In Lives of Master Swordsmen you meet the Olympians of swordsmanship, including Tsukahara Bokuden and Miyamoto Musashi, lone wolves who wandered the length and breadth of Japan in search of worthy opponents; Kamiizumi Nobutsuna, whose namesake was none other than Takeda Shingen, the brilliant warlord during the Age of Civil Wars; the Yagyu-hereditary instructors of the Tokugawa-whose Zen-based Kage-ryu was the most illustrious of all schools in the annals of Japanese swordsmanship; Ito Kagehisa, the only master swordsman who who devoted himself to swordsmanship as wielding a sword; and Kiyokawa Hachiro and Yamaoka Tesshu, who played active roles in the Meiji Restoration. The lives of these master swordsmen unfold against the backdrop of the Age of Civil Wars, the unification of the country by Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the Fortune Deciding Battle, the Battles of Winter and Summer, the Shimabara Revolt, the Pax Tokugawa, and the Meiji Restoration. With the exception of the chapter on Tsukahara Bokuden, which is based on oral tradition, Lives of Master Swordsmen is founded on careful analysis of historical facts. Makoto Sugawara takes especial pains to separate the Musashi of fact from the Musashi of fiction, and achieves startling psychological insights into the character of the greatest swordsmen of ambivalent reputation. The book also includes the first translation of Fudochi Shimyo Roku, the Priest Takuan's limpid Zen treatise on the martial arts. This influential treatise turned the attention of samurai toward Zen.

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