Musashi for Gym Enthusiasts

The acclaimed translation of Leiko Gotoda – the first complete version of the work in the West – paved the way for a whole crop of translations directly from Japanese in Brazil. This epic novel based on Japanese history narrates a period in the life of Japan's most famous samurai, who lived, it seems, between 1584 and 1645. The beginning is anthological: Musashi regains consciousness amidst piles of corpses on the side of the vanquished in the famous Battle of Sekigahara in 1600. He then wanders through a Japan in crisis where unemployed and impoverished samurai (the ronin), overthrown by feudal lords, sow villainy by dictating the law of the strongest.

Musashi will be just one of these petty tyrants, mercilessly defeating those he encounters, until a monk armed only with his malice and some Zen-Buddhist precepts manages to capture him and put him to the test. Musashi escapes thanks to a young admirer, only to be captured again, and now he is confined for three years in a dungeon where a long penance of reading and reflection will make him see a new meaning for life, as well as new uses for his extraordinary strength and skill. The paths to the fullness of being are never easy, and in his years of pilgrimage in search of both spiritual and warrior perfection, he will face the most diverse adversaries.

It is in one of these situations that, completely cornered, he will use for the first time, in the heat of the battle and almost unconsciously at first, the surprising technique of the two swords, the Niten ichi style, which would make him famous for all time. The reader will witness his maturation, following the path that led him to transform from a wild and bloodthirsty boy into the greatest and wisest of the samurai, capable of understanding and loving both fencing and the arts.

Parallel to this, the plot moves towards the expected and inevitable duel on the island of Funashima with Sasaki Kojiro, the other great swordsman of the time and Musashi's rival in skill, tenacity and warrior wisdom. This incredible combat, which concludes the work, has become firmly established in the collective imagination of the Japanese nation through literature (in all kinds of adaptations and its various film versions), and many people can comment on its moves in the smallest detail.

Musashi also paints a picture of Japan at a crossroads during the unification of the nation under the Tokugawa line, in a long transition that saw it move from constant armed struggles between small lords (daimyo) to the dominance of a class of "bureaucrats of paper and brush" (in the words of the specialist Edwin Reischauer, who signs the preface), who would make the country develop in isolation from the rest of the world for two and a half centuries. The work will also be marked by events in Edo, the future Tokyo, then in frenetic development, whose pulsating underworld foreshadows the metropolis it would later become, and which constitute the urban incursion of this predominantly bucolic work with a strong presence of a feudalism in painful modernization.

Musashi is the best-selling literary work in the history of Japan. There are several editions, as well as about 15 film or television versions. Its main characters have become part of the daily life of the Japanese, and the work has become a bedside book and a guide to the art of living for generations of Japanese.

This commemorative edition - a box containing the work in three volumes and an illustrated booklet with representations of the great samurai in ukiyo-e prints - was originally launched by Estação Liberdade on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of Musashi in Brazil, from the mark of 100,000 copies sold of the two volumes of the previous edition.

Now, after more than 17,000 boxes sold, we at Editora Estação Liberdade are bringing you a completely revamped box. Updated design, yellow paper, different covers, fonts and illustrations, all brand new!

Important: the textual contents of the three books have not been altered.

product information: