Alger's Reviews > Musashi

A breathtaking fictionalization of the life of one of the world's greatest warriors and renaissance men. Yoshikawa takes us on a mezmorizing voyage to a crossroads in Japanese history that changed all the rules and gave birth to a legend. The book opens in the year 1600 at the end of the infamous battle of Sekigahara, where the armies of east and western Japan met to decide who would govern: Toyotomi or Tokugawa. In the end to Tokugawa emerged victorious and the 150 year period of civil war came to an end.
The young son of a country samurai, Shinmen Takezo, goes to fight for the Toyotomi at Sekigahara and opens the book prostrate on the ground with two bullets in his thigh. He escapes the carnage of the battle to his home province and emerges from this ordeal not as the noble warrior he intended, but rather as a savage bandit. However, through the intervention of an old friend he is brought to justice and given a second chance and a new name. He is locked in a room of the Lord's castle for three years straight with only treatises on war, religion, and the classics of both Japan and China. From this incarceration he emerged a new man.
Musashi is offered a position as reatiner to the Tokugawa governor, but instead decides to journey across Japan to hone his swordsmanship. To do this Musashi does more than practice drawing and swinging a sword. To achieve this he studies calligraphy, painting, sculprture, agriculture, and music, all in the the pursuit of perfection as a swordsman.
The book takes us through the highlights of Musashi's career from Sekigahara , to his legendary feud with the Yoshioka sword school of Kyoto to it's culmination at the Duel of the Spreading Pine, finalizing with his infamous duel with the sword saint, Sasaki Kojiro, on Funajima Island.
Musashi evolves constantly as a character, as does his rival, Kojiro. Both men are near facsimilies of each other, the difference of which makes the book and the unfolding of both the aforementioned's destinies so tantalizing.