Eiji Yoshikawa

Eiji Yoshikawa wrote Musashi, the serialised novel that gave modern Japan its picture of the samurai, and rewrote the country's classical war tales for a newspaper readership. He left school at eleven when his family was ruined, worked in the Yokohama docks, and was badly injured there. He began publishing serial fiction in the 1920s and became the most widely read author in Japan. Musashi ran in the Asahi Shimbun from 1935 to 1939, following the historical swordsman Miyamoto Musashi from the losing side at Sekigahara through his duels to a kind of discipline that is as much spiritual as martial, and it was read by millions during exactly the years the country was moving towards war - which is part of why it has been argued about since. He also produced versions of the Taiheiki and of the Heike story, and a Japanese Romance of the Three Kingdoms. His Shin Heike Monogatari retells the twelfth-century wars in modern prose. Where the Onin War and the Sengoku period are concerned he is the reason a general audience knows them at all. He worked as a war correspondent in China, and after 1945 wrote comparatively little. He received the Cultural Order of Merit in 1960 and died of cancer two years later. Musashi ran to some four thousand newspaper instalments and has sold well over a hundred million copies in Japan. The English translation of 1981 was a bestseller in the United States during the vogue for Japanese management books, which is not what it is about. Nearly every samurai film and comic since owes it something.

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