Towards the end of the 9th century, it was common for individual poets to keep compilations of their own verse, sometimes explaining in prose the circumstances behind a poem's composition.
[3] The author of Tales of Heichū could have been Taira no Sadafuni, whose name appears variously as Sadafun, Sadabun, Sadafumi, and Sadabumi (870?–923?
With nine poems by Sadafuni in the Collection of Ancient and Modern Poetry, he ranks fourteenth out of the 120 poets whose work appears in the only imperial anthology compiled during his lifetime.
[4] Tales of Times Now Past (Konjaku Monogatari), is the first narrative work to equate the names Sadafun and Heichū.
[5] It has been traditionally assumed that the stories about Heichū were based on episodes in the life of the historical person Taira no Sadafun, but modern scholarship has never been able to prove this.
Heichū provided a fluid and varied image as different authors used him to further their own moral and narrative ends.
Clearly by the end of the tenth century readers were beginning to laugh at the excesses of Heichū, who had once been appreciated as a lover of refined sensibility and elegant poems.