The Taiheiki, as it has come down to us, contains several chapters which have little or nothing to do with the general plan of the work, and look very like interpolations by some later writer. Such are the chapters on "Rebellions in Japan," on the conquest of Yamato by Jimmu Tennō, on the Corean expedition of Jingō Kōgu, and on the Mongol invasion of Japan by Kublai Khan. The addenda in the Sōmoku edition form, of course, no part of the original work.
Taiheiki or "Record of Great Peace" is a strange name for the history of one of the most disturbed periods that Japan has ever passed through. It presents a succession of intrigues, treasons, secret conspiracies, and open warfare, with wholesale sentences of death or banishment. This was not, however, the original name of the work. It was at first called Anki Yuraiki or "Record of the Causes of Peace and Danger." Another name for it was Kokuka Jiranki, or "Record of the Cure of Civil Disturbance in the State." These last titles rather suggest a philosophical history. But the Taiheiki is very much the reverse of this. It is clearly the work, not of a statesman or philosopher, but of a literary man intent on producing an ornate and romantic story. So long as this end is attained, fact and fiction are to him very much alike. It is difficult to say which predominates in his narrative. He is notoriously inaccurate in such matters as numbers, dates, and genealogies; but that is nothing to the way in which he embroiders his accounts of sieges and battles with details that cannot possibly have been handed down by eye-witnesses, and to the dreams, portents, and miraculous occurrences with which his story abounds. There are also numerous speeches, apparently adapted by him to the speaker and the
