Swift Burning Embers - Reviewing Eiji Yoshikawa's "Musashi"; Book III: Fire
Just as Musashi’s journey to become Japan’s greatest swordsman continues, so to do my efforts to review Eiji Yoshikawa’s dramatic novelization of his life. With that in mind, if you’ve not yet read my reviews of Book I: Earth and Book II: Water, you may find those reviews below:
I feel it’s safe to say that a drama is only as great as its characters. No matter how engaging its plot or ideas might be, for the dramatic element to have the appropriate weight we must be made to care about the people within the story. Their joys and plights must matter to us, for it is through their trials and tribulations that we find the dramatic element. In other words, presenting a drama with flat or uninteresting characters will cause the dramatic element to suffer and likely lead to a story’s failure.
Fortunately, this hasn’t been the case with Musashi.
In my previous reviews we saw valuable glimpses at how the various people who were important in our titular swordsman’s young life have affected him. From Matahachi, his hometown friend whom we meet with him in the aftermath of Sekigahara; to the lascivious Oko and her wistful daughter Akemi; to Matahachi’s overbearing mother and his uncle Gon; and of course the Zen Buddhist Takuan and the shrine maiden Otsu, who ends up falling for Musashi after Matahachi abandoned her for what swift became an unhappy life with Oko; many a man and woman has had a significant impact on his journey thus far, and these are just the characters from Book I. Now we come to Book III: Fire, where the pieces that would begin to build Musashi’s legend start falling into place.
Where Book I: Earth presents us with the foundational aspect of Musashi’s life, showing us his first steps out of wild and immature boyhood into the more mature life of a man wishing to learn and better himself; and Book II: Water shows him learning some of his first and most valuable lessons on his own; Book III takes a surprisingly pronounced step back from Musashi himself and trains its eye on the many people who affect him. This isn’t to say we don’t follow our protagonist at all, though. In fact, Musashi completes one of the greatest physical feats of his young life in one of the middle chapters of this act.1 Rather, it’s that we pull back to take a broader view of the events and people that have, do, and will continue to play roles of significance in his life.
And there are a good many people of significance at this point. As already mentioned above, we’ve the likes of Matahachi and his overbearing mother, Osugi. After failing to return to their home in Miyamoto from Sekigahara, Osugi quickly placed the blame for anything and everything wrong that happened in Matahachi’s life at Musashi’s feet. Oaths were sworn before the Gods to find and kill not just Musashi, but Otsu, who allowed herself to fall for and leave with Musashi after she learned Matahachi wouldn’t be returning. However, Osugi also seeks to find Matahachi and return him home as well, so that he can fulfill his duty to the Hon’iden household and take his proper place as their head, doubtless with her whispering in his ear for the rest of her natural life.
Well, where we saw relatively little from Matahachi after the first couple chapters of Book I, only briefly returning to him in Book II after he finally decided five years of being depressed and living under Oko’s bitter heel was enough for him, one of the earliest storylines we get in Book III is a return to Matahachi. We see that since he left Oko and Akemi, he’s begun work as a day laborer helping to reconstruct one of the castles that was destroyed during the war.
Unfortunately, this really hasn’t left him in any better position than he already was in, save for the fact he’s now working instead of drunkenly loafing. The work earns him little money, often resulting in him staying hungry and getting sick, which he realizes he has during his labors on a particular day. It’s only once a twist of fate sees a young samurai he happened to meet accused of being a spy and killed that he sees a chance at turning his luck around. Offering Matahachi his parcel with his dying breath, the friend of our protagonist soon realizes this man likely wished for him to return his belongings to a loved one, or perhaps his teacher. Matahachi is left with a choice: he must decide if he will fulfill this man’s last wish and seek out whoever it was he wished for his belongings to be delivered to, or if he’ll take advantage of the dead man’s coin.
Our choices and the impacts which come from them, be they swift or slow, intended or not, stood out to me as the overarching theme of Book III: Fire. New players are brought into the story based on the actions of the old players we already know, and those old players often find their positions upended not only by their own choices, but those foisted upon them. Arguably, there’s no finer example of this than Oko’s wistful daughter, Akemi, whom we first met alongside her mother back in Book I. A brief reminder for those who may not recall, Akemi and her mother were living in a village not too far from Sekigahara. As a sick and injured Musashi, then Takezo, and Matahachi were trying to make their way back to their home, they stopped at the house of Oko and Akemi and were taken in. There, they learned that Akemi had been going into the battlefields to steal equipment and valuables from the corpses at the behest of her mother, all so Oko could continue living beyond their means.
In the five years since Sekigahara, Oko, Akemi, and Matahachi moved from her old home into a small tea house where they’d regularly entertain guests. Such entertainment often came in the form of physical intimacy - remember, Oko is something of a lecher herself and with how quickly she and Matahachi came to detest each other, it’s of little surprise that an unscrupulous woman such as herself would be willing to sleep with other men for money while still being married. Granted, Matahachi’s become a drunken layabout, but theirs is a cycle that feeds into itself.
Theirs is also a cycle that causes much strife for Akemi. When we first met her outside of Sekigahara, she was a girl of 15 or 16. Now she’s in her early twenties, and still virginal, despite her mother’s best efforts to pair her with a suitor of wealth and status. Well, as it so happens, the suitor Oko wishes to pair Akemi with is someone we’ve already met, for you see, Oko didn’t just set up some random town or well traveled road to set up her shop. She chose Kyoto, then capital city of Japan. Who and what else did we find in Kyoto?
None other than the Yoshioka School, the very dojo which Musashi humiliated by thrashing most of its students. As you might guess, it’s one of the Yoshioka samurai who’s become taken with Akemi. Who, you might ask? Their current leader, Seijuro, the very man whom Musashi is set to duel after the coming of the new year.
Thus far, Eiji Yoshikawa’s approach to Musashi’s first three books has had themes reminiscent of their names. As mentioned near the beginning of this review, Book I: Earth provides the foundation from which the legend of Musashi, and the man who will make that legend, is able to grow. Takezo grows out of his beastly boyhood and takes his first steps into becoming a man. Book II: Water, on the other hand, provides us with some of the first truly nuanced lessons Musashi has to learn. Where Book I provides him the stability of Earth so that he can grow, Book II is about his early attainment of the flexible and formless nature of Water, as represented from both the lessons he tries to take from everyone around him - including his ward Jotaro - and the varied (and sometimes impulsive) approaches he begins taking to the situations he finds himself in.
Book III then represents its element of Fire in two distinct ways. Firstly, it does so through the speed in which things change for the various members of our cast. Again, we can look to Akemi as a strong example, but it remains true of Jotaro, Otsu, Seijuro and the members of his school, Matahachi, Osugi, and Uncle Gon as well. Across the intervening years since Sekigahara, Akemi has convinced herself that she’s fallen in love with Musashi. It’s but another aspect of her wistful fantasizing, a refusal to let go of her youthful thinking that’s partly the result of her own mother’s desperate efforts to stave off any and all indications of her aging in a vain approach at eternal youth. Akemi’s approach may be the more innocent by far, but it’s no less immature.
Unfortunately, she’s not the young girl she likes to act as though she is. She’s a grown woman now, and men around her have started to notice. Of those who noticed, Seijuro is the one most smitten with her. He makes frequent attempts to get and keep Akemi’s attention for himself, but she always manages to keep her distance, even when her mother forces her to accompany him alone in his room. Part of Seijuro is frustrated by this, but despite being the leader of a famed school of swordsmanship, he’s a fairly meek individual. Indeed, both this book and the previous made it clear that neither he nor his brother, Denshichiro, who’s known to be the better swordsman but even less capable than his older brother as a leader, can hope to live up to the noble legacy of their father, Yoshioka Kempo. However, another part of Seijuro is allured by Akemi’s wistful fancies, viewing her in a way that borders on fey fascination.
Though he wants her, he’s not the type of man who would normally try to take her against her wishes. Unfortunately, an abundance of saké ends up changing that. Seijuro eventually does force himself on Akemi, sending her spiraling into a deep depression which leads her to want to kill herself. Her frustrations with Seijuro were already such that she took a life threatening risk to find a way to make him forget her, but as is often the case with Akemi, her approach was fanciful and childish. Instead of finding a way to strike out on her own, or even trying to find where Matahachi had gotten to, she turns instead to the legends of the Seashell of Forgetfulness.
Heading to the shorelines along Kyoto’s coastal border, Akemi scours the beach in search of this mythical seashell. Her hope is that if she finds it, she can give it to Seijuro to make him forget her. Tragedy strikes, however, when she finds herself pulled out into the tide, her tight wrapped kimono making it so she’s unable to effectively swim back to safety. Nearly drowning, it’s up to a good Samaritan to save her.
That Samaritan turns out to be Uncle Gon. By pure chance, both he and Osugi happened to be in the area as they were following a lead on Musashi’s whereabouts. Despite his age - Uncle Gon isn’t as old as Osugi, but he’s not a young man, either - he dives into the water to save Akemi. This chance encounter occurs after Otsugi and Uncle Gon have reunited with Matahachi, who fled from them both before long because he once again became sick of how overbearing his mother was, and it also eventually leads Osugi to have a run-in with both Musashi and Otsu, the two people she swore oaths of vengeance against for the perceived slights they committed against the Hon’iden family.
Speaking of encounters with Musashi, Akemi also eventually finds him. This happens because of a posting which Seijuro and the Yoshioka School leave for him on one of the major landmark thoroughfares in Kyoto, the bridge at Gojo Avenue. That posting is an announcement of the time and date of their New Year’s duel, and even though there’s a risk that Seijuro might find her again, Akemi faces that risk and waits there in the hopes of seeing Musashi and confessing her love for him, which she does.
I could continue on about the many ways in which just Akemi’s storyline intertwines with the other characters in Book III. We’d be here all day if I did, though, and it would spoil a huge portion of the chapter. As such, I’ll instead turn my focus to the second way in which Book III represents its chosen element of Fire: passion.
More than any other aspect, Book III: Fire explores the desires, values, and passions of the characters in Musashi. It’s the most character focused portion of the book by far, at least to this current point. Future chapters may change that, but I don’t think so. What’s impressive about Book III is the fact that even though we move to different characters with each chapter, sometimes moving between multiple within a single chapter, Yoshikawa’s writing never feels as though it’s rushed or bloated here. Instead the pacing is smooth and generally brisk, allowing us just enough time to get an idea of the various situations our cast members find themselves in, and then evolving them through their choices and the various interactions they have.
Like Fire, the events of this chapter are constantly in motion and they’re fueled by the heat of the characters’ passions. Akemi’s fantastical love for Musashi. Seijuro’s worship-like obsession with Akemi. Musashi’s yearning for Otsu and his drive to understand what truly makes a man. Otsu’s genuine love for Musashi and her matron-like caring for Jotaro. Osugi’s want for revenge against the both of them. Jotaro’s idolization of his master.
All of these examples represent just a small slice of what we get from Book III. It is genuinely jam packed with character driven drama, giving us a massive feast to chew on without it feeling like we’re being given too little or too much of any one thing. What this results in is a well balanced start to the story’s middle section that’s every bit as engaging to read as its beginning, if not more-so. Considering how many stories out there tend to lull in their middles, this is no small feat on Yoshikawa’s part.
Book III ends with the impending duel against Seijuro looming on the near horizon. It also sets up another of Musashi’s famous rivalries, that being the one between himself and the colorful swordsman, Sasaki Kojiro. I expect that one, if not both of these duels will be settled in Book IV: Wind, and we’ll get to that in time. For now, though, I’ll continue bask in the warmth of the highlights of Book III: Fire as I work to get caught up on my writing here. Then I’ll likely resume reading Musashi during the weekend.
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Reminder, the “Books” in Musashi are akin to the acts of a play, rather than individual books within a multi-story saga.