Inventing the Zen Buddhist Samurai: Eiji Yoshikawa's Musashi and Japanese Modernity

Abstract

I T IS DIFFICULT TO OVERSTATE THE POPULARITY OF YOSHIKAWA EIJI’S historical novel Musashi (1939). After its initial serialization in the Asahi Shinbun, a major Japanese newspaper, the novel underwent over fourteen reprints (for a total of over 120 million copies sold), was adapted to a film trilogy called Samurai featuring the Japanese star Mifune Toshir o and a manga series by the famous Takehiko Inoue, and became a hit abroad. Despite its enduring popularity this novel has garnered little scholarly attention outside of Japan, perhaps because of its lack of sophistication: its characters are one-dimensional and its plotline repetitive. Moreover, Yoshikawa developed this relatively bland picaresque in over three thousand pages of text, leading Sheldon Frank to title his New York Times review of the—abbreviated —English translation “Way of the Samurai, Way of the Tedious” (Frank). Though Frank’s assessment of Musashi’s literary qualities is no doubt correct, the novel’s popularity and the historical context in which it appeared do more than enough to make up for the fact that it reads rather poorly. Musashi provides a means of examining the modern construction of the samurai as a spiritual warrior, uniting Zen Buddhism and the martial arts in a manner unprecedented before the twentieth century. Reading Yoshikawa’s novel, therefore, allows us to explore the roots of a popular culture icon whose presence in (graphic) novels, movies, videogames, and other media continues unabated today.