Wolf Gnards

The boat slowly sails to Gangryu Island, a small Japanese island sandwiched between Kokura and Nagato. It is cold this day. This is where they agreed to meet, Sasaki Kojiro and Miyamoto Musashi, for an exhibition of samurai skill. The two greatest samurai of the 17th century set to have the greatest battle of either’s life. This moment becomes a major focal point in William Scott Wilson’s The Lone Samurai: The Life of Miyamoto Musashi. Kojiro has been waiting for three hours and watches Musashi’s boat with intensity. Musashi is late. Kojiro unsheathes his overly long sword dubbed the Drying Pole; for Kojiro “the soul of a swordsman was bound up in the weapon he carried at his side.” Musashi is half asleep as the boat limps to shore. He is filthy and unkempt, he pulls out his weapon, recently carved from a wooden oar. Musashi jumps into the water and wades toward his opponent. Kojiro thinks to himself this is the legendary Musashi?

Kojiro yells insults at Musashi. Musashi ignores him. Out of anger, Kojiro throws his scabbard at the water. Musashi laughs and says, “You’ve lost, Kojiro. Would the winner throw away his scabbard?”

In The Lone Samurai the reader stands on the shore and watches these two warriors trade blows. Wilson wants us in the thick of things and for a while he succeeds. For the first fifty pages he does an incredible job of blending story with history. With the popularity of Japanese lore, and so much myth still resonating with us, it’s refreshing to go back and get this image of the samurai at the height of his profession. Musashi is still relevant to modern culture. His book The Book of Five Rings has often been compared to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and discusses discipline, knowledge, the every day mind, fluidity, and psychology. Because of this The Book of Five Rings became briefly popular with American business in the 80’s.

Wilson’s career has been primarily that of a translator, but he demonstrates a surprising ear for prose in this first English biography of the man whom many consider the greatest samurai that ever lived. Still he demonstrates his translator roots when he defines samurai; Wilson strips away the warrior connotations and gives the true meaning as “one who serves.” Wilson has translated many samurai books, and his publisher Kodansha International was so impressed with his translation of The Book of Five Rings they gave him a chance to do this biography.

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Musashi’s early life is cold, yet compelling. He had his first match at 13 with Arima Kihei, a traveling swordsman looking to improve his skill and reputation. The fight was short lived. “He [Musashi] then picked up the swordsman bodily,” Wilson writes, “and threw him down head first. Recovering his staff, he beat Kihei to death and returned home.” Musashi ran away from home after his father repeatedly threw daggers and short swords at his young son (a skill that Musashi would later use to perfection). Wilson is almost poetic in the descriptions of these battles, but in the end—Musashi having fought and won over 60 individual matches—the telling begins to wear thin.

Musashi’s fighting tactics were revolutionary and something bordering on genius. Musashi used psychological warfare to throw off his opponents. He often showed up late, or early, popped out behind trees, or used odd weapons like logs or his infamous wooden sword. So much of the samurai sword fighting depended on Buddhist teachings and finding one’s center. Musashi, it seemed, almost took pleasure in disrupting that focus in his “enemies.” And even a respected friend was Musashi’s enemy in the dojo, but after they fought in that training room, Musashi would bandage his wounds.

The Lone Samurai is just that a lone samurai. Musashi was a ronin, a traveling warrior with no master. And while Musashi was offered many positions in his long life, he politely refused them all. He believed completely that a simple life of solitude and with no connections was the only way to perfect his skills. Musashi had no desire to amass a fortune or start a family. His views on woman can be summed up with his statement, “have no heart for approaching the path of love.” The only woman ever mentioned in the book was a prostitute he had a brief fondness for. Instead of marrying, Musashi adopted two sons to carry on his legacy.

The second half of the book depicts Musashi’s search for answers, perfection, and the Way. After he kills Kojiro with two strikes from his oar, he vows to never kill again. Wilson goes in depth to describe and explore Musashi’s artistic and spiritual interests: poetry, painting, calligraphy, gardening, tea ceremonies, and Zen Buddhism. But the book then spirals into a break down of how these art forms developed and into a who’s who in feudal Japan. The biography becomes less about the man and more about the lifestyle.
There doesn’t seem to be enough source material on Musashi, and Wilson begins to just describe what life could have been like for a samurai in those times. He lists anyone the might have been connected to Musashi, or people who probably would have known the samurai. For example Hon’ami Koetsu was a man near the center of Japan’s art world in Musashi’s time. There are no records of them ever meeting but due to the samurai’s wide interests Wilson infers that they must have met at some point in time and describes what that meeting would have been like. [Koetsu’s] “intense and friendly personality would have made him an engaging companion for Musashi. The swordsman’s extraordinary talent, broad interests and remarkable character, on the other hand, would likely have seemed to the older artist like a fresh breeze on a hot summer day.”

Wilson started with so much flare and potential, but this is what much of the book becomes. Wilson describes the type of material that Musashi might have read, the art that he might have admired, or the people that Musashi might have meet. Instead of getting a strong impression of the lone samurai, the reader is left only with a feeling of what it could have been like to be a lone samurai.