Did Musashi and Kojiro really duel on Ganryu Island?
Yes. It is the best-attested episode of Musashi's life, and Vagabond is still walking toward it.
For a seventeenth-century duel, the Ganryu Island fight is unusually well witnessed: arranged formally through Hosokawa Tadaoki, fought on April 13, 1612, before spectators, between the era's two most famous undefeated swordsmen. The outline in the records is consistent: Kojiro waited, Musashi came late across the water, and the duel was decided by a single stroke from a wooden sword carved out of a boat's oar.
Inoue's manga has spent twenty-seven years approaching this morning. It has not arrived: the serialization pauses in 1610s Kokura, with Kojiro in the Hosokawa orbit and Tadaoki entering the story. The duel is the horizon every Vagabond reader and every historian shares.
THE DUEL, AS RECORDED
April 13, 1612The arrangement
Musashi asked Hosokawa Tadaoki, the lord both men had dealings with, to set the time and place. Kojiro agreed; the chosen ground was the island of Ganryu, in the straits between Honshu and Kyushu.
The lateness
Musashi arrived late, by boat, with the island full of waiting spectators. Whether the delay was strategy or temperament, every telling agrees it was part of the fight: Kojiro's patience was spent before a sword moved.
The oar
On the crossing, tradition says, Musashi carved a boat's oar into a wooden sword, longer than Kojiro's blade. The most famous improvised weapon in Japanese history.
The long sword
Kojiro fought with a nodachi, an extra-long blade, the weapon of his Ganryu school. The wooden oar-sword outreached even that.
One stroke
The accounts agree on the ending: a single vertical stroke, fatal. Musashi left the island as he came, by boat, and the duel became the founding legend of them both.
The Tadaoki connection
Collectors of the manga should note whose name ends it: Vagabond's 327th and latest chapter, published May 21, 2015, is titled "The Man Named Tadaoki," the lord who arranged the real duel, arriving in the story at last.