Recent Publications

In the interest of those readers of this blog whose first language is not English, I have been a little remiss in not publicizing the two translated versions of my book, The Samurai Mind.

There are, in fact, two other versions:

Italian

La Mente del Samurai, Roma: Astrolabio, Ulbatini Editore. 2011

Spanish

La Mente del Samurái, Barcelona: Editorial Kairós. 2012

I do have a couple of the Italian ones, which I would be happy to send to anyone who drops me a line (first come, first served), but unfortunately, none of the Spanish edition.

If you are a Spanish or Italian reader, please pick up a copy and see what you have been missing. 

While we are talking of publications, be sure to check out the latest version of Kendo World (available in Kindle edition, too). This is, as the name suggests, primarily of interest to Kendo enthusiasts, but it is well-written and professionally produced and well worth a look for anyone with an interest in  such things.

The latest edition has Miyamoto Musashi as its focus, and it includes one of my articles: Confucian Voices in Swordsmanship II: Kenjutsu no Fushikihen. 

As the title suggests, it examines the relationship between Conficianism and swordsmanship in the work ‘Kenjutsu no Fushikihen’. This is a little studied work even in Japanese, but it’s inclusion in one of the major collections of original documents on martial arts at the beginning of the twentieth century suggests that it deserves to be examined more closely. 

Western readers have had very little exposure to it (if they haven’t read The Samurai Mind, that is), although a few quotes pop up here and there, from DT Suzuki’s Zen and Japanese Culture, where he casts it in a decidedly Zen light, also doubting that the writer can have achieved much in the way of enlightenment. In actual fact, it is a work steeped in Neo-Confucianism, although the references to Zen might confuse a casual reader. The title, however, is a pointed reference to Zen – or could be taken as such. Fushiki is the Japanese translation of the answer Bodhidharma is said to have given to the Emperor Wu when asked who he was, “I do not know.”  The O Yomei (Wang Yangming) branch of Neo-Confucianism was familiar with Zen, and the founder was strongly critical of it. Nevertheless, they often used references to Zen in their teachings, so this doesn't seem at all unusual. (I know I am always criticizing Suzuki, and he does deserve it, but it must be said in his defense that he wrote extensively (if partially) on subjects that had received very little serious treatment in English before then.)

I wrote a little more about Confucianism previously, (The Confucian Swordsman I & II) and of course, the complete text of Kenjutsu no Fushikihen is included in The Samurai Mind.

Although it is a little obscure in places, it is a fascinating explanation of how to teach an art that relies on spontaneity to be effective. It is, in effect, the criticism of a jazz musician for classical training as a way to prepare someone for a jam session. As someone whose own music training (not to a very high degree, I must admit, but I did play the trumpet from the age of eight until starting university) left him very poorly prepared to jam, I appreciate it.

In Business - The Book of Five Rings

Corporate Kendo - Tips for the Marketplace (from Samurai Businessman, New York, June 29, 1981)

Back in the 1980’s, The Book of Five Rings was partly popularized by selling it to the business crowd – touted as the secret of Japan’s economic success, managers and executives of all stripes were encouraged to read it and benefit from the insights their competitors’ thinking.

I came to Musashi myself through a teenage interest in the exotic, of which martial arts were part, and this was certainly pretty far from its use for business, but Musashi’s popularity in the USA was, indeed, business driven. An article from a 1981 edition of New York Magazine makes for interesting reading, explaining that one of the early proselytizers, the advertising executive George Lois said:

"I have some advice for American businessmen who are trying to figure out why the Japanese excel in business. Buy and study a copy of Musashi's A Book of Five Rings."

It also includes the corrective from a senior correspondent for the Nihon Keizai Shinbun, who said that Japanese businessmen were “far too concerned with the future to be rummaging around in the past.” (Flippo, C. (1981) Samurai Businessman, New York, June 29, 29-31).

Interestingly, he was turned on to it by Kaneda Masaichi, a famous baseball pitcher. (perhaps it was in the air - Oh Sadaharu, a contemporary of his, practiced batto (drawing and cutting with the sword) to improve his batting).

I recently came across an article addressing historical sources of East Asian strategy and their application to business. It dealt with Gorin no Sho, the Three Kingdoms and Sun Tzu, highlighting connections between them and giving guidelines for using some of the key concepts they contain in business.

Here are the main points it presented with respect to Gorin no Sho:

1) Grasping relationships and multiple perspectives… To gain new knowledge or find innovative solutions, the student must avoid unilateral thinking and the limitations of a one-track mind.

2) Seeking knowledge and information. Victory may be achieved when the “rhythm of each opponent” is known.

3) Being patient. It is best to wait for the opponent to make the first move, according to Bushido (the way of military men).

4) Training and disciplining oneself.

5) Disguising emotions and intentions. “(A)lways be the same way in any situation, and keep your mind in the Middle Way attitude,” wrote Musashi… Furthermore, people should never reveal their honne (real intentions) and always “ act in such a way as to not reveal the depth of your spirit to others, “ Musashi stated.

6) Possessing flexibility. Despite Musashi’s advocacy of the middle-of-the-road approach, he emphasizes physical, psychological, and emotional flexibility during a confrontation.

7) Using diversion. Wrote Musashi: “Once you have distracted {your opponent}, gain the advantage by following with your attack.” While promoting patience, Musashi also advocates swift action at the opportune moment… (here the author goes on to expand this point rather than talking about diversion).

8) Divide and conquer. “(W)hen you have seen that the ranks of the opponents have been disarrayed… push in and strike strongly without allowing any time to lapse.”

9) Assessing the terrain. Musashi’s analysis is analogous to Sun Tzu’s statement that “it is of utmost importance to force the opponent into a disadvantageous position.”

Tung, R.L. (1994) Strategic Thought in East Asia, Organizational Dynamics, Vol 22(4), 55-65.

This brings up a couple of interesting points.

Firstly, I’m not sure I would be able to reduce my understanding of Musashi’s work into only nine or ten points, but I find it interesting to see the ideas of someone who has done so, if only because examining someone else’s view of a work enables you to reassess your own view of that work. It gives you a tool to measure or assess your own understanding.

Secondly, it calls into question the value of works such as Gorin no sho, that were clearly written with regard to specific contexts, for a specific audience, and referenced things with which the average reader no longer has knowledge of. The concepts outlined above are not particularly profound – whether or not they are particularly useful in a business context, I am not qualified to say. I suppose they might provide some food for thought, especially for those involved in business with East Asian companies, who were not familiar with the culture.

Sun Tzu, which was also discussed in the article, is referred to much more commonly – despite the lack of a familiar context, it seems to have become a much used text in a variety of contemporary business and military contexts. There have been far more incisive and focused texts on strategy and tactics in these areas, but it has remained one of the most often cited works, famously quoted by Gordon Gecko and assigned as reading by the USMC for officer training. Perhaps the very fact it is so general that it allows for creative interpretation for its readers and broad applicability across a variety of fields and situations.

In Japan, too, Sun Tzu has been written about in a business context, but a quick perusal of the book shelves suggests that it is less often used as inspiration than The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and other, home grown sources. In this latter category, it is not Musashi who features most often, but the generals of the Sengoku period, the Age of the War.

Yes, there's plenty of interesting material there!

Neko No Myojutsu - The Mysterious Skills of the Old Cat

The Cornered Rat Attacks the Cat - Ogata Gekko (1892)

Neko no Myojutsu is a story that many people will be familiar with. I first came across it as a student in DT Suzuki's Zen and Japanese Culture, an important but somewhat flawed book in this field, and subsequently it was the first text on swordsmanship that I read in Japanese, being already familiar with the story. It was also the genesis of my book The Samurai Mind. Originally I had envisaged an illustrated version of this story, done in sumi-e, and this was the proposal I sent to several publishers. Stonebridge Press picked it up and asked to see the complete series of illustrations. They liked them, and everything looked set... until their parent company got into trouble and placed a moratorium on new acquisitions. Subsequently Tuttle contacted me and said they were interested in the text, but not the illustrations, and the rest is history.

The importance of Neko no Myojutsu
The fact that it has been translated several times suggests that not only is this an appealing story, but that it might have something interesting to say. Although the author, Issai Chozan, disavowed his own skill as a swordsman, he clearly had a well-developed understanding, and was able to give a very helpful impressionistic view of the inner factors involved higher levels of the art. It is commonly included in Japanese collections of works on swordsmanship, and was, at one time, held as an inner text of the Itto-ryu.

In the context of my book, I regard it as a key to understanding these inner elements of bujutsu.

Overview
It is a fable, and this is part of its attraction and why it is so accessible. A samurai named Shoken (his name means 'Victorious Sword' or something along those lines) finds a large rat running about his house. His own cat runs away in fright and he has no luck when he tries to kill it himself. the three experienced rat-catching cats in the area have no luck either, so it is left to an old cat in a neighboring part of town to take care of things. That night, the cats have a little celebration, and ask the old cat to explain why he was so successful. He offers critiques of their methods and goes on to explain his own approach. Shoken has been listening in and interjects his own question, which the old cat answers, expanding on his original answer.

What makes it a key text?
The critiques of the old cat are important in that they compare the different methods of the three cats, each one of which uses an approach focused on one aspect of combat. Actually, each one of these approaches is fairly specific, and anyone with a broad background in martial arts that includes some knowledge about different styles and approaches, and the arguments that surround them will probably find this quite familiar. They are particularly apposite in terms of swordsmanship - from this and other writings, it seems there was some dispute about which was the most effective approach to swordsmanship, both in terms of training and tactical usage during the period in which he was writing... and later, too.

Readers will probably understand these different approaches without too much difficulty. The explanations offered by the cat on why each approach is flawed require a little more care with the translation, and I must admit that some of the translations I have read didn't supply the reader with the clarity and logic present in the original.

The cat's explanation of his myojutsu (marvellous technique) is the heart of the piece, and consequently it is here that a firm understanding of the concepts described, on the part of the translator, is most important to get a real sense of what it all means and why it works. 'It', in this case, refers to these inner factors, often referred to by terms such as shinpo or shinjutsu, that form an important part of the advanced techniques of bujutsu. The most well-known example is probably mushin, which is often treated as an exclusively Zen concept. This story is interesting in that it offers, as I noted before, an impressionistic description and explanation of this area of bujutsu, as well as describing related areas, such as mental domination and harmonizing with the opponent, and explaining why they are different and their relative superiority.

Wrapped up in a story about cats, it makes for a compelling and practical introduction to this area.

Hopefully readers will find my translation in The Samurai Mind leaves them in a better position to understand and appreciate the other works in the collection, which I will be discussing over the next few posts.

The Inner secrets - Questioning Old Manuals

Issun saki wa yami - an inch ahead is darkness
Of course, here,  the disastrous events of the 11th are on everyone's mind.
With a rising death toll and thousands missing, even for those not directly involved, it serves as a reminder of just how precarious life can be. This is something that has formed a continuous theme in many expressions of Japanese culture, artistic and literary, and has colored many aspects of life here. Perhaps it is why a premium has been put on keeping orderly records of so many things - a surprising number of which still survive despite their frailty.

Scrolls from the Chikubushima Ryu of bojutsu

Preserving Knowledge
The type of knowledge handed developed and handed down by schools of bujutsu was primarily transmitted person to person in a close and trusted relationship between master and student, and learned through long, intense application. Over the years, much of this knowledge has been lost - schools and styles have died out and the teachings seem less relevant with changes in society and technology. Although the passing on of this kind of knowledge and skill was primarily a person to person affair, written texts did play a role as well. And a surprising number of them exist till this day.

As the translator of a collection of old works on swordsmanship, the question of what can we actually learn from these kinds of works is close to my heart. Of course, they have an intrinsic value for those with historical bent, but what we can learn beyond that, whether they contain anything that we can utilise in our own lives and practice is one that, I suspect, is at the back of many readers' minds.

Some of the works in this, and related, genre have certainly stood the test of time and achieved a canonical status. Sun Tzu's The Art of War, in particular has been read widely - for perhaps two thousand years, in fact, and in the late twentieth century, Miyamoto Musashi's Gorin no Sho achieved a wide international readership. This is despite (or perhaps because of) the vagueness or lack of precise detail that allows a variety of interpretations. Though these kinds of works conjure up a feeling, an image of knowledge,  they do not always deliver on their promise, remaining tantalizingly vague and frequently obscure.

So to rephrase the question above, perhaps what we should be asking is whether they contain more than these vague and attractive generalisations, some core of 'deep' knowledge?

If the answer to this is 'yes', we should then ask if we can access that knowledge. With a work like Sun Tzu, the range of notes and interpretations, stretching back a very long way, tell us that not only have many seen it as a valuable work, but that it is one that invites, and perhaps requires, explanation.

The same questions may also be asked of other works. One of the enduring attractions of Musashi's Gorin no sho is the fact that he was a superlative swordsman. The practical value of his work may depend on our ability to interpret it, but Musashi's ability seems to stand as surety of the riches it contains, making it worth the effort to study what he wrote.


We might expand our enquiry to give us the following questions:

    1) Does the original work contain 'deep' knowledge?
        i. Who was the writer? How much did he know?
        ii. To what degree was the writer able to accurately put his knowledge into written form?
        iii. How much did the writer want to reveal?
       
    2) Is the meaning accessible?   


Who was the writer?
Sometimes this is how we come to the work in the first place - we hear about someone and then find out they have written something. Often, it is the other way round - the written work is what makes the writer famous. How many of Sun Tzu's contemporaries were equal or superior to him?

Of course, a 'track record' is a good reason for reading something in this genre. The notes on Sun Tzu written by Cao Cao, or Zhuge Liang's book on The Art of War, or in the west, Julius Caesar or Napoleon's own works suggest knowledge and understanding that come direct from a master. Whether or not they were concerned with explaining their tactical insights or doing a PR job (as in Caesar's case) might have further bearing on how interesting their writing is.

Sometimes, however, we know little about the writer save what he has written, and it is from this that we must judge his skills. Though it may be unwise to judge prematurely, it is usually possible to gauge something of a writer's skill through the way he writes, the tone he takes, what he mentions and what he doesn't.

To what degree was the writer able to accurately put his knowledge into written form?
There are so many variables in this field, that this question may be almost impossible to answer, relevant as it is. Some, such as Julius Caesar, are recognised as good writers, but this is not always the case. Sometimes a less practised writer may be able to convey the essence of meaning more effectively than  one who is more stylistically accomplished. In any case, although it should be borne in mind that the most skilled practitioner in a field may not be the best writer, it is also true that in this field, authentic knowledge and skill is generally held to be of paramount importance - this is the way these arts were taught and this attitude extends to primary sources in the field. We want to hear what the masters had to say.

How much did the writer want to reveal?
Often these kinds of works were written for a small inner circle of initiates or students of a tradition, sometimes just for one person, and so include references and jargon that only someone already privy to those teachings can readily understand. The Heiho Kadensho, written by Yagyu Munenori, expressly states that it was just for members of the family. Many of the terms used are opaque and not easily understood by outsiders to the Yagyu school of swordsmanship - in fact there is even acknowledgment of this within the text.

Other works give even less information - they are just lists of names of techniques or diagrams that serve to indicate relative importance of particular issues. If Heiho Kadensho is difficult to understand, these might be considered truly impenetrable for outsiders.

There are yet others which use 'coded language'. They might, in fact be quite didactic and even intended for a relatively large audience, but still held something back. Many Taoist work seem to fall into this category, with short-hand or jargon inserted for particular concepts that would only have been explained orally. Works in many other genre fall into this category as well - secrets were valued and well kept in these societies. Though some of them may seem to us to be of little direct value, and others are easily dismissed as being 'merely' this or that, in a world where such things could mean the difference between success and failure, riches and poverty, and ultimately life and death, it ill becomes us to belittle them. In the medieval realm of poetry, one of the most powerful and influential families, the Reizei family, kept secrets that were an important part of its position and power. They included, in this world of hand-copied manuscripts and long memories, copies of poetry collections held by almost no-one else and knowledge of the correct pronunciation of certain words.

Not all writings were meant for such a restricted audience, however, and it is from these that we can expect to gain a greater understanding of the meaning as the writer intended.

Translation
Of course, for works in other languages, this is an important consideration. As well as understanding the straight-forward meaning, the technical terms and the specific nuances as they relate to the subject are extremely important; to a practitioner the differences can be small but important, and transform a sentence from a general statement into something with weight and authenticity. In particular, it should allow a seasoned practitioner to be able to understand the intent of the writer, which can be a somewhat different thing from merely transposing the words into fluent English. This is particularly important in the case of terminology for which there is no exact English equivalent, (ki, i, & kokoro spring to mind) and when an inexact choice of words can render a concept devoid of all practical meaning... although sounding fine in English.

And the secrets?
After all that, I must say that I find these works endlessly fascinating. The most interesting of these works are rich in experience and knowledge, sometimes well hidden, and sometimes clearly explained. As with any art or field of study, the advanced teachings are built upon a foundation - the lay person may find them difficult to understand at first, but with a growing familiarity with the concepts and approaches on which they are built, the deeper meanings can become clear. Which is not to claim that I understand everything myself, merely that much of what seems obscure was not meant to be so, and much that is deep, and useful, was not necessarily hidden or secret.

Musashi takes a Bath

Musashi breaks out of the bath-house, and he's not happy. A triptych by Utagawa Kuniyoshi

The fictional Musashi has a life of his own, so for a change, I thought I would write bit about one of his lesser known fictional episodes.

Despite its being a novel, the episodes presented in Yoshikawa Eiji's 'Musashi' have had a powerful influence on the way we see the historical swordsman. Inoue Takehiko's manga Vagabond, is one of the most notable contemporary versions of the tale - the well known series of movies starring Mifune Toshiro, and the slightly less well-known (but possibly better) series starring Nakamura Kinnosuke are direct adaptations of Yoshikawa's novel, while numerous other versions in various media draw heavily on his work. His novel did not spring, sui generis, from nothing. There had been several films, books and a long history of oral tellings of Musashi's story, not to mention a popular kabuki play, and it is to this we must turn to discover the origin of the particular episode illustrated in the print above.


I first saw this print in Victor Harris's 'A Book of Five Rings', and it was a few years later that I saw the first in the series of the Nakamura Kinnosuke films and discovered the same scene... "Aah, this is where it comes from", I thought. Actually, I was wrong, but it wasn't until quite a lot later that I discovered the real source of this story... an 18th century kabuki play.

These two prints show Musashi threatening Dengoemon.

Unfortunately, I have lost the details of the artist.

Katakiuchi Ganryujima
The play, Katakiuchi Ganryujima 'Vengeance at Ganryu Island' was written in 1737 by the playwright Fujiwara Banzaburo, in Osaka. Its popularity ensured its transfer to Edo theatres the following year, where it hit the big time. It concerns Musashi's vendetta against the villainous Ganryu, who ambushed and killed Musasashi's father, Munisai (with a gun), finally ending with the famous duel in which Ganryu loses his life. Of course, Ganryu is thoroughly villainous, and stoops to all sorts of 'low tricks' (in fact, borrowing something of the real Musashi's use of heiho to defeat his opponents with unexpected tactics - Musashi still bears the stigma, in some quarters of, using less than straight-forward means to win his victories).
 

The bath-house scene occurs when Musashi is on the trail of Ganryu, and having heard of a sword teacher who answers to Ganryu's description, visits him under a pseudonym and applies for a match. When he arrives, he discovers that the man, Shirakura Dengoemon, is actually who he says he is, and not Ganryu. At this stage, he feels he can't turn back, and so fights several of the pupils, and beating them, goes on to fight the teacher, whom he also defeats. Dengoemon, pretends to take his defeat in good form and, after revealing that he suspects Musashi's real identity, asks him to stay a while as his guest and teach him. Musashi agrees, and stays for two or three months, although gradually coming to feel that Dengoemon is not really the kind of person he should have as a student. All the while, Dengoemon is watching out for a chance to kill Musashi. He takes a few of his students into his confidence, and after dismissing various options, decides to shut Musashi in the new bath-house Dengoemon has just had constructed on his property, and there boil/steam him into a weakened condition and kill him, if he hasn't already been killed outright.

Musashi in the bath-house. From a print by Kuniyoshi

With this in mind, they throw a party to celebrate the new bath-house, and when Musashi, slightly the worse for drink, prepares to leave for bed, they persuade him to take the inaugural bath. He goes in, without his weapons, of course, and the men outside bar the door and start adding more and more hot water. Musashi calls out that it's too, hot, then realising that it's a trap, smashes his way through the door, grabs the piece of wood used to bar the door and lays about him, killing anyone who comes too close... including Dengoemon. Running back to his room he grabs his swords and a thin robe, before escaping into the mountains, stopping only briefly to kill Dengoemon's wife, who comes at him wielding a naginata.

It's all fiction, of course, but it's interesting how Yoshikawa included a similar incident in his own novel - given his extensive research, it is likely he knew of this story and adapted it to fit into his own novel and help provide motivation for the young Musashi's feelings of alienation when he returns to his home village after the battle of Sekigahara.

The Bushu Denraiki - source document for the Musashi story

This was my winter reading - well a bit of it, anyway.

The commonly told of Miyamoto Musashi is a much patched version taken from a variety of sources of varying reliability, stitched together in what has become a familiar pattern, including large doses of speculation and outright fiction. Of course, much of the fiction comes from Yoshikawa Eiji's novel, which many of the subsequent movie and TV versions were based on. His version, which drew heavily from previous versions and documents, some of which contained greater or lesser amounts of reliable historical information, has become a kind of de facto story of Musashi's life.

It was only when reading through William de Lange's new(ish) translation of the Bushu Denraiki, one of these source documents, that I realised how little detail there is on these documents in English, even when you include William Wilson's 'The Lone Swordsman' and Kenji Tokitsu's 'Miyamoto Musashi: his life and writings'. While Wilson used a wide variety of sources, he steers clear of discussing them individually, and while Tokitsu is good on Musashi's own writings (and lots else besides), he gives less information on sources about Musashi's life.

De Lange is particularly good on just this sort of thing, laying the historical context out clearly and providing extensive notes and background on the major figures involved (albeit tangentially, in some cases) in Musashi's life. He gives a valuable explanation of the relationships between these major sources, which goes a long way to helping us understand the roots of the legend.

The source documents which form the basis of what we know about Musashi's life fall into two parallel streams: the Bushu Denraiki (1727) itself, written by a 4th generation successor to the Niten Ichi-ryu, Tachibana Minehira, and the Hyoho (sometimes written as Heiho) Senshi Denki (1782) which was written by a 'grand-student' of Minehira's, who had left Fukuoka and settled in Harima, one Niwa Nobuhide, and based his account on what he could remember of  Minehira's original, embroidering where necessary to fill in the gaps. This stream of knowledge was Kyushu based, and was connected with the Kuroda clan, with whom Musashi had strong connections early in his career.

The other stream was connected with the Hosokawa family, with whom Musashi was close to in his later life. Tokitsu also mention this, (though he gives different readings of the names, as well as different dates). According to de Lange, the Bukoden (1755) was compiled by Toyoda Masanaga, then rewritten in an updated and clearer form by his son, Toyoda Masashige (1776) as the Nitenki (which is perhaps the source most commonly quoted from).

In addition, there is the Kokura Hibun, which is not a document as such, but a stone monument set up by Musashi's adopted son Iori in 1654. This is the earliest account of Musashi's life, and although it is generally considered accurate, it must be considered a partisan account. (There are other, contemporary, references to Musashi, but not accounts of his life).

The book, 'The Real Musashi: Origins of a Legend - the Bushu Denraiki' is valuable as being one of the earliest and purest of the accounts of Musashi's life. There are many details that will probably be unfamiliar to Musashi fans, even ones who are fairly well-read - it gives details of Musashi's involvement in a seige in Kyushu at the time of Sekigahara, rather than fighting in that battle, as well as an alternative, and quite interesting, account of the duel on Ganryujima. As de Lange admits, although some of the stories are almost certainly untrue, there is also much that appears factual, some of which has also been corroborated by other sources - in any case, the whole combines to give a fresh and vivid impression of the master swordsman, written by someone who was concerned to give as accurate a portrait as he could, based on the stories and recollections of his own masters.

This is a nice book - it is well written and presented, with the original text and the accompanying notes clearly differentiated by the use of different fonts. It is limited in  its scope, but purposely so, which gives it a nice compactness. Although I have one or two minor quibbles, they are not really worth detailing here, but as they are particularly germane to this blog I will just mention two.... the place where Musashi fought the Yoshioka's in his final 'duel' with them, is sagarimatsu not kudarimatsu, and the Ichijo Temple (Ichijoji) was not still standing in Musashi's day, as de Lange has it.

Overall, however, de Lange has a firm and confident hand with both the translation and the notes. (It is worth saying, however, that the notes take up as much or more space than the translation, which is not particularly long). It is certainly worth reading if you are interested in Musashi, but it is a rather specialised volume, and is probably best digested after reading some of the broader based works, such as the two mentioned above, to get a more balanced perspective. It is also a touch pricey for its size, at least the imported version was. I noticed that de Lange's accompanying volume, The accompanying volume, The Bukoden, is due out this spring, and it seems de Lange also plans a biography of Musashi. I think I will probably be getting it.

By the way, in case you were wondering, the 'Bushu' in the title Bushu Denraiki, is an early pronunciation of Musashi. The title means "The Recorded Transmissions of Musashi".