Plenty of Nothing

Heike Monogatari Wax Museum

Visit the Takamatsu Heike Monogatari Wax Museum with Amanda and Jim.

Giō Departs

Source. You can read about the Giō/Hotoke/Kiyomori love triangle in The Tale of the Heike, chapter 1, part 6.

Burning Palace

This is a detail from a scroll painting of the Kamakura period entitled "Night Attack on the Sanjō Palace". It illustrates an event recorded in the Heiji Monogatari:

    The situation at the Sanjō Palace was beyond description. Soldiers were guarding all the gates, and flames were shooting up here and there. Wild flames filled the heavens, and a tempestuous wind swept up clouds of smoke. The nobles, courtiers, and even ladies-in-waiting of the women's quarters were shot down or slashed to death, for it was thought that they perhaps constituted the whole of Shinzei's family. When they rushed out, so as not to be burned by the fire, they met with arrows. When they turned back, so that they would not be struck by the arrows, they were consumed by the flames. Those who were afraid of the arrows and terrified by the flames even jumped into the wells in large numbers, and of those, too, the bottom ones in a short time had drowned, those in the middle had been crushed to death by their fellows, and those on top had been burned up by the flames themselves. The palace buildings, built one beside the other, were swept by a fierce wind, and ashes spewed forth upon the ground. How could anyone at all have saved himself? The Imperial consorts and the ladies-in-waiting were not destroyed in the burning of the A-fang Palace, but the loss of life among the "moon nobles" and "cloud courtiers" in the burning of this retreat of a Retired Emperor was indeed terrible.

Reischauer and Yamagiwa, Translations from Early Japanese Literature, 2nd ed., p. 302.

You can explore the scroll painting here.