Volume 28, Number 6 · April 16, 1981
Tears on the Kimono
By Richard Storry
A Tale of Flowering Fortunes: Annals of Japanese Aristocratic Life in the Heian Period
translated with an introduction and notes by William H. McCullough, by Helen Craig McCullough
Stanford University Press, 948 (two volumes) pp., $62.50
The Heian age in Japanese history lasted for some four hundred years, from the end of the eighth century AD to the closing decades of the twelfth. The name Heian ('Peace and Tranquillity') comes from Heian-kyo, the capital city established in 794, in emulation of the T'ang metropolis in China, Ch'ang-an. Heian-kyo was planned on a generous scale and covered a large area, with broad thoroughfares arranged on a rectangular pattern that is discernible to this day in its modern manifestation, the city of Kyoto. In the north central section of Heian-kyo the Greater Imperial Palace stood on about four hundred acres (the present Kyoto Palace takes up an area about half that size), and this was the social, cultural, and, in a ceremonial sense at any rate, political Parnassus of the Heian age.
Review, 2369 words
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