What is Vagabond based on?

Eiji Yoshikawa's novel Musashi, the 1935 newspaper serial that taught Japan its own swordsman.

Every Vagabond cover says so, in both languages. Inoue's manga is a loose adaptation of Musashi, the epic novel Eiji Yoshikawa serialized in the Asahi Shimbun from 1935, which retells the life of Miyamoto Musashi (c. 1584 to 1645), the undefeated swordsman who wrote The Book of Five Rings. Yoshikawa's version, part history and part invention, became so popular that for most Japanese readers it simply is Musashi's story.

Inoue read it and wondered about the part the legend skips: the young man before the mastery, violent, frightened, and animal. That question is Vagabond. The novel gives the manga its route and its cast; the manga repays the debt by reimagining nearly everything it touches, which is the subject of the next page in this archive.

THE NOVEL

Eiji Yoshikawa's Musashi

Serialized 1935-1939

Yoshikawa told Musashi's life as a newspaper serial in the Asahi Shimbun across the late 1930s, and Japan adopted his version as the national one: the Musashi most Japanese readers know is Yoshikawa's.

The shape Inoue inherited

The novel supplies Vagabond's skeleton: Sekigahara, the wild Takezo, Takuan's intervention, the Yoshioka duels, the long road to Kojiro. Inoue follows its map while redrawing every face on it.

The credit on every cover

Japanese Vagabond covers carry the line "from Yoshikawa Eiji's Miyamoto Musashi," and the English editions print "Based on the novel Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa." The debt is on the book, not buried in it.

The English novel

Yoshikawa's Musashi circulates in English in Charles S. Terry's translation, the standard one-volume edition, for readers who want the source after the manga.

How does the manga differ from the novel? →

Who was the real Musashi? →

What is Vagabond based on?

THE NOVEL

THE FIRST WORD