Samurai Saturday

For those of you who enjoy stories about the samurai and feudal Japan I may have a couple suggestions. 

Last night I watched the film "Goyokin" knowing little to no background on it.  The film was very good; it takes place towards the end of the samurai era long after the battle of Sekigahara and establishment of the Tokugawa Shogunate and centers on Magobei Wakizaka. Magobei is a ronin who left the service of his lord after the chief retainer who also happens to be his brother in law perpetrated a massacre to cover up the theft of gold from a sunken ship.  The massacre is attributed to being the work of evil crow spirits and Magobei  agrees to keep silent about it if the chief retainer never repeats his actions.  After 3 years of wandering and on the brink of selling his sword and renouncing the Way of the Samurai, he is attacked by former comrades leading him to believe that the chief retainer plans to go back on his word and commit a similar atrocity.  The director of the film is Hideo Gosha, who according to wikipedia is nearly as influential in the "chambara" or "sword-fighting" film genre as Kurosawa, and watching this film I can definitely see why.  Of course this isn't exactly "Yojimbo" or "The Seven Samurai"  but in terms of storytelling this film blows pulp samurai films out of the water, while still having enough action to hold the interest of people who may be fans of stylistic elements of "exploitation" samurai films.



 My second suggestion to fans of samurai lore is the book Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa, this is a very famous book however if you are only familiar with it by reputation or if you enjoyed the book "Shogun" I would highly recommend that you pick this book up.  The book is a fictionalized account of a decade in the life of Miyamoto Musashi, and while it has action and combat it is more about character developent. The book follows Musashi from his humble beginnings as a young tough wounded in the battle of Sekigahara, he eventually becomes an outlaw, begins to try to seek the true "Way" and eventually masters himself and finds peace. Yoshikawa is a master storyteller he creates a large cast of characters who are all interconnected. He also tends to neglect one character or the other for a couple hundred pages, and just as you are starting to think "hey what happened to so-and-so?" whatever character you are wondering about makes a seamless reappearance.  Be forewarned however this book is obscenely long it usually takes me 1 to 2 nights to finish a book, this one took me close to 10.  The copy that I rented had enormous pages and was still over 800 pages in length, I can only imagine a paperback copy having over 1000.  In all I found the book to be deeply satisfying if a little lengthy and I highly recommend it to fans of "Shogun" or even Dumas' "The 3 Musketeers."