Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast episode 617.

I am legend part four.

I don't remember a lot from high school English, if I'm honest.

I generally didn't have a great experience with the class, which is to be expected,

given that my favorite teacher ended up getting busted for selling marijuana on the side. I mentioned that

partially because it's kind of funny in retrospect, and also because it gives you a sense of the

quality of educator we're dealing with here. But one thing I do remember well are discussions

about the nature of tragedy, that what makes tragic works as a genre work is the notion of the tragic flaw.

This is, of course, the idea that your hero has some sort of character defect that makes their

downfall inevitable, despite their many and varied talents. The flaw makes it so their demise

cannot be avoided, and their heroism comes from their

valiant attempts to struggle against a fate they cannot escape.

And of course, there are many examples of this in the Western literary tradition.

If memory serves, my teacher brought it up in relation, of course, to Macbeth.

But of course, the same analysis applies Macbeth, but of course the same

analysis applies to, say, Achilles in the Iliad, or the entirety of Sophocles' edipus cycle,

but Minamoto no Yoshits the bill as well, and certainly by the second half of Gikeki,

the legend of Yoshitsune as tragic hero is in full swing.

Now, as we mentioned last week, one of the odd things about Gikeki is just how quickly the plot moves.

Since the anonymous author clearly assumed anyone reading it would be familiar with the plot of Heike Monogatari, there's no effort

to fill in anything covered by that text, and as a result, and frankly, kind of hilariously,

in my view, the middle of the book is just a massive time skip.

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