The Lone Samurai

by William Scott Wilson

  At last I stand up, walk to the offering box, and light incense before Musashi’s tomb. Placing my hands together in the Buddhist gassho, I recite the mantra of the Heart Sutra.

  Gyate, gyate, haragyate . . .

  The old couple has finished their sweeping, and soon other visitors will begin arriving to pay their respects as well. But for now, all that can be heard are the faint shouts of the kendo practitioners in the dojo across the stream and beyond the wall.

  APPENDIX

  1

  Life After Death

  Stories about Musashi began to circulate around Japan very early in his life. The name of the young boy became well known in Harima and Mimasaka soon after he defeated the Shinto-ryu swordsman Arima Kihei, and this tale was followed only two years later by that of the downfall of Akiyama from Tajima at the hands of the same boy, still barely a teenager. These stories would have traveled the roads, albeit only to the contiguous provinces, with other shugyosha attuned to such information. Some might have disparaged this young swordsman when they heard about him at their inns or the local drinking establishments at the end of a day’s wandering; the more discerning would have listened with quiet interest.

  But if information about the youth Bennosuke had remained only in the provinces, the news of Miyamoto Musashi swept through urban areas with his defeat of the entire Yoshioka clan. Although the events connected with this story occurred on the outskirts of Kyoto, the shock and sensation of each match would have quickly made the gossip rounds throughout the capital, to nearby Osaka and beyond. And not just at the swordsmanship schools, but at any place where people gathered for the most recent news. Here was a young man barely twenty-one years old who seemed to come out of nowhere to defeat an entire school! Where did he come from? What was his style? Hadn’t he defeated over sixty men at Ichijoji? Or was it a hundred?

  In this way, Musashi not only gained a reputation, but also became the focus of what would become a growing legend even while he was alive. His victory over Sasaki Kojiro, the Demon of the Western Provinces and sword instructor to the revered Hosokawa clan, helped to guarantee that his story would continue far beyond his lifetime. His eccentricity in dress and his nonconformity in refusing the binding status of a samurai were additional ingredients for a tale that would be too good to let go.

  By the time Musashi passed away on 19 May 1645, stories about him had been told and embellished for at least forty years. As the Tokugawa government gained political and cultural control, and Japanese society was increasingly marked by conformity, the reputation of a man who had become possibly the best swordsman of his time without patronage, lineage, or compromising his freedom only grew. Just as important to the growing legend was the entertainment factor. With government control seeping into so many social institutions, the Pax Tokugawa, and the concomitant economic prosperity—particularly among the merchant class—brought a certain restlessness and demand for diversion from everyday affairs. New forms of public entertainment proliferated, and, although Japan’s long history provided a plethora of heroes for plot lines, there was always a need for something new. Musashi’s legend fit the bill. In less than a hundred years from the time of his death, his story—at times almost unrecognizably embellished—was being dramatized in kabuki, bunraku, and professional storytelling; and he was featured in the new styles of woodblock prints produced for a public well-acquainted with the theme. In these genres, Musashi’s popularity continued for well over two hundred years.

  Modern times and new media have only broadened Musashi’s fame. Beginning with Yoshikawa Eiji’s perennially popular novel, Miyamoto Musashi (in English translation, Musashi, by Charles S. Terry), the swordsman, artist, and writer has been the subject of countless novels, movies, television series, television specials, and quiz programs, and even a very serious, long-running comic book series. The core of Musashi’s spirit was also too good not to embellish. Everybody, it seems, wanted their own Musashi. Through the years and changing forms of communication, the Japanese public, and more recently the Western world as well, have been unwilling to let the story die.

  KABUKI AND BUNRAKU

  On 23 October 1604, the year Musashi came to Kyoto and began his series of matches with the Yoshioka clan, a theater opened in that city for the performance of a new style of drama, kabuki. The premier of this new form of entertainment had been given some years before, in 1596, when a priestess by the name of Okuni came from Izumo and performed a number of dances in the Kamo riverbed. What Okuni performed is not clear, but it is thought to have been a combination of Buddhist dances called nenbutsu-odori and folk dances, laced with erotic gestures. Whatever it was, it was so successful that she was summoned to perform at the Imperial Palace in 1603, and this was followed by the construction of a semipermanent theater the following year. By the end of the century, kabuki theaters were everywhere. The origin of the word itself is obscure, but the old verb, kabuku, suggests a strange or willful inclination.

  Very early in its development, kabuki began to take plot lines from historical romances and the like and thus became legitimate drama. Not unlike the classic Noh drama, kabuki performers acted out words chanted by a narrator, but with far more animation and exaggeration. Unlike Noh, however, kabuki was never meant to be highbrow entertainment, and it has remained popular theater in that sense to this day. Costumes range from colorful to gaudy, and the accompanying instrumentation is far less subtle than the stark music of Noh. Broadly speaking, it is a theater of action rather than nuance.

  During the same period, the puppet theater—termed bunraku or joruri—was developing in a parallel and even symbiotic way with kabuki. This art form originally began as a story—The Tale of Joruri—chanted by blind musicians who accompanied themselves on the biwa, a four-stringed lute. By the middle of the sixteenth century, however, the Okinawan samisen, a sort of three-stringed banjo, was substituted for the biwa, and by the end of the century a musician by the name of Menukiya Chozaburo hired a puppeteer to act out the story with wooden hand puppets as Chozaburo played and chanted the narrative.

  By the end of the seventeenth century, the puppet theater had evolved into serious public drama. Like kabuki, it used plots taken from various classical sources, but eventually embraced tragedies of the day, including—perhaps especially—love suicides. Once only hand-puppets, the “actors” have gradually become ingeniously flexible and almost doll-like in aspect, three-and-a-half to four feet tall and each one operated by three “handlers” dressed in gauzy black shrouds. Two chanters now deliver both narrative and dialogue, and the literature has been written by such revered playwrights as Chikamatsu Monzaemon. Kabuki and the puppet theater have traditionally shared a number of plays and styles, and kabuki actors will even, at times, imitate the stiff-jointed movements of the puppets.

  Both kabuki and the puppet theater were well attended during the Edo period (1603–1868), as they are today, and stories of swordsmen and vendettas were extraordinarily popular fare. As might be expected, the swordsman Miyamoto Musashi was a great draw.

  In 1737, ninety-two years after Musashi passed away, part of his legend was turned into drama as the kabuki play Revenge at Ganryu Island, written by Fujikawa Fumisaburo and performed at the Ayameza theater in Osaka. The play was a success and still saw production at the Kadoza theater in Osaka in 1848. So popular was this play that printmakers Utagawa Kunisada and Yoshitora made posters depicting the actor Arashi Rikan III as Musashi, while the famous Utagawa Kuniyoshi designed a triptych of the same subject for nontheatrical purposes. Even a series of kyoga, a sort of early comic book depicting the actors of the play, was published in 1817.

  Variations of the story, including Ganryu Island: Blossoms Floating Downstream and Miyamoto and the Duel at Ganryu Island, played throughout the Edo and Meiji periods (together, 1603–1912), with the last opening at the Miyakoza theater in Tokyo in 1907. The plays themselves were typically two-dimensional, full of historical inaccuracies, and centered on Musashi as a colorful sw
ordsman who rewarded good and punished evil. Playgoers loved them.

  No doubt encouraged by the popularity of these plays, dramatists embellished more than the events of Musashi’s life. In the kabuki play Tale of the White Heron Castle, still occasionally performed at Himeji Castle, Musashi’s skills are extended to being able to fight off the supernatural.

  But the kabuki and puppet theater were still plays—dramas that required suspended disbelief, a stage, puppets, and costumed actors. Moreover, most of the theaters that housed these dramas were in the larger urban areas of Japan, and so were accessible only to the people living in or passing through the bigger cities. For the rest of the population, there was a different kind of performance through which Musashi would be known, giving far more breadth to the stories of his life.

  PROFESSIONAL STORYTELLERS

  While the populace of the large cities like Osaka, Kyoto, and Edo were entertained with dramatizations about Musashi in the kabuki and puppet theaters, people in smaller cities and towns and rural areas had opportunities to see a different style of entertainment in theaters called engeijo. These humble theaters were much smaller in size, with stages that could not accommodate the sets for complicated plays or the recessed floors necessary for puppet operators. In keeping with the lower level of sophistication of these audiences, programs might include one or two musicians with a singer or dancer, a comic raconteur (rakugo artist), or a professional storyteller (kodan) who told elaborate tales of swashbuckling heroes and wrongs brought to right through famous vendettas.

  It was through the professional storytellers that Musashi’s popular image lived for two and a half centuries: a Musashi who was morally upright, a strong and skillful swordsman, filled with Confucian sentiments of justice and righteousness; but not a Musashi who was particularly influenced by Buddhism, philosophy, or the arts. This was the people’s Musashi.

  The professional storytellers’ tales were also printed and published by the episode in small booklets. In this connection, in April 1887, a “novel” about Musashi written by a Walter Dening was published by Griffith, Farran & Co. of London and Sydney, N.S.W. Entitled Japan in Days of Yore: The Life of Miyamoto Musashi, the original was in two parts, hand stitched with folded, uncut pages, and illustrated with woodblock prints. In a footnote, Dening informed the reader that this story of 170 pages (it reads for the most part as a translation) was based on an anonymous work called the Kokonjitsuroku eiyubidan, or Praiseworthy Tales of Authentically Recorded Heroes, Past and Present. The piece written under this august title seems to be a compilation of professional storytellers’ tales in a single presentation, and as such is wonderfully representative of the kabuki, bunraku, kodan, and even the earlier films that took Musashi as their hero: Musashi as he was known by almost everyone except scholars and swordsmanship specialists until just over fifty years ago. It is, therefore, worth recounting in some detail.

  THE OTHER MUSASHI

  The story begins with the identification of Musashi and his parentage in what will be hallmarks of the work: imagination and “facts” unsupported by historical evidence. Musashi is declared to be Miyamoto Musashi Masaakira, a retainer in the service of Kato Kiyomasa, the lord of Higo, while his father is introduced as none other than Yoshioka Tarozaemon, a retainer of the thirteenth Ashikaga shogun, Yoshiteru. Tarozaemon has been given the name Munisai by the shogun after defeating sixteen famous swordsmen in a match that Yoshiteru had ordered. But the shogunate having fallen, Munisai has moved on to Himeji in Harima, and is making a living by teaching swordsmanship in the town of Shinmi. According to this account, Munisai has two sons: the elder, Seizaburo, a quiet, retiring, and rather sickly man; and Shichinosuke, who is so energetic and bright that, by the age of twelve, he has the bodily strength of an eighteen-year-old and the intelligence of a man of twenty. He is a fighter but not a bully, and is always ready to help the weak.

  Eventually, however, Shichinosuke becomes too self-assertive and indifferent to others’ rights. Drawn into a confrontation with his disapproving father, he was forced to flee to the village of Nomura, where he takes refuge with his mother’s brother, a Buddhist priest.

  Shichinosuke stays with his uncle to study and learn discipline. Not much later, however, he happens by the fencing school of Arima Kiheiji Ichiyoken Nobukata and notices that Kiheiji has put up a placard arrogantly proclaiming the superiority of his school. Outraged, Shichinosuke exclaims:1

  “What cheek! One would think, to see this notice, that Nobukata was the only fencer in existence. I have heard my father say that the men who have originated styles of fencing are innumerable; and yet this man tries to make out that the style that he has invented is superior to everything else. It is rightly said that it is peoples’ vanity that is the cause of their destruction. I will act in Heaven’s stead and punish this man for his presumptuous folly.”

  There follows a colorful telling of Musashi’s first victorious match, and leads to Shichinosuke and his uncle fleeing from Kihei’s outraged disciples. During their flight, they are saved by Miyamoto Buzaemon, an old friend of Munisai’s and a retainer of Kato Kiyomasa.2 Buzaemon eventually adopts the boy, giving him the name Miyamoto, and the two travel on to Kumamoto.

  The following episode relates the circumstances behind the creation of Musashi’s Two-Sword Style. In this rendition, Shichinosuke’s father, Munisai, is an expert in Jiken-ryu, a style that used a short sword of fourteen inches, while his adoptive father, Buzaemon, practices the Kurama-ryu, wielding a sword twenty-seven inches in length. In a moral quandary, the youth is torn between his two fathers’ styles, when he chances to pass by a festival where a dancing priestess skillfully maneuvers two swords. This is the answer to his problem, allowing him to practice swordsmanship without relinquishing the style of either father, and serendipitously producing an undefeatable style of his own. Later, Shichinosuke explains the style to Buzaemon:

  “Two swords are taken, one in each hand, a long one in the right hand, which corresponds to the male principle (yo), and a short one in the left hand, which corresponds to the female principle (in). At first, the two swords, like the two principles, remain together, and seem as though they were hesitating how to act: then, they part from each other, the male sword ascending, and thus corresponding to heaven, the female descending, and becoming earth. Then, coming together again in the form of a cross, they produce all manner of results. This crossing of the two is that, like the combining of the two principles, begets a universe of things. There is no difficulty about changing the positions of the swords a thousand times to suit the ever-varying movements of an opponent—their advance and retreat, their moving up or down is free and unimpeded by any hindrance whatsoever.”

  While the beginning of this description bears no relation to the contents of The Book of Five Rings, the last sentence seems to hint at some acquaintance with the book.

  The story now returns to Himeji, where a fencing school has been established by a master of some reputation, Ganryu Sasaki Yoshitaka. Sasaki is here introduced as the son of Sasaki Shotei, a powerful lord in Omi before being defeated by the warlord, Oda Nobunaga.3 His mother then leaves for the northern provinces and dies when the boy is eleven or twelve, but not before filling his head with the notion that he is better than others, and that he is morally bound to avenge his father’s death. He eventually becomes a skillful swordsman and goes on to Kyoto to found a school. Here (and this part of the tale is given some credence) he is discovered by a Kyoto official, Masuda Nagamori, who then recommends him to Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Contrary to Gan-ryu’s high expectations, however, Hideyoshi not only refuses to take him into service, but has him banished from the city of Kyoto for his arrogance.

  Ganryu eventually makes his way to Himeji and establishes a sword fighting school. Discovered by Hideyoshi’s less prudent nephew, Kinoshita Katsutoshi, he is hired as fencing instructor to the high and mighty. Thus his ego soars.

  Munisai, in the meantime, has come under the patronage of the daimyo, Mori
Terumoto, as a sword instructor, but he is now getting on in years. Taking leave to the hot springs in Arima, he takes along only one servant, Kyusuke. In a convoluted scene, Kyusuke becomes ensnared by Ganryu, who then demands a match with his master, Munisai. Although the latter tries to demur any number of times, the arrogant Ganryu insists, and in the end an official match is held on the island, Kameshima. Even using treachery, the six-foot Ganryu cannot beat the withered old Munisai, and is eventually humiliated. Thus is created the enmity that turned this tale into a classic vendetta.

  Although Ganryu pretends to be truly humbled by his defeat, his thoughts now turn to the destruction of Munisai, which he ultimately accomplishes by a late-night ambush with a gun, estranging him even further from the Way of the warrior. This is the pivotal point of the story; everything that follows leads only to Ganryu Island. Nevertheless, the Edo storytellers had, at this point, just set the hook.

  Informed of his father’s death, the sickly elder brother, Seizaburo, sends for Shichinosuke to avenge the family. Shichinosuke, still in Kyushu, eventually receives Kato Kiyomasa’s permission to start out after Ganryu, but not before a demonstration of his skill—an event that moves the lord to change the hero’s name to Musashi, “the storehouse of military knowledge.” Musashi starts out on a long journey through the provinces to find Ganryu, going first to Edo, then down the Tokaido highway, and eventually gaining employment with Kinoshita Katsutoshi in Himeji, thinking he might find his man there.

  There is an interesting interlude here, only obliquely mentioned by Dening, in which Musashi is possibly bewitched by foxes, and is accused of receiving a stolen sword. For this reason he is put in jail and, too proud to explain the real circumstances of the situation, awaits his fate.4

  Six years then pass from the time of Munisai’s murder, and Sasaki Ganryu decides that it is time to return to Himeji. Informed that Musashi is in jail, he contrives a match with the prisoner, on the condition that the latter be put to death if he loses. The day of the match comes, but in the final moment the apostate Ganryu fires off a furizue, a sort of hollow stick containing a ball and chain which are projected out in the manner of a bullet. (Interestingly, Dening notes—no doubt prompted by his storytelling source—that this weapon was invented by Hozoin In’ei, a priest who was an expert with the spear.) Musashi is wounded in the forehead with this dishonorable weapon and declared the loser of the match. Outraged at Sasaki’s perfidy, he fights through the constables who have swarmed in to arrest him, leaps over the palisade and, bringing Part I to an end, “as fleet as a deer, fled across the plain, his well trained legs in a very short time bearing him far away out of reach of his numerous foes.”