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A boy, cursed in the womb by his father, triumphs over his disabilities to become one of Japan’s greatest performers.
The Tale of the Heike: The Inu-Oh Chapters centers on two Noh performers in fourteenth-century Japan. Inu-Oh is born into a theater family. His friend Tomoichi is a biwa hōshi, one of the blind itinerant minstrels who perform stories about the fall of the Heike clan. Inu-Oh is horribly disfigured, the result of a curse, and Tomoichi was blinded as a boy, but they rocket to fame when they begin to captivate audiences with bold new material.
Praise for The Tale of the Heike: The Inu-oh Chapters
[from the paperback edition] “Tomoichi’s biwa-playing and Inu-oh's dancing: such a mixture of joy and sadness, of ugliness and beauty. It made me cry”. --Taiyō Matsumoto
“A story of friendship with rock ’n’ roll spirit: it will change your ideas about one of Japan’s perennial classics.” --Amy Ozawa, Asahi Shimbun
Praise for Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure: A Tale That Begins with Fukushima (2016)
“Literary balm for the pain of 2011, a triumph of the imagination.” --Japan Times
“This novel, which depicts the 3/11 triple disaster in northeastern Japan in all its complexity, is a marvel. Furukawa's austere writing is as sober as it is inventive and as elegiac as it is hopeful.” --Davinder Blowmik, associate professor, University of Washington
Praise for Slow Boat (2017)
“An endearing story, translated into riffing, confessional English.” —Wall Street Journal
HIDEO FURUKAWA is one of the most innovative writers in Japan today. He has been described as the heir to Haruki Murakami and Gabriel García Márquez. His novel Belka, Why Don’t You Bark? was translated by Michael Emmerich; his experimental reportage in the aftermath of the 3/11 disaster Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure: A Tale That Begins with Fukushima was translated by Doug Slaymaker with Akiko Takenaka; and his short novel Slow Boat was translated by David Boyd. After translating the medieval classic The Tale of the Heike into modern Japanese, he published The Tale of the Heike: The Inu-Oh Chapters in 2017.
KENDALL HEITZMAN is an associate professor of Japanese literature and culture at the University of Iowa. He has translated the work of Hideo Furukawa, Tomoka Shibasaki, and many others. His translation of Kaori Fujino’s Nails and Eyes was published by Pushkin Press in 2023 and won the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize. His translation of Fujino’s Negative Space will be published in March 2027.