The book follows Shinmen Takezō starting after the Battle of Sekigahara. It follows his life after the monk Takuan forces him to reinvent himself as Miyamoto Musashi. He wanders around Japan training young pupils, getting involved in feuds with samurai and martial arts schools, and finding his way through his romantic life.

Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa | Goodreads

God, he's so good. In my list of knights without fear and reproach, which every girl creates by stringing a garland of book and film characters on a virtual thread (even if she has not been a girl for a long time, and the heroes are not quite knights): Ivanhoe. Robin Hood, Alan from "Kidnapped", de Bussy and Athos, Mr. Rochester, Mr. Darcy, Heathcliff, Gatsby - my list of additions.

Some characters also just come and go. Musashi takes on pupils, they worship him, and he seems to care for them too only to completely disregard them. His relationship with Otsu is interesting at the heart of it, but there is so much faffing about that it falls into that repetitive trap. Overall, I enjoyed this long novel very much. It was very entertaining, easy to read, with plenty of hilarious moments, and a large cast of eccentric and colourful characters from a variety of walks in life. The lovely Otsu, seeing in Musashi her ideal of manliness, frees him from his tortuous punishment, but he is recaptured and imprisoned. During three years of solitary confinement, he delves into the classics of Japan and China. When he is set free again, he rejects the position of samurai and for the next several years pursues his goal relentlessly, looking neither to left nor to right. And of course, if the science of killing had been Musashi's primary contribution to history, he would not have occupied the place in the culture of modern Japan that rightfully belongs to him, revered as a saint. His opponents could perceive the sword as a murder weapon, as a marker of belonging to a certain privileged stratum, as a noble weapon, as a symbol of strength and skill - for Miyamoto Musashi, the sword was a symbol of the spirit. Incidentally, both Yoshikawa and Tolkien are born in 1892. The Hobbit came out in 1937, while Musashi came out in 1935.))

Musashi: An Epic Novel Of The Samurai Era (Hardback)

I am sure many people will enjoy (or have enjoyed) such an epic, and I am happy for them, but I cannot say that I enjoyed my time with this audiobook.

As I have already mentioned, the story's unspoken reliance on extraordinary coincidences is probably my biggest problem with Musashi as a whole. With an entire country to explore, the way our protagonist bumps into the same 4 or 5 characters dozens of times throughout the story just led to such a stale overarching sense of progress and development. Artistic License – History: The novel plays this trope quite a lot, but one of the most egregious is at the very end. During the final duel between Musashi and Kojirō it's implied that Kojirō survived, whereas in history he did not. Defiled Forever: With Akemi, the novel goes to great lengths to show that no, non-virtuous girls (even if they aren't really responsible for their lot in the first place) don't deserve a good life. Also played with with notorious whoremongering Matahachi, who ends up with said defiled Akemi, while Musashi gets virtuous Otsū.