Love, Warfare, and the Maturation of the Young; A Time For Change - Reviewing Eiji Yoshikawa's "Musashi"; Book IV: Wind
It’s been some time since I last sat down to detail my thoughts on Musashi, Eiji Yoshikawa’s dramatic novelization of the life of Japan’s Greatest Swordsman. For those of you who’ve joined me in the previous entries of my piecemeal review of the novel, which seeks to examine each of the seven “books” within, you will find links to the first three parts of this review below:
Book I: Earth
Book II: Water
Book III: Fire
Book IV: Wind generally marks the middle point of Musashi as a novel, but not that of his journey. Many of us are aware of the cultural connotations that wind holds as a concept. Similar to the prevalence of tales regarding disastrous world-ending floods across a variety of faiths and structures of myth throughout human history; or to the belief in dragons or dragon-like creatures shared by cultures which had no means of contacting one another, separated as they were by the vast gulf of time; wind has commonly been associated with forces of change.
It’s not difficult to see why that is, either. All one needs is to do is commit to a cursory examination of the effects we see regularly caused by winds. Ranging from the gentle summer breezes that comfort us with their delicate warmth to the raw and destructive power of hurricanes and tornadoes, there exists a vast myriad of ways in which an effect of nature as seemingly simple as wind can affect and alter our day to day lives. When considering the nature of wind and its relationship to the concept of change more deeply, one rapidly begins to understand why this concept has not only transcended the bounds of individual cultures - repeated as it has been across cultures which never could’ve contacted each other - but why it has endured for as long as it has. Even today we still make use of turns of phrase like “the winds of change” or “a shift in the winds” as analogies for changing times.
In the case of Eiji Yoshikawa’s novel, Book IV: Wind exemplifies this concept of change. In the previous entries on the first three books - Earth, Water, and Fire - I looked at some of the different ways in which those books were representative of the element they chose to name themselves after. Each of these elements is representative not just of the way in which Yoshikawa chooses to approach some of the events he’s dramatizing, but of a fundamental stage within Musashi’s journey. The first book, Earth, sees Takezo building the foundations of masculinity and learning which would help shape the man he’d become after changing his name to Musashi. The second book, Water, sees him learning how to open his mind and gain better control of himself, making him a less rigid and narrow thinking young man. Fire deals heavily in the passions of the cast, the way their desires clash and the building up of conflicts we know are soon to come.
Wind delivers on many of these conflicts, detailing not only how the end result of them changes Musashi, but the entire cast surrounding him. There are the duels with Seijuro and Denshichiro Yoshioka, as well as the Yoshioka School as a whole. Matahachi, who finds himself torn between his mother Osugi’s old ideals of honor, Musashi’s desire to help him become a better man, and the bitter jealousy ultimately born of his own fecklessness. Otsu, who’s love for Musashi began to border on obsession, and who became an object of immature fear for the swordsman. Sasaki Kojiro, the foppish vagabond who acts as the dark mirror of Musashi’s ongoing quest to discover the way of the sword. Akemi, the daughter of the lascivious and vain Oko, who wishes to flee all the troubles of her life, and yet always manages to do so in the most childish way, not unlike her youth obsessed mother.
The elements and themes of change are present all across Book IV, and with very good reason. This is the point in the story where we see the first of Musashi’s most amazing feats, the first series of major climaxes which would ultimately resolve his ongoing feud with the declining and desperate Yoshioka School. It also covers the point in his journey where the clash he’s arguably the most well known for is seen on the horizon, but we’ll get to that in due time.
As one might expect by looking at how much is going on just in the brief summaries I’ve included in the previous two paragraphs, Book IV is easily the longest we’ve read in the novel so far. In total, 21 chapters span this section of the book, with most of them closely matching the average chapter length of the prior three books, or being longer. Glancing ahead, Book V: Sky has 26 chapters, but the average length of most of these is about half that of those in Book IV, and that trend continues on into the final two books as well. As such, it’s safe to say this is the single longest segment of Musashi.
However, long does not equate to dull or uninteresting. Quite the opposite. Just taking into account the trio of duels Musashi partakes in, as well as his numerous encounters with people from his past who’ve been seeking him out, I found myself stuck in on an act in the story that was so rich with action, dramatic tension, and the resolutions of some long awaited meetings that I could barely bring myself to put it down. It’s not so densely packed as Book III: Fire was, but that’s a good thing. The specific goals of the previous act necessitated that events moved along quickly, while Yoshikawa better served this act by taking his time. His approach gives us readers the freedom to ruminate on the events of the story alongside the characters, which helps us further strengthen our connections to them.
One fine example of this comes from the duel which opens up Book IV - Musashi’s bout against the head of the Yoshioka School, Seijuro. For those who may not recall, Seijuro was the eldest son of Kempo, the now deceased creator of the Yoshioka style of swordsmanship and founder of the Yoshioka School. He, along with his younger brother Denshichiro, were expected to carry on their father’s legendary legacy. Unfortunately, each of them ended up proving less than capable in his own way. Seijuro was too timid and had a weakness for women, which we see in earlier chapters via his one sided affection for Akemi. He’s also not a particularly good swordsman despite being the head of the school.
By contrast, Denshichiro is a much better swordsman than his older brother. It’s common knowledge among the Yoshioka students that Denshichiro took to his martial studies far better than Seijuro did. Unfortunately, the younger brother is a vainglorious drunk, hot tempered and impatient. His desire to wander between saké houses and brothels has turned him into the black sheep of his family, and it’s only after Seijuro’s loss in his duel with Musashi that he returns home.
Interestingly, there’s not a whole lot to be said about the duel itself, and that’s because we never actually see it. Now I will fully admit, when the first chapter opened up on a crowd gathered in the field where the duel between Seijuro and Musashi was meant to take place and neither man showed up, I was a bit disappointed. We spend a lot of time in the first half of that chapter with Jotaro, the ten-year-old boy who became Musashi’s ward and student. However, as he and the many other people in the area wait for Musashi and Seijuro to arrive, which includes a sizable group of Yoshioka students who plan to ambush Musashi if the duel doesn’t go their way, they see no signs until a young student from the Yoshioka school comes to inform them that the duel is already over. Seijuro lost.
Those of you who read my earlier reviews can probably guess why this bothered me initially. One of the very first major feats Musashi managed was a duel against a series of the Yoshioka students within the confines of their own dojo. It’s said that he defeated all comers, and that was the reason why an enmity was sparked between the Yoshiokas and himself. However, we don’t get to see that series of duels play out. Instead, we spent our time with Seijuro as he absentmindedly dealt with his daily tasks, only to learn from a panicked student what just happened. Admittedly, I was bothered by the fact that Yoshikawa leaned on this trick again for the duel with Seijuro. However, as Book IV progressed, my opinion on this decision swiftly changed.
While disappointing on the face of it, when I thought back over the previous three books and continued further into the events of Book IV, the reasoning behind Yoshikawa’s decision not to show Seijuro’s duel became clear: it was a foregone conclusion. Seijuro was always going to lose to Musashi, and badly. The difference in their ability is as a colossal gulf, and we get an inkling of that when the messenger sent by Seijuro relays what happened in the fight. Musashi doesn’t just defeat him in a single blow, he completely shatters Seijuro’s arm with a single strike from a wooden sword. Seijuro is now no longer capable of continuing as a swordsman, and as such determines to try and do the most honorable thing he can. He plans to surrender his leadership of the school to his younger brother, hoping that in so doing he’ll be able to better follow the example of their father and won’t make the same mistakes that led Seijuro to the point he’s at.
The results of this single combat inevitably lead to two more climactic moments within Book IV. The first of them is the duel against Denshichiro, something the younger brother insists upon despite his older brother’s vehement protests. (Joe, one of my talented contemporaries from The Brothers Krynn, recently touched on the Denshichiro duel in his recent essay on the short lived nature of celebrity amongst modern legacy writers.) The second is a duel with the remainder of the Yoshioka school, which proved little more than a legally sanctioned attempt at doling out mob justice to Musashi for his repeat victories against them. I shan’t be going into detail on what happens in either of these duels as I don’t wish to spoil their dramatic contents. Suffice it to say, these are the finest moments of action Yoshikawa has written into the book thus far; full of tension, strategy, and the requisite violence needed to give the deadly art of swordplay the impact it deserves.
Musashi’s journey into maturity, as well as the skills he develops in his quest to become Japan's Greatest Swordsman, aren't only shown through the way he personally grows and changes. Yoshikawa has mirrored and paralleled him with various characters all throughout this story, and that is no different in Book IV. While one could easily argue the peak of his growth is shown in his three duels with the Yoshioka School and its two masters in Seijuro and Denshichiro, I don't see it this way. These victories are milestone moments for him, yes, and they do represent impressive and important peaks of his growth. However, it's through the parallels drawn with the people closest to Musashi that we see the most significant ways in which he has changed, and I would argue that no characters showcase this more clearly than Otsu, the woman whom he loves but has denied for so long, and his old friend Matahachi, who stands now as his opposite in most ways.
I’ll begin first with Otsu. Given the generous size of this act of the novel, Otsu’s presence within it isn't as pronounced as some of the other characters we deal with. Arguably the Yoshiokas receive considerably more screen time, for want of a better phrase, as does the boisterous and foppish Sasaki Kojiro, another vagabond warrior who travels with them. More on him later. In fact, Otsu isn't actively seen all that much in Book IV. We hear more of her through Musashi's young ward and apprentice, Jotaro, than we actually see of her.
This isn't the same as saying her presence isn't felt, though. Otsu remains a near constant force throughout Book IV, and it's not difficult to see why. If my reading of Eiji Yoshikawa’s intentions is correct and it always was his plan for this portion of the story to present major turning points for his characters, then it's not hard to imagine the role Otsu has to play. Given how she's been trying and wishing to find Musashi again, how she desires to confess her love to him, it stands to reason she would seek him out. Ultimately, that's exactly what she does, but not before very nearly giving into her despair at his absence. In their years apart, Otsu has grown ill, something which the boy Jotaro and the itinerant monk Takuan1 both believe ultimately stems from her inability to let go of her feelings about Musashi. How much truth there is to this assertion is left ambiguous, but when Jotaro eventually learns of Musashi's whereabouts after his duel with Denshichiro, he runs off to try to find him.
This decision by the impetuous youth ultimately results in Otsu deciding to chase after him in the hours before his duel with all the remnants of the Yoshioka School. Jotaro is successful in finding Musashi, who’s been in hiding after his duel with Denshichiro. When they part ways again, which only happens after he’s been dragged into agreeing to the fight with the remnant Yoshioka forces, Musashi tells Jotaro to deliver a message to Otsu effectively asking her to forget him, for chances are good he will die come the duel the next morning.
Otsu refuses to accept this. Despite her sickness and physical weakness, she travels up into the mountains with Jotaro and does end up finding Musashi. At long last, after five years apart, they're forced to face one another and confess their love and desires. The result is a heartwarming and poetically beautiful scene, just the sort one would expect to find in a well written modern Japanese drama. Yet again, this shows us the far reaching influence of Yoshikawa's novelization.
This moment, as well as the myriad times each of these young lovers ruminates on the other from a distance, (often making wildly incorrect assumptions of intent and desire, as often happens with young love,) showcases the manner in which both have matured in each other's absence, all without fully realizing it themselves. Musashi is a man who understands his wants and goals intimately, and while he understands Otsu's feelings he cannot simply give them up. His quest is greater than himself, a divine calling that he must see through. However, it also shows his ignorance of the kind of woman Otsu really is, because she shows understanding of this. She is willing to wait, however long that may be, so long as she has Musashi's promise that he will come for her when his quest reaches its end. Even if that means they'll only reunite in the afterlife, if she has that promise, that's enough for her, because it means she's never alone even if he's not physically there with her. One can see the youthful romanticism at play here, and with this confession coming just minutes before his upcoming duel with the dozens of remaining Yoshioka students, the confession Musashi always feared would undo him instead emboldens his resolve.
Matahachi, on the other hand, represents a very different sort of companion. As Musashi's life long friend from Miyamoto, a man whom he not only spent his childhood with but went to war alongside, it's pretty clear that he's the sort of person Musashi would care deeply for. And, just as we see with Otsu, this is shown to us when they finally meet for the first time since they parted ways half a decade earlier outside of the house of that lascivious deceiver, Oko. However, his chance meeting with Musashi is one of the last times we see Matahachi in Book IV. The other times we see him involve him meeting other people of significance in his own life, and these often result in him being either thoroughly humbled, or torn in multiple directions in terms of choices he should make about the sort of life he should live.
I would argue that no chapter better exemplifies this than the one which became my favorite in Book IV. Titled, “Too Many Kojiros,” it is the third chapter of this section and it finally sees a poor decision that Matahachi made back in Book II catch up with him. After finally breaking away from Oko, Matahachi went out to try and make his own way in life. He searched for work and ended up landing a job as a day laborer, helping with the reconstruction of one of the castles destroyed in the civil war leading up to Tokugawa’s rule. Naturally, being the sort of man he is, Matahachi finds this unfulfilling and ends up giving in once more to laziness, illness, and bad thinking supported by poor rationalizations. This comes to a head when a wandering samurai who wishes to sketch the castle as it’s being rebuilt, but gets mistaken for a spy for doing so. When the man is killed by the guards around the reconstruction site, he uses his dying breath to hand Matahachi a scroll and his belongings, asking him to see them delivered to their rightful owners.
At first he intends to do this, but alas, Matahachi’s bad habits come around to haunt him. After first starting to use the dead samurai's money to pay his way due to having so little of his own, he swiftly begins using it to indulge in the comforts of lavish meals and premium saké. For obvious reasons this is considered highly disrespectful, but by this point Matahachi is fully in the thrall of his vices. Yet it’s the other action he takes while in this state of mind that sets up the clash we see in “Too Many Kojiros” - after already indulging in money that isn’t his own, Matahachi decides to take a look in the scroll case. In it, he finds a certificate naming one Sasaki Kojiro as an officially sanctioned master of the style of his teacher, a well regarded samurai named Toda Seigen. Seeing opportunity for status and wealth, Matahachi decided to take on Sasaki Kojiro’s identity for himself.
As I'm sure you can guess from the chapter name, this doesn't go well for him. When we find him again in Book IV, Matahachi has spent all of the dead samurai’s money, found his mother Osugi and his Uncle Gon, and then proceeded to get into an argument with Osugi and abandon her. At this point, once more living with next to nothing, he chances into an encounter with Oko’s daughter, Akemi, whom he finds has been chased up a tree by a pack of dogs. Deciding to fend the curs off, he tries to help the girl out and discovers that she was trying to hide from someone who’s been after her. That someone just so happens to be the real Sasaki Kojiro, whom she traveled with briefly in an effort to get away from Seijuro Yoshioka after he drunkenly forced himself upon her.
Unfortunately, it turned out that where Seijuro was thoughtlessly drunk and deeply regretful of his actions, Kojiro is genuinely cruel and abusive, a dangerous thing considering his equally genuine skills as a swordsman. This puts Matahachi on a collision course with the overdressed and boisterous ronin, which means it's only a matter of time before he finds out Matahachi has stolen his identity.
Luckily for Matahachi, Sasaki Kojiro ultimately finds him too pathetic to be worth killing, though he strongly considered doing so. After seeing Matahachi beg and grovel for his life, he decides instead to punish him by tying him to the tree Akemi climbed up to hide in - she fled during their commotion, by the way - and writing up a makeshift sign that outs him as having stolen Kojiro's identity. Ironically, it isn’t until Denshichiro and his men happen to pass through the area that Matahachi is able to be freed, which presents another dangerous situation for him since his last encounter with Yoshioka students was also rife with conflict. Luckily, he catches a break in the facts that Denshichiro and his retinue don’t know him, and that they free him on the night Denshichiro is traveling to meet his recently defeated brother, allowing Matahachi to easily get away.
These are but a handful of the many indignities and mistakes Matahachi makes not only in Book IV, but the novel as a whole so far. We’re repeatedly shown his immature propensity to give into strong emotions like jealousy, anger, and fear, and how damaging these end up being not just to Matahachi himself, but those around him. We also see him continually give his trust to people who prove themselves to be untrustworthy, with Akemi arguably turning out to be the greatest example of this.
A strong contrast is then created against how Musashi handles himself across the novel. Especially taken with the events of Book IV, where he achieves so much through his ever increasing discipline and understanding of who he is and what he wants, we see that while he does have setbacks, Musashi keeps moving forward in his quest for self betterment. Matahachi, on the other hand, crawls through the muck when he falls, only to continually slip again every time he tries to rise to his feet. It’s not difficult to see why he keeps falling, either, as he stubbornly continuing to grasp at the supposed easy ways out of his situations. Where he could take from the good advice and example Musashi sets for him, he instead chooses to give into his jealousy and blame his old friend for his own failings.
In all, Book IV: Wind has been the most excellent act in Musashi thus far. Eiji Yoshikawa's writing showcases his usual strengths at their best. From start to finish, he entire act is chalk full of satisfying payoffs for events built up to across the entire first half of the novel. It has me thoroughly excited to see the direction the story will take as we build up to another of Musashi's famous duels which now looms on the horizon: his inevitable clash with Sasaki Kojiro.
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Readers of the previous entries in my ongoing review may recall that I stated Takuan was my favorite character in Book I: Earth, so I was very pleased to see him make a handful of fresh appearances here, one of which included a brief reunion with Musashi himself.
Do you think Musashi novel is high literature?
I'm glad you like Takuan so much, Musashi is still King for me!
Really glad you liked this part, I must confess to despise how the first duel isn't shown. It's why I loved the manga more in some ways.