These 12 volumes contain exceedingly rare and precious illustrations of Japan's first battle epics, The Tale of Hogen and The Tale of Heiji. They may represent the earliest surviving paired illustrations of the Hogen-Heiji theme in manuscript form.

Two serious battles erupted in Kyoto in the mid-twelfth century. Both rebellions were short--the first lasted no more than a day in the summer of 1156 (the first year of the Hogen era) and the second a few weeks in January of 1160 (the Heiji era)--but they had far-reaching effects, as they mark the end of the old social order and the beginning of the period of samurai rule. They were the first such disputes to be settled by force in the capital, using members of the rising warrior class. Together the two war tales tell the story of the succession struggles that resulted in the eclipse of Fujiwara power and the rise to supremacy of the former provincial warrior clan, the Taira (or Heike) family. The tales resemble one another so much in subject, style and ordering that they have sometimes been attributed to the same person, but authorship is unknown. Although the original versions are no longer extant, there are more than thirty different manuscript versions of both the Hogen and Heiji in existence (a late 16th century manuscript from the Hyde collection was sold in these rooms October 7, 1988, lot 24). The earliest Hogen text dates from 1318. The earliest surviving Heiji text accomapnied a set of illustrated handscrolls, popularly known as the Heiji scrolls, datable to the mid-13th century. These handscrolls, the first of the new genre of battle art, now consist of only three complete scrolls (one in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, one in the Tokyo National Museum, and one in the Seikado Library, Tokyo) and fragments of a fourth scroll. Originally they mat have belonged to a set of fifteen, perhaps paired with a now-lost set of fifteen Hogen scrolls. This hypothesis is based on a reference to an illustrated set of Hogen battle scrolls in the Kammon Gyoki, the dairy of Gosuko-in, father of Emperor Go-Hanazono (1419-71), for the year 1436. Gosuko-in was shown a set of fifteen illustrated Hogen scrolls stored in the precincts of the Enryaku-ji, the powerful Tendai temple on Mount Hiei, in the outskirts of Kyoto. He wanted very much to see the set of Heiji scrolls, also stored at Enryaku-ji, but found them to be virtually inaccessible. In any case, the famous mid-13th century set of Heiji scrolls seems to have been broken up as early as the seventeenth century. Other early examples are almost unknown and the earliest surviving depiction of the Hogen battle is that on the well-known pair of Hogen-Heiji battle screens in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, dating from about 1600. It was not until 1626, during the Kanei era, when the firt illustrated, woodblock-printed versions of the Hogen-Heiji tales came into circulation, that inexpensive, mass-produced pictorial versions were available for the general public. Today, even the woodblock-printed sets are rare. One complete Hogen-Heiji illustrated edition of 1657 is preserved in the Ryerson collection at the Art Institute of Chicago. Although the Ryerson set contains some images that are very similar to the present manuscript, it did not serve as the model. The painted images shown here are quite fresh and vivid in details and provide a valuable 'missing link' in the chronology of Hogen-Heiji painting. The artist has chosen to illustrate the most memorable moments, such as the naked Tametomo courageously fighting off a surprise attack in the bath house, or cowardly Taira soldiers fleeing their encampment when they mistake the sound of rising geese in a nearby marsh for an enemy attack.