The Lone Samurai

by William Scott Wilson

  Kojiro might well have been indignant. The sword was considered the soul of the warrior and, just as opposing combatants would proudly declare their personal lineage before a fight, they also took great pride in carrying weapons that had distinguished histories. Kojiro was a traditionalist in this sense, and his indignation at being challenged with a carved oar can be understood.

  Kojiro personified the ideal of swordsmen of his day: his lineage was impeccable and his teachers well known; through disciplined training, he had created his own seemingly flawless style; he had won the approval of the highly respected Hosokawa clan and been allowed to establish a school in Kokura; and he appeared to be on his way to becoming the official sword instructor to that clan. Above all, Kojiro respected the sword and technique—both of which were part of the mythology of Japan: in myth, the very islands of the country were created by ocean water dripping from a blade, and techniques and styles were taught by gods and demons. Through his success in all the traditional aspects of the culture of the sword, Kojiro was an inspiration to his many devoted disciples and the numerous swordsmen all over Japan who had heard of his rise to fame.

  Musashi was a swordsman of an entirely different stripe. Seeming to have appeared out of nowhere, he claimed no teacher, no school, no lineage. Like the poets Saigyo and Basho, the painter Fugai, and the sculptor Enku, he was a perpetual peripatetic—never entering into a long-term contract of service with a local lord, or even marrying or settling down. As he roamed the length and breadth of Japan, Musashi trained himself in the powers of observation and intuition—which he valued far above technique—to an extraordinary degree, and the results of this discipline were manifested in both his swordsmanship and his art. Perhaps due to his preference for independence and freedom, he established no school of the martial arts and was never associated with a professional atelier. He was outstandingly talented and highly cultured, but there was something rough and eccentric at the core of his character throughout his life. He died surrounded by his few disciples, but he was fundamentally a loner. Astonishingly, he rarely used a real sword.

  Musashi was above all a free spirit, and this was reflected in his avoidance of service to a single daimyo, even though he was on excellent terms with a number of highly respected clans. It was also reflected in his transcendence of the warrior’s ancient idealization of the sword and technique. While he respected the sword, he was not fixated on its use, and would happily take up anything at hand when confronted by an opponent. He encouraged his disciples not to have preferences or to rely on anything, including the sword, the very “soul of the samurai.”

  Like Kojiro standing at the shore, we find ourselves wondering who this Miyamoto Musashi was. Although he had little or no formal training, Musashi established himself as Japan’s most famous swordsman during his youth and went on to become known as one of the country’s most respected painters. He used a wooden sword in nearly all the sixty-some bouts that made him famous and wrote a book on swordsmanship that is now read worldwide, three hundred and fifty years after his death. Eschewing position and family, he had little need for the comfort and security that most of us require.

  What Musashi established with the sixty-one years of his life was a legend and an ideal for the Japanese people for which there is no equivalent in Western culture. His life has been the inspiration for countless stories, dramas, novels, movies, and television series; one of the two largest battleships built by Japan during the Pacific War was named for him.1 There are figures of speech in modern Japanese that refer to someone with a “Musashi-like” character—and it is likely that Musashi’s name is as well, if not better, known than many of the most important figures in Japanese history and culture. All this despite the fact that Musashi never intentionally set out to change that history or affect that culture. How could this be?

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  The Way of the Sword: Banshu to Ganryu Island

  FIRST STRIKE

  One morning in 1596, just outside the village of Hirafuku in the province of Banshu, Arima Kihei, a swordsman of the Shinto-ryu, sat waiting for a formal apology. This was to be delivered by a thirteen-year-old boy, Miyamoto Bennosuke, the local gaki daisho,1 or “commander-in-chief” of every ruffian in the area, and the chief instigator of every outrage in Hirafuku.

  Kihei had arrived in the area a few days earlier, put up a simple bamboo fence, and erected a placard announcing in large gold letters that he would accept a match with anyone willing to enter a contest of skill with him. Why he chose to come to such an out-of-the-way place as Hirafuku is uncertain. He may have heard that a master of the sword and the jitte, a certain Hirata Munisai, lived not too far away, and hoped to attract his attention.

  He was, however, to be disappointed. It was a young Bennosuke, rather than the seasoned Munisai or any other wandering swordsman, who noticed the placard. On his way home at the time from a calligraphy lesson, Bennosuke took out his brush and ink, smeared over the gold letters of Kihei’s sign and, in a fit of bravado, wrote, “Miyamoto Bennosuke, residing at the Shoren-in, will give you a match tomorrow.”

  When Kihei returned to the spot and saw this bit of vandalism, he responded by sending a disciple to the Shoren-in, where the youngster Bennosuke lived with his uncle, the priest Dorinbo. As Kihei’s disciple informed the priest that his master wished to accept the challenge from this Bennosuke, the priest turned ashen and explained that Bennosuke was only thirteen and that his challenge was just an adolescent prank. When informed of this, Kihei magnanimously sent a message to Dorinbo that he understood, but would need a formal apology from the boy in order to clear his honor. The priest readily accepted these terms.

  So the following morning Kihei sat waiting for the priest and the boy to set the matter right. A number of villagers who had heard of the incident also gathered, probably to witness and enjoy the humiliation of this wayward child who was always causing so much trouble.

  But as Dorinbo and Bennosuke approached, people noticed that the latter was carrying a six-foot staff. Then, to everyone’s surprise, just at the moment the apology was to be made, instead of bowing in humility, Bennosuke charged. Kihei was not expecting this and may have been caught off guard, but he was a practiced swordsman. Dodging the blow, he unsheathed his sword and took a stance. Surely the onlookers must have thought that the brash young challenger had no chance at all. But after a few exchanges, Bennosuke suddenly threw down his staff and grappled with Kihei. He then picked the swordsman up bodily and threw him down headfirst. Recovering his staff, he beat Kihei to death and returned home.

  Long before writing The Book of Five Rings, Bennosuke would become known as Miyamoto Musashi.

  In that book he refers to this match quite simply: “From long ago in my youth, I set my mind on the martial arts, and had my first match when I was thirteen. My opponent was a martial artist of the Shinto-ryu, Arima Kihei, whom I defeated.”

  But another record, the Tanji hokin hikki, provides insight into Bennosuke’s mental attitude at the time of the match: “At this point [Bennosuke] thought, ‘I was unbeaten by the enemy because I gave no thought to my life. I simply walked in and struck.’”

  This attitude would inform his psychology for the rest of his life and become one of the main undercurrents of The Book of Five Rings.

  His “enemy,” Arima Kihei, was most likely one of the many shugyosha of that period; a sword practitioner who perfected his skills and enhanced his reputation by wandering through the provinces of Japan engaging in combat—often mortal—with other swordsmen. A shugyosha took disciples or established his own style or school, but also always hoped to be noticed by the local lord, who might offer him an official position as sword instructor to his clan. The life of the shugyosha was by no means an easy one. It involved a long list of rigorous ascetic practices: in his travels, the shugyosha was exposed to cold and hot weather, often sleeping in the mountains and fields with little shelter from the wind and rain; he bore hunger without carry
ing money or rations for his travels; he walked through the most inaccessible places and was always in danger of losing either his reputation or his life in a chance match along the way.2

  Of the unfortunate Kihei himself, almost nothing is known, but he may not have been the most exemplary of shugyosha. One account, the Sayo gunshi, published in Hyogo Prefecture in 1926, relates: “There was a certain Arima Kihei who gambled and acted outrageously. Although an accomplished swordsman of the Shinto-ryu, in town he was despised as though he were a snake or scorpion.”3

  His style, the Shinto-ryu, was that of the legendary Tsukahara Bokuden, a master swordsman of a generation earlier; but the word “Shinto-ryu” may indicate any number of styles or substyles. There were, and still are, the Katori Shinto-ryu, the Kashima Shinto-ryu, and Bokuden’s style as well. All of these came from the eastern provinces at that time and were offshoots of one basic tradition. (Interestingly, there was also an Arima Shinto-ryu created by a certain Arima Yamato no kami, and it may be that Kihei was either a member of that family or a disciple of the school.)

  Nothing else is clear: only that Kihei was killed by the thirteen-year-old Bennosuke (it should be noted in Kihei’s defense that, according to some accounts, Bennosuke had the stature of a young man three or four years older).

  For his part, Bennosuke coolly returned to the Shoren-in to continue his studies in calligraphy, Confucianism, and Buddhism under the loose—and perhaps, after this turn of events, timid—direction of his uncle Dorinbo. He also studied some painting, probably on his own; when he departed the temple for good, he left a painting of the Zen patriarch, Daruma, presaging his emergence some thirty-five years later as one of Japan’s finest india ink painters. But, for the three years following the match, he lived now at the Shoren-in near Hirafuku,4 and now with his sister, Ogin, in the village of Miyamoto, close to the provincial border in Sakushu. Finally, in the early spring of 1599, he deeded all of his family’s possessions—weapons, furniture, and family tree—to his sister’s husband, Yoemon, and walked out of Miyamoto and up into the hills with one of his friends. At Kama Slope, having been presented with Bennosuke’s staff as a keepsake, his friend turned back to Miyamoto and obscurity. Bennosuke—who from this point became known as Miyamoto Musashi—walked out of obscurity and on to become Japan’s most famous and singular swordsman.

  ORIGINS

  There is nothing particularly remarkable about the low mountains and hills between the villages of Hirafuku and Miyamoto. In the late 1500s, the area contained scattered farming villages dotted with houses and fields and, in Miyamoto, a river of no very great size. Yet while the landscape was generally one of peace and tranquility, if a traveler climbed the Kama Slope, as Musashi did on his departure, he would come out onto a pass in the middle of the mountains. This was the highway between Harima (Banshu) and Mimasaka (Sakushu), which during the ensuing Edo period (1603–1868) was part of the road used for the sankin kotai, the journey to Edo (Tokyo) taken by the daimyo every two years. The road itself was an ancient one, probably used as a trail first by the bear and deer that had inhabited the forests, later by hunters, and finally by merchants transporting wares from the western seaboard to the capital. No doubt it would have been a thing of wonder to a small boy of great curiosity and imagination, growing up in one of these otherwise remote country villages. It was the road out.

  Harima, however, did have a colorful history. The Akamatsu clan had settled there early in the twelfth century, eventually building Shirahata Castle and establishing itself as the local daimyo family. The Akamatsu were descended from a Minamoto Morofusa, who in turn came from the Genji line of the Emperor Murakami, and thus the clan could consider themselves distant relatives of the imperial family. The Akamatsu did well in the area for three hundred years, but came to their end in 1441 when the head of the clan, Mitsusuke, made the great tactical error of assassinating the Ashikaga shogun, Yoshinori. Although the shogunate itself was not very strong at the time, other daimyo led by Hosokawa Mochiyuki took this opportunity to destroy Mitsusuke and his clan’s castle.

  The Bessho, a junior line of the Akamatsu, survived this disaster and prospered enough to built several castles in Harima. One of these castles, commanded by a Bessho Shigeharu, was attacked and fell in 1578; Shigeharu escaped by the skin of his teeth to the village of Hirafuku, where he changed his name to Tasumi, literally “one living in the fields.” It was Shigeharu’s daughter, Yoshiko, who gave birth to Musashi in 1584, thus linking him to the Akamatsu, to the Minamoto or Genji, and, anciently, to the imperial line.

  Musashi’s father was Hirata Munisai, a landed samurai with the status of senior vassal to the Shinmen clan, whose last name he was eventually given permission to use as his own. The Shinmen family was a pillar of the warrior community in Mimasaka and its progenitor was Tokudaiji Sanetaka, the twenty-eighth-generation descendant of the famous Fujiwara Kamatari. Involved in the attempted restoration of Emperor Godaigo between 1334 and 1338, Sanetaka was exiled to Awai-no-cho in Mimasaka. His son, Tokuchiyo, went to Kyoto and asked for absolution (shamen; 赦免) of the family’s crimes. This was granted, and the clan was given the status of warrior and changed its name to Shinmen (新免), or “newly absolved.” Tokuchiyo, now called Shinmen Norishige, married the daughter of Akamatsu Sadanori, the governor of Mimasaka; his son Naganori also married into the Akamatsu clan.

  Finally, Munisai’s father married into the Shinmen clan and Munisai’s first wife, Omasa, was the daughter of Shinmen Munesada, the fourth-generation Shinmen. It is in light of this genealogy that Musashi sometimes stated his full name to be Shinmen Musashi Fujiwara Genshin.

  Munisai thus became a minor power in the area and was invested with a small fief; his house in Miyamoto was an old-style mansion, surrounded by a good bit of land enclosed by walls of stone and no doubt including a fine dojo. It was here that Musashi played as a young child, climbing the trees and roaming the low mountains.5 His older sister, Ogin, married into the nearby Hirao family, and in the garden of that house today stands a zelkova tree that is said to be the second generation of one from which the young Musashi took a branch to make into the first of his many wooden swords.

  An instructor to the Shinmen clan, Munisai was a master of several of the martial arts including the Two-Sword Style, the use of the jitte, jujitsu, and the proper use of armor.6 He was known in particular as a skilled practitioner of the Tori-ryu of swordsmanship, a style he would use to good effect against Yoshioka Kenpo in Kyoto. Munisai also taught jujitsu to Takenouchi Hisamori, who stayed as a guest at the Hirata house when Musashi was about four years old and who would later establish the Takenouchi-ryu of that art. Thus, Musashi was raised in a household that placed a great emphasis on the martial arts and he most likely began receiving some instruction from his father at an early age. Certainly weapons of all kinds were constantly around him and he must have often sat enthralled at the conversations of the talented men who came and went, gathering around the stern Munisai for instruction and edification.

  But Musashi’s childhood was not a happy one. Not long after he was born, Munisai divorced his second wife, Yoshiko, who was Musashi’s mother, and she moved back to her home in Harima. Munisai then married yet again, and Musashi seems not to have gotten along well with his new stepmother. In addition, there were hurtful rumors that his real mother was not Yoshiko at all, but in fact was Omasa, Munisai’s first wife—a claim that the village of Miyamoto (now Miyamoto, Ohara-machi, Aida-gun, Okayama Prefecture) officially makes to this day. When he was about eight years old, Musashi’s relationship with his father began to deteriorate to the point where the young boy began making the difficult trip over the mountains to visit Yoshiko and her family, eventually dividing his time between Harima and Mimasaka. It was at about this time that his formal education was placed in the hands of his uncle, the priest Dorinbo.

  One day, the situation with his father came to a head. The following story is found in the Tanji hokin hikki:

  Bennosuke wa
tched his father’s martial arts from the time he was quite young. As he got older, he gradually started to voice critical remarks. Munisai began to think that this child was not very likeable, despite the fact that he was his own son. One day, while Munisai was carving a toothpick, his son approached and began criticizing his jitte technique. Angered, Munisai took the dagger he was using to carve the toothpick, and threw it at his son as though it were a shuriken. Bennosuke dodged the weapon and it lodged in the pillar behind him. Munisai became all the angrier, took out his short sword and used it too as a shuriken. Bennosuke dodged this as well and fled outside. After this, he never returned to the house but, rather, lived with a priest related to his mother in Banshu. Thus he abandoned his hometown.

  Musashi now considered Hirafuku to be his real home, and it may be for this reason that he declares in The Book of Five Rings, “I am a warrior born in Harima.” But local records in Miyamoto copied as far back as 1689 clearly state that Musashi—officially, at least—lived in that village until 1596, and so would have retained a strong sense of its rhythms and environment. One of his favorite haunts would have been, just as it is to village children in Japan today, the local shrine, with its wide spaces and old trees. In ancient times, the Aramaki, or Sanomo shrine, had once stood at the top of the mountain to the rear of the village—hence the village’s name: Miyamoto, “at the foot of the shrine.” The shrine was later moved to the base of the mountain, close to the northern side of the Miyamoto River. Here the young Musashi would have watched the Shinto priests as they beat a huge drum throughout the day; at night he would have drifted off to sleep to the same sound: that of two drumsticks, constantly in motion, swirling like swords in expert hands.