Zen Buddhist Samurai 1

“Asian Popular Culture” Special Issue Submission: Inventing the Zen Buddhist Samurai: Eiji

Yoshikawa’s Musashi and Japanese Modernity

Introduction

It 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 Toshirō, 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 the 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.

Discussions of Musashi and its relation to the politics of the Pacific War have tended to

revolve around the question whether or not the novel and its author supported the war effort.

Musashi, after all, was serialized during a time (1935-1939) when the Japanese state increasingly

censored literature that did not directly contribute to the war effort. Musashi’s uninterrupted

serialization and publication seems to indicate that state authorities approved of the novel and its

author, something further attested by the use of the book as propaganda after hostilities with the
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United States began (Sakurai 75–6). Moreover, Yoshikawa’s self-identification as a “fascist”

writer and his membership of “The Society of the Fifth,” a group that met with the military on a

regular basis to discuss the proper form of literature, also indicates complicity with the regime

(Rubin 251–2; Torrance 61). However, the significance of Yoshikawa’s membership in this

group should not be overstated; as both Jay Rubin and Richard Torrance point out, the “Society”

was a loose conglomeration of idealists, not a hegemonic cabal controlling literary culture. As

for Musashi, Saitō Tadao has read the immense amount of bloodshed in the novel, often part of

the reason why the novel is seen as supporting the war, as a critique of Japanese imperialism in

general and the war in China in particular (Saitō). The whole issue of Yoshikawa’s politics is

further complicated by his post-war changes to Musashi: according to Sakurai Ryōju, Yoshikawa

deleted scenes where the main character worships the emperor in order to adapt the book to the

mentality of postwar Japan (Sakurai 72–94).

Although this article will not solve the question of Yoshikawa’s personal politics, it will

propose that Musashi participated in a network of significant cultural representations within

which violence was glorified and aestheticized, thus serving the purposes of a nation at war. This

complicity can be understood as part of a global and continuing struggle against “modernity,” by

which is meant the social and cultural consequences of capitalism. In his study of interbellum

and wartime Japanese thought, Harry Harootunian shows that to resist the changes capitalism

brought to their country (including class struggle, rapid change, industrialization, and

urbanization), intellectuals frantically looked for an essence of Japaneseness that could resist all

encroaching, foreign cultural elements. These intellectuals, like many of their Western

counterparts, located this essence in the past. Seeking to draw away from the economic-political

realm, marked as it was by rapid change, they reified Japanese culture (and emphatically art) as
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eternal. In this, their project was similar to fascism, which also tries to bypass the social and

political base of liberalism by recourse to cultural objects and customs from another era.i The

ultimate irony with this attempt to overcome modernity is that it was itself an expression of

modernity: only in modernity would one feel the need to rescue the fleeting present by recourse

to the past. To “overcome” modernity is thus to be always-already overcome by it (Harootunian

xxix–xxxii).

Apart from the host of intellectuals analyzed in Harootunian’s book, more recent

contributions have clarified the dynamic he describes in individual case studies, such as

Yokomitsu Riichi’s reconstruction of communal bonds (Lippit 197–228), Kobayashi Hideo's

turn to aesthetics (Dorsey, Critical Aesthetics), and Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s and Yamada Yoshio's

attempt to save the Japanese language (Hurley). Moreover, focusing on literary form, Alan

Tansman has suggested that interbellum Japanese authors created “fascist moments” in an

attempt to escape modernity. These moments erase the confusion of modern existence by

dissolving individual subjectivity into a greater whole. Tansman argues that this lyrical

dissolution is ideologically effective precisely because it pretends to be unconcerned with

politics.

This article draws on Harootunian and Tansman’s work to understand Musashi. It also

brings these scholars into dialogue with a growing literature on the role of Zen Buddhism in the

Japanese war effort (Sharf, “The Zen of Japanese Nationalism”; Sharf, “Buddhist Modernism

and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience”; Victoria, Zen at War; Snodgrass). This combination

of perspectives suggests that in the 1930s, Zen Buddhism was seen as a resistance against

modernity. Major apologists for the religion, such as Daisetz Suzuki, proposed that Zen

Buddhism was the source of Japanese uniqueness and strength. In Musashi, Yoshikawa goes
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along with this by casting Miyamoto Musashi (1584-1645 CE), a historical figure considered

Japan’s most famous samurai, as a Zen Buddhist. Uniting the martial and spiritual, Yoshikawa’s

Musashi represented a Japanese warrior spirit untainted by the corruptions of modernity. At the

same time, Musashi’s behavior modeled that of the perfect twentieth-century Japanese soldier,

thus furthering the propaganda purposes of a nation at war. A formal analysis of “fascist

moments” in Yoshikawa’s novel further demonstrates its attempt to overcome modernity.

Drawing on contemporary discourse on Zen, these moments erase the moral problems of

violence by aestheticizing it, thereby facilitating killing in service of the state.

Overcoming Modernity: The Way of the Samurai

Similar to heraldic mythology in the West, Yoshikawa understood samurai to be cultured

and above all spiritual warriors, with Musashi as the ultimate embodiment of this ideal. In

imagining Musashi’s life story, for which there exist almost no historical sources, Yoshikawa

provided a shining example to many young men who were already or about to be a different kind

of warrior in a battle that contemporary discourse portrayed in equally spiritual terms borrowed

heavily from Zen Buddhism.ii A close-reading of certain passages from the novel brings out

Yoshikawa’s position towards his own time: they contain a critique of modernity and advocate a

return to a samurai culture, “the Way of the Samurai.”

From its opening scene, Musashi critiques modernity. The reader first meets Musashi,

who is then still known by his given name, Takezō, at the battle of Sekigahara. Sekigahara

marked the beginning of the Tokugawa Shogunate (1600-1868 CE), an era that would see

Japan’s nearly complete isolation from the Western world (during the Tokugawa, only the Dutch

were granted limited trading privileges). According to Yoshimoto Mitsuhiro, at the beginning of

the twentieth century this long period of peace was both commodified and idealized (216).
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Yoshimoto adds that twentieth-century Japanese did not think of the Tokugawa as “pre-modern”

but more as an in-between stage, an agreeable modernity that was not Westernized yet. By

opening his novel on the scene that inaugurated the Tokugawa, Yoshikawa therefore already

suggests his critical attitude towards the influence of foreign elements in his own time.

Moreover, he amplifies the anti-Western symbolism of Sekigahara by noting that on this

battlefield Musashi/Takezō lies wounded by a western import: bullets.

Yoshikawa returns to this critique of Western influences when the reader is introduced to

Sasaki Kojirō, who will become Musashi’s most formidable opponent (Musashi 259–69).The

scene is the following: Kojirō is traveling and his ship is filled with merchants who praise the

profits to be made in foreign trade and mock the stupidity of the samurai who let them do as they

please so long as they make a show of obeisance. Moreover, in these uncertain times (the

Tokugawa Shogun who was victorious at Sekigahara is still establishing his power, and rebellion

is brewing everywhere), merchants have become richer than samurai, a wealth demonstrated in a

foreign gambling game the merchants proceed to play out of boredom:

A curtain was hung, mistresses and underlings brought sake, and the men

began playing unsummo, a game recently introduced by Portuguese

traders, for unbelievable stakes. The gold on the table could have saved

whole villages from famine, but the players tossed it about like gravel.

(260)

Like the opening of the novel, this passage criticizes Japanese modernity as a product of

corrupting Western influences. This time, the criticism does not focus on guns, but on another

Western import: capitalism. Discussing the effects of the economic crisis that followed the 1929

Wall Street crash, Andrew Gordon points out that in Japan the worldwide depression was
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worsened by the currency speculation of the country’s banks. The consequences (such as poverty

and famine) hit farmers the hardest (Gordon 182–3). Returning to the passage from Musashi

above, it is easy to read the merchants playing the foreign gambling game as Japan’s bankers.

Their game is interrupted though, when Kojirō’s pet monkey steals some of the playing cards.

Answering to the captain’s complaints about this, Kojirō points out that the animal “was just

imitating what they themselves [the merchants] were doing” (269).iii

Kojirō’s mockery of the merchants marks his second provocation on the ship. His first

was defeating Gion Tōji, a disciple of the famous Yoshioka School of swordsmanship, thereby

confirming rumors that the school’s teaching has degenerated. Focalizingiv on Tōji, the narrator

tells us the reason for this degeneracy: the Yoshioka master has lived beyond his means,

spending all his money on women and alcohol. Because of the debt the Yoshioka School has

accumulated, this once exclusive institution now contemplates offering instructions to anyone

willing to pay for it. Kojirō’s humiliation of Tōji, an act performed by cutting off the latter’s

topknot, parallels the former’s humiliation of the merchants: in both cases, both Kojirō and the

narrator criticize the erasure of the traditional class distinction samurai-commoner and the moral

laxity of both classes.

The examples above illustrate the form that Yoshikawa’s critique of modernity takes:

foreign imports, changing economic conditions and moral degeneracy combine to weaken class

distinctions (in both incidents on Kojirō’s ship, greed leads to degeneracy). As a cure for this

disease, the book advocates a return to the “Way of the Samurai,” a path largely forgotten in

Musashi’s world where “almost anyone who could wield a sword or shoot an arrow from a bow

was regarded as a samurai, regardless of the attention—or lack of it—given to the deeper

meaning of the Way” (594-5).

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For Yoshikawa’s Musashi then, the stable foundation to escape the degeneration of

foreignness and greed—modernity—is to revive the “Way of the Samurai.” This “Way” has a

“deeper meaning” than mere martial arts. It is profoundly philosophical:

The techniques of a swordsman were not his [Musashi’s] goal; he sought

an all-embracing Way of the Sword. The sword was to be far more than a

simple weapon; it had to be an answer to life’s questions […] For the first

time, he asked whether it was possible for an insignificant human being to

become one with the universe. (595)

If this implies a spiritual development that remains personal, Musashi later discovers that it is

also a way to guide others: “The Way of the Sword should not be used merely for his own

perfection. It should be a source of strength for governing people and leading them to peace and

happiness” (657). The novel repeats this point again and again: what Musashi studies is not just

martial arts, but something much more profound, a fundamental knowledge that matters for any

domain of human endeavor, from philosophy to politics to personal happiness to artistic insight

and mystical realization. Another good example of this comes at a key moment in the book,

namely when Musashi finally develops his unique style of swordsmanship, which consists in

fighting two-handedly, a long sword in one hand and a short sword in another. He comes upon

the idea while watching a drummer absorbed in his art:

Two drumsticks, one sound. The drummer was conscious of left and right,

right and left, but at the same time unconscious of them. Here, before his

eyes, was the Buddhist sphere of free interpenetration. Musashi felt

enlightened, fulfilled. (793)

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Here, Buddhist metaphors (“enlightened”; “sphere of interpenetration”) are used to describe

Musashi’s thinking as he develops the fundamentals of his personal style as a swordsman. By

describing the “Way of the Samurai” in this manner, Yoshikawa displays his familiarity with at

least some of the contemporary discourse on Zen, to which the analysis now turns. Just like some

of his contemporaries, Yoshikawa did not really see Zen as separate from the martial arts. If the

Way of the Samurai is this novelist’s escape from modernity, that “Way” is framed in Zen

Buddhist language.

Zen and the Art of War

Musashi discovers the “Way of the Warrior” guided by a Zen monk, Takuan Sōhō.

Takuan oversees the most important transformation in the book: that of Takezō, a man without

discipline or purpose, into the samurai Musashi. The transformation happens as follows: in the

beginning of the novel, Takuan first hangs the wild and murderous Takezō upside-down from a

tree for days on end, claiming that he is teaching him a lesson. After Takezō begs for his life,

Takuan deems him ready for further education and locks the young man in an attic room, forcing

him to study Chinese and Japanese classics for three years. Takezō emerges from the room

reborn, a rebirth Takuan marks by giving his pupil a new name: Musashi. From then on Musashi,

now a blend of cultural sophistication, spiritual vision and martial skill, will go on to defeat

opponent after opponent, a quest that takes up the remainder of the novel. As Musashi’s teacher,

Takuan is therefore an important side-character in the novel. Yoshikawa based this character on

the historical Takuan Sōhō (1573-1645 CE), an influential Zen abbot famous for writing two

studies on swordsmanship. This fact, and the apparent popularity of this figure in the 1930s

(Haskel 31–2), probably inspired the author to go beyond historical fact and cast Takuan as
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Musashi’s first teacher.v But Takuan’s presence also points to how Yoshikawa approaches Zen, a

manner very much in keeping with discourse on this school in the 1930s.

To understand interbellum discourse on Zen, some of the pre-modern historical

circumstances that shaped the socio-political role of this Buddhist sect in Japan need to be

described. These circumstances were very different from those in China, the country of Zen’s

birth, where, barring times of unrest and rebellion, political authority was relatively centralized.

As many scholars have shown, Buddhism flowered in China because it managed to cater to this

centralized authority, for example by providing legitimacy to the reigns of successive emperors

(Zürcher; Orzech; McRae; Welter, Monks, Rulers, and Literati; Welter, The Linji Lu and the

Creation of Chan Orthodoxy; Schlütter; Cole). Once Zen spread to Japan, the school also catered

to political authority. But, unlike the Chinese case, that authority was increasingly local and

decentralized. During the Kamakura (1192–1333 CE) period, the imperial court already faced

significant limitations on its power. Though initially power was recentralized in the hands of the

Kamakura Shogunate, during the following Muromachi (1338–1573 CE) period, local warlords

increasingly gained power. As a result, the Zen temples that had chosen to associate with these

lords became more prestigious than the temples that had remained close to the imperial court.

But this increased influence came at a price. As the civil war that would end the Muromachi

gained intensity, temples were called upon to support their patrons’ war efforts directly by

fielding armies and providing generals (Collcutt 125–9; Jorgenson 135–6; Haskel 60–76). But

Zen was not just of strategic importance to Japanese warlords: the sect’s highly developed

psychology fascinated samurai, as did its access to the refinements of Chinese high culture, a

domain previously reserved for the imperial court (Haskel 26–7; King 159–178). Therefore,

when Takuan composed his treatises on swordsmanship, he could draw on a long-standing

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connection between Zen and the martial arts. In casting Takuan as Musashi’s spiritual guide,

Yoshikawa draws on this history of Zen’s involvement with samurai warlords.

In view of this history, it should not come as a surprise that many Zen leaders also

actively supported Japanese wars of conquest in the twentieth century, for example by justifying

such wars as tools for spreading Buddhism or by holding ceremonies in order to ensure victory in

battle (Victoria, Zen at War 57–65). The cooperation was not one-sided: already in 1907 the

Japanese military sought to “spiritually educate” their soldiers by implementing a code they

called the bushidō, “the Way of the Samurai” (Victoria, Zen War Stories 19–20). Although this

code, as Oleg Benesch has shown most recently, is a modern creation, its promoters claimed to

have derived it from traditional Japanese books on the samurai art such as the Hagakure, another

treatise on swordsmanship written by a Zen monk (Benesch 8; Sharf, “The Zen of Japanese

Nationalism” 6; Victoria, Zen War Stories 107). Again and again, the bushidō stresses two key

elements: ultimate loyalty to one’s duty (symbolized in the 1930s by the Japanese emperor) and

suspension of one’s fear of death. Enthusiastically promoted both by militarists and renowned

Zen Buddhists, the bushidō, as encoded in the military’s Field Service Code (Senjikun), defined

the Japanese warrior ideal by the beginning of World War Two. In Musashi, the “Way of the

Warrior” is a version of bushidō that stresses the Zen dimensions of the code, and erases its

modern origins.

In their search for a spiritual foundation for Japanese soldiers, Zen must have seemed

particularly appealing to the Japanese military men at the dawn of the twentieth century. Not

only did the school have a long history of associating with soldiers, but when read in a certain

way it seemed to dismiss any questioning of orders. Takuan himself wrote the following in a

manual addressed to the shogun’s sword master, Yagyū Munenori:

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The expression “A response instantaneous as a spark struck from flint”

describes the swiftness of a flash of lightning. For example, when

someone calls, “Mataemon!” [the early given name of Munenori] and you

instantly answer “Yes!” that's what's meant by immovable wisdom. In

contrast, if someone calls “Mataemon!” and you start to think, “What does

he want?” and so forth, the mind that then wonders “What does he want?”

and so forth is the ignorance of attachment as the ground of delusion.

(Haskel 38)

Takuan's description of immovable wisdom here is remarkably similar to Louis Althusser's

analysis of modern subjectivity, where an unquestioning reply to a call from the authorities

defines the interpellated individual as a subject and as a being subjected to the state (Althusser

174). This call was also interpreted as such in interbellum Japan. For example, in 1937 Ishihara

Shummyō, a Zen priest, approvingly referred to the citation from Takuan above, commenting

that

If one is called upon to die, one should not be the least bit agitated. On the

contrary, one should be in a realm where something called "oneself" does

not intrude even slightly. Such a realm is no different from that derived

from the practice of Zen. (Victoria, Zen at War 102–3)

In Ishihara’s interpretation, which was far from eccentric, Zen becomes the perfect fascist

ideology. An unquestioning obedience to the state goes hand in hand with the dismissal of the

importance of one’s own life.

In Musashi, Yoshikawa writes the bushidō back into the Tokugawa period. In the

process, he erases the modern roots of the code and represents it as an eternal essence of which
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Miyamoto Musashi is the perfect representation. Musashi then becomes the supreme standard of

the virtues Japanese soldiers were told they should strive for, not for themselves, but for the

nation as a whole. At multiple points in the narrative, characters assert the importance of samurai

who sacrificed their lives for the nation, claiming that revitalizing the eternal Way of the Samurai

“could become the foundation of the nation’s strength and prosperity” (595). This disregard for

self-preservation reaches its climax at the end of the book, where Takuan’s Zen education

renders its ultimate fruits. In a small boat on the way to his final duel with Sasaki Kojirō, a duel

that will take place on a small island, Musashi feels a complete indifference towards death:

[Musashi] was thinking of nothing at all. He was, if anything, a little

bored.

He looked over the side of the boat at the swirling blue water. It was deep

here, infinitely deep, and alive with what seemed to be eternal life. But

water had no fixed, determined form. Was it not because man had a fixed,

determined form that he cannot possess eternal life? Does not true life

begin only when tangible form has been lost?

To Musashi’s eyes, life and death seemed like so much froth. (964)

Here, Musashi’s complete indifference towards death conforms to the Zen-inspired bushidō

perfectly. In view of the immense success of Yoshikawa’s novel, not few of those crammed in

boats bound for similar life-or-death struggles on distant islands will have wished themselves

equal to Musashi’s valor. Historical records show that many succeeded in emulating his

disregard for death, the Japanese rate of soldiers surrendering being significantly lower than

those of the other Axis powers (Victoria, Zen War Stories 106).vi

Fascist Aesthetics
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Apart from using Zen discourse to frame Musashi’s “Way of the Samurai,” Yoshikawa

also uses a Zen-derived aesthetics to create “fascist moments” which provide another way to

escape the fragmentation that marks modernity. At the same time, these moments obliterate the

moral consequences of violence, a move that, like the bushidō code that Musashi follows, had

very real consequences on the mentality of at least some Japanese soldiers. Though it might be

true that the bloodshed in Musashi can be read as a critique of Japanese imperialism, as Saitō

Tadao has argued, the manner in which Yoshikawa describes lethal violence does not suggest

such an interpretation (Saitō).

At least since Okakura Kakuzō’s The Ideals of the East (1903), Zen Buddhism has been

associated with Japanese art, an association that, like the bushidō, is mainly a modern invention.

“Art” here needs to be understood broadly: tea ceremony, archery, and rock gardens were all

incorporated in an essentializing discourse on Japanese aesthetics.vii No wonder then, that

swordsmanship was also deemed a Zen art. Daisetz Suzuki, perhaps the most famous writer on

Zen in the twentieth century, took this association in a jarring direction. Writing in 1938, as the

war on the Chinese mainland was in full swing, he asserted that true Zen warriors do not kill: “It

is really not he [the swordsman] but the sword itself that does the killing. He had no desire to do

harm to anybody, but the enemy appears and makes himself a victim” (Suzuki 145). Because the

sword “automatically” kills its enemies, the swordsman becomes “an artist of the first grade,

engaged in producing a work of genuine originality” (Suzuki 145).viii Yoshikawa relies on this

theory of aesthetic violence to depict confrontations between Musashi and his foes. As “fascist

moments,” these scenes suggest the dissolution of individuality into beauty and death.
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In a rich study inspired by Walter Benjamin’s analysis of fascism as the “aestheticization

of politics,” Alan Tansman has argued that interbellum Japanese novels provide “fascist

moments.” He defines these moments as offering

images of self-obliteration evoked through the beauty of violence, often in

the name of an idealized Japan. These images are anchored in ancient

myth and transcend the strictures of time: they are moments in which the

individual is depicted as merging with, or is called on to merge

imaginatively with, a greater whole. (Tansman 18)

Tansman here distinguishes three key characteristics of fascist moments. First, they are

representations of death, channeled through beauty. Second, they present themselves as eternal,

as unchanging essences, often of Japaneseness. Finally, the death they represent is meaningful as

a fusion with a “greater whole,” which in Tansman’s book often means the Japanese state.

Many of the encounters between Musashi and his enemies can be described as fascist

moments. Such encounters are consistently framed in the Zen language of aesthetics. The ending

of the novel is a good example. As described above, Musashi looks upon his possible death in

the final duel against Kojirō with a bushidō-like indifference. After describing Musashi’s

attitude, the narrator goes to describe the scene in more explicitly Zen-inspired terms:

Here, hopes, prayers, and the gods were of no assistance, nor was chance.

There was only a vacuum, impersonal and perfectly impartial. Is this

vacuum, so difficult of achievement by one who has life, the perfect

expression of the mind that has risen above thought and transcended

ideas? (968)
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The impersonal mind just described is the so-called “no-thought” or “no-mind.” In an essay on

“Zen and Swordsmanship” published in the 1938 collection Zen and Japanese Culture, Suzuki

calls this “no-mind” “one of the most important ideas in Zen” (Suzuki 111, n17). No doubt he is

right. Yet his discussion of this idea takes place within parameters set by Takuan’s treatises on

swordsmanship, a distinctly martial interpretation also present in Musashi. The similarity

between Yoshikawa and Suzuki’s interpretation of “no-mind” thus demonstrates how Musashi

reproduces 1930s discourse on Zen.

Shortly after Musashi’s mystical meditation, the duel begins:

The wooden sword rose straight in the air. With one great kick, Musashi

leapt high, and folding his legs, reduced his six-foot frame to four feet or

less.

“Y-a-a-ah!” Ganryū’s [the martial nickname of Kojirō] sword screamed

through the space above him. The stroke missed, but the tip of the Drying

Pole cut through Musashi’s headband, which went flying through the air.

Ganryū mistook it for his opponent’s head, and a smile flitted briefly

across his face. The next instant his skull broke like gravel under the blow

of Musashi’s sword. (969)

In this fascist moment, violence is made subservient to aesthetics. Like an abstract painting, the

description of the scene consists of a variety of lines whose mutual play is its real interest. The

vertical rise of Musashi’s sword announces Musashi’s leap, which is paired with the horizontal

fold of the legs. Ganryū’s sword provides a new movement from low to high. Then, Musashi’s

headband whirls through the sky, the shape of which shades into Ganryū’s smile. The final
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downward motion concludes the scene with an explosion of red color. The ethical messiness of

killing disappears in a work of literary art that is only interested in its own aesthetics.

Another example of how the aestheticization of fascist moments effectively combines

with Zen discourse comes earlier in the novel, when Musashi faces Yoshioka Denshichirō.

Responding to a clumsy attack by the latter, Musashi dodges and draws his sword:

It looked as though they were too close together for both of them to

emerge unscathed, but after a moment of dancing reflected light from the

swords, they backed off.

Several tense minutes passed. The two combatants were silent and

motionless, swords stationary in the air, point aimed at point but separated

by a distance of about nine feet. The snow piled on Denshichirō’s brow

dropped to his eyelashes. To shake it off, he contorted his face until his

forehead muscles looked like countless moving bumps. His bulging

eyeballs glowed like windows of a smelting furnace, and the exhalations

of his deep, steady breathing were as hot and gusty as those from a

bellows.

[...]

Musashi held his sword at eye level too, with his elbows relaxed, flexible,

and capable of movement in any direction. Denshichirō’s arms, held in an

unaccustomed stance, were tight and rigid, and his sword unsteady.

Musashi’s was absolutely still; snow began to pile up on its thin upper

edge. (455)
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Here, the aesthetics are significantly different from those that determined the confrontation with

Kojirō. The interplay of lines is still there in the contrasting position of the blades, but here it is

accented by a delicate motif: the snow falling slowly, piling up on the warriors’ bodies and their

weapons. The cold whiteness of the snow also contrasts with the redness of Denshichirō, whose

eyes blaze like “windows of a smelting furnace.” The duel ends with Musashi taking two lives:

Dead silence. Snow accumulated on Musashi’s hair, on Denshichirō’s

shoulders.

Musashi no longer saw a great boulder [Denshichirō] before him. He

himself no longer existed as a separate person. The will to win had been

forgotten. He saw the whiteness of the snow falling between himself and

the other man, and the spirit of the snow was as light as his own. The

space now seemed an extension of his own body. He had become the

universe, or the universe had become him. He was there, yet not there.

Denshichirō’s feet inched forward. At the tip of his sword, his willpower

quivered towards the start of a movement.

Two lives expired with the strokes of a single sword. First, Musashi

attacked to his rear, and Ōtaguro Hyōsuke [an ally of Denshichirō]’s head,

or a piece of it, sailed past Musashi like a great crimson cherry, as the

body staggered lifelessly toward Denshichirō. The second horrendous

scream – Denshichirō’s cry of attack – was cut short midway, the broken-

off sound thinning out into the space around them. Musashi leapt so high

that he appeared to have sprung from the level of his opponent’s chest.
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Denshichirō’s big frame reeled backward and dropped in a spray of white

snow. (456)

If the death of Kojirō was an abstract painting, this scene is expressionist. Snow provides the

white background color for the red blood. In this space, shapes extend beyond themselves, as

Denshichirō becomes a boulder and Musashi expands until he fills the universe. The mystical

language abruptly cuts into an orgasmic celebration of violence. Apparently the consequences of

being one with the universe include the gruesome death of others sharing that universe. This

combination of killing and spirituality expresses the ultimate consequences of the Way of the

Samurai: if to Musashi “life and death seemed like so much froth,” (Ibid.) then the only thing

that still matters is not whether you take lives, but how you take them. An ethical decision (is

killing right?) changes into an aesthetic one (are we killing properly?).

Merely a cursory glance at the records of Japanese war atrocities shows that this manner

of (not) thinking about the ethics of violence did not remain confined to fiction. In Iris Chang’s

The Rape of Nanjing, an eyewitness remembers how Japanese officers showed their men the

proper way to decapitate prisoners:

“Heads should be cut off like this,” [Second Lieutenant Tanaka] said,

unsheathing his army sword. He scooped water from a bucket with a

dipper, then poured it over both sides of the blade. Swishing off the water,

he raised his sword in a long arc. Standing behind the prisoner, Tanaka

steadied himself, legs spread apart, and cut off the man’s head with a

shout, “Yo!” The head flew more than a meter away. Blood spurted up in

two fountains from the body and sprayed into the hole. The scene was so

appalling that I felt I couldn’t breathe. (Chang 57–8)

 Zen Buddhist Samurai 19  

In a remarkable review of Chang’s book for the Buddhist periodical Tricycle, Josh Baran has

juxtaposed this quotation with what Suzuki wrote on the swordsman as an “artist,” calling the

latter’s statements “grotesque” in face of the horrifying practices that were continually taking

place on the Chinese mainland (Baran). Such an appraisal can also be extended to Yoshikawa

who, writing at the same time as Suzuki, continued to evoke images of violence that dispense

with moral questions.

Conclusion

Yoshikawa engages with Zen discourse on two levels. First, he casts Japan’s most

famous samurai, Miyamoto Musashi, as a Zen Buddhist warrior who follows the twentieth-

century bushidō. Second, Yoshikawa aestheticizes violence, creating “fascist moments” that

erase moral questions, in line with Zen discourse on the warrior as a martial “artist.” Written at a

time when Japanese soldiers were already involved in a brutal war on the Chinese subcontinent,

this novel and others of its kind are not merely escapist or antiquarian.ix Using Zen Buddhist

discourse, authors like Yoshikawa actively created and promoted a warrior ideal whose legacy

lasts until this day.x

By carefully analyzing the roots of this phenomenon, the configuration of our own time

as a continuation of the struggle against modernity become clearer, as do the features of similar

“spiritual warriors” and the dangerous attraction they hold on the modern mind. Though an

analysis of such figures today lies beyond the scope of this article, the contemporary figures of

the Islamic State jihadist and his counterpart, the Christian warrior, seem comparable to the Zen

Buddhist samurai.xi Both draw on religious ideas to construct a warrior ideal that seems immune

to change and rooted in a traditional past. In the horrific suicide bombings that haunt the news

one can discern the silhouette of the samurai warrior whose complete devotion to duty remains
 Zen Buddhist Samurai 20  

most memorably conserved in the grainy black-and-white films of kamikaze fighters diving

towards aircraft carriers.xii Then as now, the spiritual warrior’s most self-fulfilling moment was

his violent self-destruction.

                                                                                                               
i
For the purposes of this paper, fascism is understood along the lines of Harootunian and
Tansman (op. cit.). The discussion also follows Marilyn Ivy in considering the application of the
term “fascism” to the interbellum and wartime system in Japan as analytically useful. Ivy writes
that “fascism is a notion that outstrips its historical reference, one that has a theoretical and
reflective afterlife that can allow us to think about a range of problems that weren’t, aren’t,
thinkable otherwise” (Ivy viii).
ii
In a book that is devoted to reconstructing “Musashi’s life,” Tokitsu Kenji admits that, since so
little evidence is extant, writing a biography of Musashi resembles imagining a vase based on “a
small fragment of some piece of Greek pottery” (Tokitsu xviii).
iii
Autobiographically, Yoshikawa’s resentment towards merchants might derive from his
experiences with trade as a child, as documented in his memoir, Fragments of a Past. His father
hailed from a samurai family but was forced to start a trading company in Yokohama. Though
business was good, eventually a social misstep led to sudden abject poverty, forcing the young
Yoshikawa to take on a series of random jobs, the most dangerous of which was refitting trade
ships (Yoshikawa, Fragments of a Past: A Memoir).
It is also necessary to note here that Shimauchi Keiji has argued that Yoshikawa portrays
merchants positively in Musashi, an interpretation directly opposed to the one defended in the
present article. Shimauchi cites Kobayashi Tarozaemon, a merchant that helps Musashi towards
the end of the novel, as evidence of Yoshikawa’s favorable disposition towards merchants
(Shimauchi 28–30). The matter is no doubt complicated enough that no single interpretation of
authorial attitude, a matter difficult enough to assess on its own, can be defended without
qualifications. Nevertheless, Shimauchi’s example focuses on an individual rather than
Yoshikawa’s representation of merchants as a social group, which is usually as a greedy and
lecherous assembly of people. Kobayashi is exceptional because he aids Musashi despite his
social class.
iv
“Focalization” is the process where an external narrator represents the thoughts and feelings of
one of the characters in a text. For example, in Musashi, the narrator is all-knowing and not
bound within space and time: it freely comments on the actions of the characters, and is able to
know things they do not. This all-knowing perspective is called external focalization. However,
sometimes the narrator sees the world of the text through the eyes of one of the characters, in
which case it is internally focalizing. Though Gérard Genette originally developed this
narratological system, this article uses the adaptation of Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck
(Herman and Vervaeck 41–102).
v
Though Musashi and Takuan were contemporaries, no historical record exists of them ever
meeting, let alone of the latter having been the former’s teacher. However, several Tokugawa
daimyo, among them the Shogun’s swordmaster Yagyū Munenori (1571-1646 CE), claimed to
have received instruction from Takuan, making Yoshikawa’s invention not wholly far-fetched.
 Zen Buddhist Samurai 21  

                                                                                                               
vi
Commenting on Yoshikawa’s usage of Zen, Donald Richie writes that “Musashi appears to
know as much about Zen as the average Jersey city jogger” (Richie 281). Whether Richie is right
or wrong depends on what one considers “Zen” to be here. If by “Zen” is meant a familiarity
with canonized sutras, chants, and traditional meditation methods, then Musashi is surely a
beginner. If one means a type of discourse used by Zen priests and laymen alike during the
1930s, then Musashi is an enlightened expert.
vii
For a discussion of archery and rock gardens in particular, and how Western visitors to Japan
played a key role in developing this discourse, see Shōji Yamada’s Shots in the Dark (Yamada).
viii
In a chapter devoted to Suzuki’s interpretation of the samurai, Winston King shows that the
Japanese scholar’s position has little historical validity: “Suzuki’s idealized version [of samurai
as Zen warriors] was not that of the rank-and-file samurai who found Zen training practically
useful in actual combat regardless of presumed spiritual benefits. Suzuki’s is a later version”
(King 183). What King maintains here in spite of his criticism of Suzuki, namely that a
significant amount of historical samurai had undergone Zen training and used it in combat, has
also been questioned, for example by Christopher Ives’ in his stimulating review of King’s book
(Ives 237).
ix
James Dorsey has shown that Musashi was far from unique in casting the Pacific War as a
“quest for spiritual purity” (Dorsey, “Literary Tropes” 424). The novel he analyzes, a
fictionalization of an army communiqué on the role of submariners during the Pearl Harbor
attack, demonstrates that the character type of the spiritual warrior also appeared in depictions of
contemporary Japanese soldiers at war.
x
See, for example, Maria Rankin-Brown and Morris Brown’s exploration of the samurai figure’s
role in contemporary manga, where they assert that the “honorable codes” such figures are
believed to live by are “key to establishing a positive national identity and, by extension in
Japan, a personal identity” (Rankin-Brown and Brown 80). Though the history of nationalism
demonstrates that such an identity is not necessarily “positive,” Rankin-Brown and Brown’s
examination demonstrates, as the present article aims to do, the function the samurai figure
fulfills in establishing and maintaining Japanese cultural identity in the face of modernity.
xi
On one such Christian group currently fighting the Islamic State in the Middle East, see
Loveday Morris’ article in the Washington Post (Morris). The group Morris examines is called
Dwekh Nawsha, a term that means “self-sacrifice” in Aramaic. The meaning of this name
already points to the similarity between the ideals of this group and those of the death-defying
Zen samurai.
xii
In her work on Japanese kamikaze diaries and the cherry blossom aesthetic, Emiko Ohnuki
Tierney has already suggested the similarity between kamikaze missions and today’s suicide
bombings (Ohnuki-Tierney).
 Zen Buddhist Samurai 22  

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