English Dub Review: The Heike Story “If You Don’t Belong to the Heike, You Won’t Be a Person”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

A girl with different colored eyes named Biwa shows disgust for some rich kids mistreating a resident, but her father is killed to spare her from being punished. She is eventually taken in by Shigemori, a member of the affluent Taira who can see the spirts of the dead, an ability that Biwa also has, but she can also see the future, including the coming downfall of the Tairas.

OUR TAKE

We begin one of the more anticipated shows of the Fall 2021 Anime Season, and for good reason, as it’s another stylistic series from Science Saru, the studio built by Masaaki Yuasa of Ping Pong the Animation and Devilman Crybaby fame, and who recently contributed to the Star Wars Visions anthology series. Though strangely, this show is directed instead by Naoka Yamada, most well known for directing K-ON, which is quite far away in terms of subject matter. The Heike Story is an adaptation of a recent translation of The Tale of the Heike, an accounting of conflicts between the Taira and Minamoto clans near the end of the twelfth century, previously compiled as an “epic account” of those events. As a whitebread American weeb, I have no framing or previous knowledge with this subject, but I am noticing that animated interpretations of Japanese history are unsurprisingly pretty common in the medium. A while back, I covered a series following the young life of Oda Nobunaga, which ended up being a total dud in terms of style or substance. The Heike Story at least seems to be avoiding that fate with the talent backing it and working on it, with the first episode starting off on a very bold note.

And we don’t need to worry about it being disingenuous about its historical accuracies, because it’s clearly going for a more supernatural interpretation of events from the word go. I say this because I am fairly certain that there were no psychic orphans in Japan in that time period. Today, maybe, but not in the 1100’s. Biwa’s ability to foresee the future seems to mainly be a device for foreshadowing the eventual tragic fates of the Taira clan, who have taken Biwa in. She withholds her visions from them as a form of vengeance over her father’s murder, but she’s also likely to become close to the family now that she’s with them, which will no doubt make her conflicted about holding back chances to save them, but even if she caves, I’m guessing it will be futile to stop all of their deaths. Along with its striking and stylistic visuals that have become a staple of Science Saru, I think this will be a pretty entertaining watch at the very least, and possibly a best of the year contender if we’re lucky.