General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

New Tales of the Taira Clan

New Tales of the Taira Clan (新・平家物語, Shin Heike Monogatari, also released abroad as Taira Clan Saga or Tales of the Taira Clan) is a 1955 Japanese color historical drama directed by Kenji Mizoguchi, produced by Daiei at its Kyoto studio, and adapted from Eiji Yoshikawa's historical novel serialized in the magazine Weekly Asahi¹^•². It was the first installment of a planned three-film project and the second-to-last film of Mizoguchi's career³^•⁴.

Key fact	Detail
Japanese title	新・平家物語 (Shin Heike Monogatari); English titles include Taira Clan Saga and New Tales of the Taira Clan²^•⁵
Release	September 21, 1955, distributed by Daiei²
Director / producer	Kenji Mizoguchi; produced by Masaichi Nagata at Daiei Kyoto¹
Source	Eiji Yoshikawa's novel Shin Heike Monogatari, serialized in Weekly Asahi¹
Key crew	Screenplay Yoshikata Yoda, Masashige Narusawa, Hisaichi Tsuji; cinematography Kazuo Miyagawa; music Fumio Hayasaka; color supervision by painter Sanzo Wada⁵
Length / format	107 minutes on the National Film Archive record (some sources list 108); 35 mm color, standard ratio¹^•⁴^•²
Lead cast	Raizo Ichikawa as Taira no Kiyomori, with Yoshiko Kuga, Michiyo Kogure, Narutoshi Hayashi, Ichijiro Oya, Eitaro Shindo, Koreya Senda, and Eijiro Yanagi⁴^•²

Spoilers

Story and cast

The film is set in the late Heian period, a time when the aristocratic order was decaying and the warrior class was rising³. It dramatizes the youth of the samurai leader Taira no Kiyomori: his father Taira no Tadamori, victorious against pirates in the western seas and in settling a dispute between the court and the Enryaku-ji temple on Mount Hiei, is nonetheless treated poorly by the court nobles, who are unsettled by the rising power of the warrior class³^•⁹. Kiyomori visits Fujiwara no Tokinobu, who was suspended over Tadamori's reward, and falls in love with his daughter Tokiko⁹. A rumor reaches Kiyomori that his real father was the Retired Emperor Shirakawa, leaving him with conflicted feelings about Tadamori⁹. The plot culminates, in the synopsis given by Kinenote and eiga.com, in Kiyomori firing an arrow into the portable shrine carried by two thousand warrior monks of Mount Hiei gathered at Gion, after Tadamori has died amid the disturbances². A review on eiga.com notes that in historical fact the arrow was shot by Kiyomori's forces in error rather than by Kiyomori himself, and that this episode in the film follows Yoshikawa's fiction¹⁰.

The film is also a workplace debut story. Raizo Ichikawa, then a new Daiei star in his second film, played young Kiyomori, and the role is credited with helping launch his career; he became one of the studio's top stars until his early death in 1969⁴^•⁸^•⁶. Around him, Mizoguchi drew vivid performances from a large ensemble cast that included Yoshiko Kuga as Tokiko, Michiyo Kogure as Yasuko, Ichijiro Oya as Tadamori, Eitaro Shindo, Koreya Senda, and Eijiro Yanagi⁸^•².

Production

Daiei intended the adaptation of Yoshikawa's novel as a series and assigned the opening chapter to Mizoguchi, who had just returned from Yokihi (Princess Yang Kwei Fei), a 1955 color co-production with Hong Kong's Shaw Brothers³^•⁶. The screenplay was written by Yoshikata Yoda, Masashige Narusawa, and Hisaichi Tsuji, the same team pattern used on Mizoguchi's Yokihi, with cinematography by Kazuo Miyagawa and music by Fumio Hayasaka⁵^•³. For the color scheme Daiei brought in the painter Sanzo Wada as color supervisor⁵. According to the ACMI collection notes, Mizoguchi asked an art teacher from forty years earlier to serve as the film's color consultant⁷.

The film was Mizoguchi's second work in the color medium, after Princess Yang Kwei Fei³; he made only two color films, both in 1955, the year before his death⁷^•⁶^•¹⁴. It is also counted as the last of his jidaigeki (period films)⁷. The festival program note by critic Tony Rayns records that Mizoguchi's one regret was that he could not shoot it in CinemaScope⁸.

Style and color

Miyagawa and Mizoguchi used color symbolically. Miyagawa recalled that Mizoguchi "always used colour as an element in the overall design," giving the example of a gate behind the angry Kiyomori that appeared in a "ferocious red," because red was the color of anger and blue of sadness, as much as black⁶. When the film was screened in the United States, New York Times critic Eugene Arthur praised its "lyrical pastel compositions" and observed that the monks, warriors, and aristocrats were differentiated by the shades of their costumes as much as by their behavior⁶. Rayns's program note describes the film's control of color, design, and staging as matching Mizoguchi's familiar high standards, with the complicated historiography made sense of through the ensemble performances⁸.

The film's long-take camerawork was praised by figures of the French New Wave, according to the Pia-sourced synopsis on Natalie¹¹.

The trilogy and Mizoguchi's late career

Two sequels followed in 1956, directed by other Daiei filmmakers: New Tales of the Taira Clan: The Three Women Around Yoshinaka (part two, by Teinosuke Kinugasa) and New Tales of the Taira Clan: Shizuka and Yoshitsune (part three, by Koji Shima)³^•¹².

New Tales of the Taira Clan was Mizoguchi's penultimate film; he died suddenly in August 1956⁴^•¹³.

Preservation and later showings

A collaborative restoration, carried out digitally in 2004, was undertaken by the National Film Center (now the National Film Archive of Japan) together with the studio then known as Kadokawa Pictures¹². The National Film Archive of Japan holds the show-print in its collection, a 35 mm color sound print running 107 minutes¹. The restored version has been screened at archives and festivals, including the Museum of Modern Art in 2018, where a 4K digital restoration was shown, and the Karlovy Vary festival's 2017 Mizoguchi tribute⁴^•⁸.

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026