Maybe you've seen movies like "Shogun" by James Clavell with Richard Chamberlain or Hiroyuki Sanada as the leading actor. You still remember "The Last Samurai" with Tom Cruise. They are excellent entertainment films about Japanese warriors and their spirit. They are good entertainment, but more is needed. The New Tale of Taira, written by the famous Eiji Yoshikawa, is a more authentic historical novel with several fictive elements. The New Taira Tale is his life's work. Keiji Shimamura, the authority on "The Tale of Genji," describes The New Taira Tale as eternal literature. The samurai saga tells of the rise and fall of the Taira samurai tribe at the end of the 12th century in Japan. It covers around 50 years of the history of this Far Eastern country.

In the beginning, the warrior tribes were subterranean people. The emperor, I would rather say tenno, was the absolute monarch. He let the nobility implement his policies.

The warriors laboriously made themselves heard. The samurai families had first to decide who had the strongest army. This struggle to rule Japan's warriors involved brutal wars. The warrior tribe Minamoto destroyed the samurai tribe Taira. The young general, Yoshitsune Minamoto, defeated Taira's marine forces. The wars killed so many people and did not bring the long-term peace. The new ruler, Yoritomo Minamoto, chased away the strong general Yoshitsune. Yoshitsune, Yoritomo's younger brother, did not want to use offensive weapons against Yoritomo and renounce arms. Yoshitsune died at 32 years old and was not happy, but he never wanted to fight another war that would cause so many human casualties. 

Yoshikawa rewrote the classic novel to give the Japanese the answers to the questions of how post-war Japan should find peace and what people's happiness looked like. Sixty-seven years after Yoshikawa's book, this novel teaches us the right questions about peace and happiness.