Well, fortunately it wasn’t a complete disaster the romance is a long-drawn-out melancholic affair filled with a lot of silliness, that I could have largely done without, but surrounding that there were many interesting passages giving me much of my hoped-for insights into the culture of the time. Surely it would have been better to keep things more authentic and maybe adding a glossary? The dialogue was filled with American colloquialisms and idioms, frequently sounding more like conversations between cowboys rather than samurai, all distances are given in Imperial units and eras given in western centuries. Matters were not helped by one of the worst jobs of translation I’ve had to deal with in a long time, perhaps ever. But I convinced myself that it was still going to be a serious novel and set out on its 1300 pages (on my eReader). I only have myself to blame before buying the book I had seen and largely ignored comparisons describing it as Gone with the Wind for Japan! There were a lot of other clues of which I was equally aware including, most significantly, that it was serialised for a Japanese newspaper. It did this to some extent but only in between an awful lot of romantic drivel.

This is the story of a legendary samurai swordsman, Miyamoto Musashi, from 1600s Japan, written between 19, which I had hoped would give serious insights into the samurai culture of that time.

Musashi miyamoto eiji yoshikawa