Japanese
The Tale of the Heike reached its written form through generations of blind itinerant monks who chanted it to the biwa, a lute, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. No single hand shaped it. Yoshida Kenko, writing around 1330, credited a courtier named Yukinaga and a performer named Shobutsu, but the text as it survives carries the fingerprints of many reciters who added, pruned and polished as they travelled. The result is a war chronicle that reads like liturgy: the fall of the Taira clan told by voices trained to make an audience weep. Scholars now treat the Heike as a communal creation rather than a book with an author, a shared national memory of the Genpei War set to music.