No one uses this gate now."
The words, ordinary enough in themselves, filled Genji with an unaccountable depression. How swiftly the locks rust, the hinges grow stiff on doors that close behind us! "I am more than thirty," he thought; and it seemed to him impossible to go on doing things just as though they would last-as though people would remember. "And yet," he said to himself, "I know that even at this moment the sight of something very beautiful, even if it were only some common flower or tree, might in an instant make life again seem full of meaning and reality,"
(Waley, p. 390)
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