Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast, Episode 616.

I Am Legend, Part 3.

As we covered last week, the Yoshitsune legend really began to come together in the

1300s, with the systemization of the Heike Monogatari along the lines of the Akashi no

Kakuichi variant of the text, the only one today that's widely

known or read.

But even in Heike Mnogatari or other versions of it that aren't Akashis, Yoshitsun is not

the main character.

There really isn't a main character in point of fact.

To the extent that there is one subject for the story, it's something

like the ephemeral sadness of fading worldly glory, or something like that.

Yoshitsune is only one of over 1,000 characters in the narrative, and not even the one

who appears the most frequently. He's not, as we saw at the end of last week's episode, even

the most fleshed out or psychologically

realistic.

So how then does the Yoshitsune legend go through its final evolution into the form that's

widely known today?

That, at last, brings us to our final text written by an anonymous author sometime in the

1400s, but before we get to

it, of course, we need some background.

Really the most important thing for us to understand is simply how sensationally popular

Akashi no Kakuichi's narrative of Heike Mologatari was.

...