Tom Holland

Yes.

And those lines you quoted are from its opening and it's in the translation by Royal Tyler for Penguin Classics.

And it's a tremendous read.

So, Dominic, we met the Haika or the Taira, as they are better known in the first episode of this, our epic series on the rise of the samurai.

And just to remind listeners about who the Haika or the Taira, as we'll be calling them, who they are.

They are an aristocratic dynasty that had first emerged in Japan in the early 9th century.

They descended from a whole crowd of princes who had become surplus to imperial requirements.

They were also much too expensive to maintain, and so they'd been deprived of their princely status.

They'd been given the surname of Taira.

So they had effectively been banished from the silken court of Kyoto with its love of calligraphy and perfumes and cherry blossom.

They'd gone off to the much rougher and wilder northeastern reaches of Honshu, the main island of Japan, and they'd made great names for themselves there.

These northeastern reaches of Japan in the early Middle Ages, this is where people lived who were viewed by the Japanese as barbarians.

They'd only just been subdued, brought under the rule of the emperor in Kyoto, and so it's still very much a kind of feel of a frontier zone.

As a result of this, the Taira, even though they are descended from emperors, they're not as into writing poetry, I think it's fair to say, as the courtiers and the great lords who are back in Kyoto.

Although they do still love a poem, as we will see.

And we said how back in the court in Kyoto, warriors are despised.

To be a fighter is to be seen as someone who is thuggish and uncultured.

But of course, this is not the case beyond the mountains that lie east of Kyoto.

And there, for centuries now, it has been the custom for an entire order of men, so they might be low-ranking nobles, they might be upwardly mobile peasants, to be raised from childhood in the saddle, shooting arrows, this kind of demanding skill, which marks them out as kind of an elite warrior.

And it's not just boys who are being raised to do this.