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A review by linda_1410
Musashi: An Epic Novel of the Samurai Era by Eiji Yoshikawa
adventurous
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
I think this needs to be subtitled "Japan's Existential Crisis" instead.
I decided to read this because 1) I'm still waiting for Part 2 of Shōgun to become available through my library (should be soon), and 2) I needed to balance out the exoticism in Shōgun with an actual Japanese classic. I didn't know when I picked this up that this story jumps off right where Shōgun ends, so I spoiled myself a little on that, whoops. The foreword, that I read after I finished the novel, confirms that this is, at least with the larger events, historically correct, unlike Shōgun.
I did skim a bit through the parts I didn't find to be particularly interesting or necessary, which helped speed this up considerably, so probably about 5% of the novel here and there throughout. The writing - or perhaps just the translation - is on the dry side, and there was a lot of talk about a lot of ancestors who did this or that, and then we kept getting interrupted with the fights with the redshirts. As I said in my updates, it was clearly going to come down to Musashi and Kojirō in the end, so I didn't really need to read all the other fights as it was obvious how those were going to end, and I really got tired of the Yoshioka disciples popping up over and over again.
Other than Musashi though we don't get much in the way of character development for any of the secondary characters. And Musashi was a bit hard to take at first too. All the women fell in love with him. All of them. Even one dude fell in love with him before he even met him. (Did Musashi ever take that money back?) (Did Iori ever meet Otsū? Did Musashi go back to Otsū? He didn't deserve that woman's devotion to him. And seriously, what did the author have against Akemi? Poor thing. And that moment at the end with Osugi was a bit hard to believe too. That was most unbelievable thing in the book by far.) The other characters are mostly there to be friend or foe with no in between. They're pretty flat, which isn't to say they aren't interesting, because many of them are, but they end up not being as fully fleshed out as the MC despite how long this book is. Maybe this is standard in Japanese literature; I wouldn't know. Then I started thinking about how they might be caricatures of the huge shift in Japanese society that started taking place in this time period, but I'm not about to attempt to go into that since I do not have the knowledge necessary for that level of analysis.
You can really see the serial structure of this story as it was originally published. You get the same feel with reading older Western classics as well. Some "books" published in such a format read better as books than others, depending on how well the author crafted them. This is one of the better ones, as in there's not a lot of unnecessary repetition of information, but you could also lose track of side characters for several chapters - often leaving them in dire circumstances - just to catch up with them later after their troubles are over and getting a quick info dump to explain how they ended up okay.
I'm glad I stuck with this and read it. It's much more down-to-earth in how the characters all interact with each other as opposed to Shōgun, and I couldn't help but notice that seppuku was mentioned only once and that was never the very end, while the first half of Shōgun had it at least forty times, if not more. I really liked seeing how the aftermath of this war effected the common folk and how they found ways of living their lives in so many different ways. It was strongest when it focused on those parts, as well as Musashi's journey to understanding the Way of the Samuari and what that actually means for him personally. I just wish the prose would have been more engaging to hold my interest more, and the possibility this is likely a translation issue makes it that much more frustrating. Also, as much as these characters move around, a map would have been useful. Japan is slightly smaller in size than California, but as often as these characters were randomly running into each other, it felt more like the size of an average neighborhood. 😂
I decided to read this because 1) I'm still waiting for Part 2 of Shōgun to become available through my library (should be soon), and 2) I needed to balance out the exoticism in Shōgun with an actual Japanese classic. I didn't know when I picked this up that this story jumps off right where Shōgun ends, so I spoiled myself a little on that, whoops. The foreword, that I read after I finished the novel, confirms that this is, at least with the larger events, historically correct, unlike Shōgun.
I did skim a bit through the parts I didn't find to be particularly interesting or necessary, which helped speed this up considerably, so probably about 5% of the novel here and there throughout. The writing - or perhaps just the translation - is on the dry side, and there was a lot of talk about a lot of ancestors who did this or that, and then we kept getting interrupted with the fights with the redshirts. As I said in my updates, it was clearly going to come down to Musashi and Kojirō in the end, so I didn't really need to read all the other fights as it was obvious how those were going to end, and I really got tired of the Yoshioka disciples popping up over and over again.
Other than Musashi though we don't get much in the way of character development for any of the secondary characters. And Musashi was a bit hard to take at first too. All the women fell in love with him. All of them. Even one dude fell in love with him before he even met him. (Did Musashi ever take that money back?) (Did Iori ever meet Otsū? Did Musashi go back to Otsū? He didn't deserve that woman's devotion to him. And seriously, what did the author have against Akemi? Poor thing. And that moment at the end with Osugi was a bit hard to believe too. That was most unbelievable thing in the book by far.) The other characters are mostly there to be friend or foe with no in between. They're pretty flat, which isn't to say they aren't interesting, because many of them are, but they end up not being as fully fleshed out as the MC despite how long this book is. Maybe this is standard in Japanese literature; I wouldn't know. Then I started thinking about how they might be caricatures of the huge shift in Japanese society that started taking place in this time period, but I'm not about to attempt to go into that since I do not have the knowledge necessary for that level of analysis.
You can really see the serial structure of this story as it was originally published. You get the same feel with reading older Western classics as well. Some "books" published in such a format read better as books than others, depending on how well the author crafted them. This is one of the better ones, as in there's not a lot of unnecessary repetition of information, but you could also lose track of side characters for several chapters - often leaving them in dire circumstances - just to catch up with them later after their troubles are over and getting a quick info dump to explain how they ended up okay.
I'm glad I stuck with this and read it. It's much more down-to-earth in how the characters all interact with each other as opposed to Shōgun, and I couldn't help but notice that seppuku was mentioned only once and that was never the very end, while the first half of Shōgun had it at least forty times, if not more. I really liked seeing how the aftermath of this war effected the common folk and how they found ways of living their lives in so many different ways. It was strongest when it focused on those parts, as well as Musashi's journey to understanding the Way of the Samuari and what that actually means for him personally. I just wish the prose would have been more engaging to hold my interest more, and the possibility this is likely a translation issue makes it that much more frustrating. Also, as much as these characters move around, a map would have been useful. Japan is slightly smaller in size than California, but as often as these characters were randomly running into each other, it felt more like the size of an average neighborhood. 😂