So this historical novel came out in the 1930s, and the introduction here unfortunately calls it the “Gone with the Wind” of Japan, which might be true in terms of the epic scope and readability, but given that I am quite sour on “Gone with the Wind” I hope that is the full connection. Then there’s another connection that the introduction discusses, which is with the James Clavell novel Shogun, which came out about 30 or so years later and tells a similar story against the backdrop of the same history, but with a white, English protagonist. That only really makes sense if you’re British, but alas. There’s other versions of similar epic storytelling in this era (which by the way is late 17th century Japan, after the reign of Oda Nobanaga) such as the video games Nioh and Nioh 2, and a little bit later, the David Mitchell novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and the Endo novel The Samurai, which also brings in white characters, specifically Jesuit misionary priests.
The story is historical fiction, so it follows the story of Miyamoto Musashi, who begins in the story as foot soldier who has just lost a battle. He’s a teenager, but still a capable fighter, but not a samurai yet. Because of its epic scope the story is also telling the story of different figures in his life and representative characters. The introduction mentions how different this book is from the kinds of books that were available in English translation in the 20th century as being much more neurotic and literary in scope. I would imagine it’s referring to authors like Soseki, Junichiro, Mishima, Enchi, and Kawabata, which all certain fit that description. Reading this, it’s much more like a long film or a tv show, similar to Kurosawa’s longer epics. And like the films, the tone and storytelling here is similar to many different anime I’ve seen. All of this is in contrast to the often dreadfully serious novels mentioned before.
An early theme in this book is getting a second chance. Musashi is a brash young teen when the novel begins and he’s defined by his generally crappy attitude and behavior and only redeemable based on his love and affection for his sister. He’s offered a chance to correct his behavior when he’s beaten in combat by a monk who has him at a disadvantage. And these early scenes of redemption come along with a re-interpretation of his kanji, and therefore a new name.
Another theme that keeps getting revisited is Musashi and women. He’s not a womanizer at all, and is almost desperately chaste at times. There’s something about giving up power and control that more or less freaks him out. Also early in the novel, Musashi meets a teen girl (he’s a teen boy, so no worries) and there’s a persistent sense that they will be circulating each other’s stories for years.
In addition, Musashi is a bit of a Don Quixote in reverse. He’s got a plucky little miscreant sidekick, a boy who is a vassal of sorts. Musashi is not worldy-wise, but he’s more than capable, while his sidekick keeps getting into scrapes. Musashi is also traveling around the country looking for military masters who him to challenge or learn from. This leads to many of the episodes from the book. An early one has him discussing war tactics with a priest of sorts who helped to developed a stick fighting style. After the discussion Musashi feels like he’s been best or lost something, and all this from a conversation. This stems from the priest telling him that Musashi’s power and strength are actually his biggest detriments. The youth in Musashi wants to laugh and fight about it, but the growing man in him knows that there’s wisdom in this comment, just that he doesn’t have enough experience of the world yet to understand how and why. This leads him to ponder this for awhile. This is the first seeds of Musashi as a philosopher, which is mostly how he’s known now. Another time though meeting with a blacksmith who has perfected a technique with a ball and chain staff leads to a straight up fight between two well-matched foes. So there’s different lessons to be learned from many different experiences and encounters.
There’s a big fight in the middle of the novel (spoiler alert, there’s a big fight in this long samurai novel), where the narrator explains that Musashi is a fight first, reflect later. Specifically, this is a discussion of style. In the fight, Musashi is taking on an entire school and has to adapt his tactics to the overwhelming numbers. But in addition, they have a specific style that he has to fight against as well, which causes him to change his specific fighting style. His fighting style is entirely self-made. This means that in plenty of cases, someone much more skilled than him could very well beat him through their mastery, but it also means that he’s not beholden to a specific style, and more so, that his style is unpredictable. If one has a specific style, that means that anyone who knows that style and how to counter it, can beat a better fighter by being able to predict. Musashi doesn’t have the advantage of having something like a memorized set of techniques to form his core, but also means he’s not predictable or beholden. So he fights and wins, and then reflects on what worked in the battle. The battle shows him choosing to do something brutal that is effective, but “dishonorable” and he’s chided and outcast for it. This is in a fight when an entire school showed up to overwhelm him. He can’t win. Well, he always wins, but you get it.
This section also gives us more of his interactions with his longtime love, where they share feelings with each other (she sick, and he on the precipice of battle) where they think they might lose each other. And well, it doesn’t go great.
As the novel begins to move to the end game a few more threads open up. I should mention here that the novel was serialized, and as such there’s lots of episodes, some that contribute to a kind of meta story arc and some that mostly function on their own for individual stories or maybe just character building. A few moments throughout remind us that Musashi was not universally beloved, and the novel doesn’t treat that as fully unjustified. He’s the protagonist, and that is clear throughout, but he’s got his enemies. One is an old woman whose son he killed. But she’s a little more like Grendel’s mother than fully justified in her motives, but she’s an antagonist nonetheless. Another thread involves Musahi’s former student who is now out on his own and not necessarily heeding the lessons he learned. But even that’s not entirely fair as Musashi himself admits that he does not know whether or not his lessons were good. He struggled with the kind of lessons he offered because he was worried about being a helicopter sensai and possibly robbing the boy of a childhood or ill-preparing him for independence. This leads to one conversation with a sword restorer who laments that all the best swords have already been made and if they’re not kept up then that will be that. They relate this to people, as there’s always more people to be made, so if one is a fool, no worries, more where that came from. Anyway, this leads Musashi to be looking for his former pupil as we winnow down to the ends of the novel.
The Book of the Five Rings – no rating
I am not entirely sure what do with a book that mostly tells you about how to fight someone with swords. It will hopefully never come up in my life. One thing that’s very interesting about this is that having just read the novels about Musashi, I am interested to hear his writing and see what from the biographical material from the novel makes it into his writing or the editing around the writing. The answer is, some, not all.
The book talks about the five stance that Musashi comes up with specifically having to go with his two sword technique. In general the two swords of a samurai are the katana and the wakizashi. In generally, the katana is used in open combat where there’s space to swing a three and half foot sword and the wakizashi is used in close combat or closed spaces where the much shorter sword is useful. There are lots of other weapons available like the spear and the lance, the kusarigama (a scythe like blade on one end and a chain and iron ball on the other), axes, bows, and staves. Musashi fights masters of these types in the novels (and presumably in his life) but he focuses on the two swords. He also fights someone with a “washing pole”, a just gigantic katana like sword called a nodachi.
Anyway, rather than use each sword when it was most appropriate, he developed the style to use both at the same time, which requires a lot of dexterity and strength and to constantly press advantage. This book develops the stances he thinks are necessary to know to be successful.