Hagakure:
The Book of the Samurai
at Amazon.com
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| The Cover of Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai |
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Ok, so you want to be a samurai? You saw Tom Cruise in action, noticed that he got to wear cool armor, score with the babes, ride a horse, and die an honorable death. How could any young man resist? It is just too cool. And those neat sword master types with pearls of wisdom, bubbling with rhetorical questions that push you to look deep within your soul, how could they possibly be wrong? To be a samurai is the coolest thing that any man, any martial artiste could hope for.
Well then, young yamabushi (warrior aesthete of mystical proportions) you must read, without fail, the Hagakure. It is here that you will be transported to the fireside chats of an ancient and sage samurai warrior, a man who has faced death again and again and has been thwarted the dark embrace of this cold mistress his whole fighting life. And now he can be found in these pages, these “hidden leaves” imparting many interesting tales and images to young would-be samurai.
There is advice about how not to permit a single stain on your honor, how to prepare the mind for the inevitabilities of death, how bravery is a simple notion of setting yourself to stare into oblivion and accept that fate openly, and how to behave as a proper “kaishaku” (the guy who chops off the head of the dude gutting himself with a sword) during seppuku (suicide).
But let us not turn a blind eye to some of the more curious areas that Yamamoto Tsunetomo offers us counsel. He has advice for warriors how to avoid excessive yawning, various thoughts on consentual homosexual relations, and the importance of wearing rouge to improve your appearance when necessary. So for those of you who are of the mind that being a samurai is “just for the boys”, you my dear, are sadly mistaken. Not that the samurai were known for touching one another on the forearm while saying, “Sister-girl, you just simply must wear that saucy red outfit to Nakada's ritual suicide tonight! It is just to die for!!,” but the advice that you may find in these “hidden leaves” are sometimes hidden from contemporary readers for reasons. For the nasty details, you will simply have to read the book for yourself.
For me, I love this book. I think that it is simply marvelous. As an artifact of various thoughts on how one must conduct themselves as a warrior, the book is great fun. But please keep in mind that so much of what is recorded is selected, carefully edited, arranged for aesthetic purposes, and has very little value in an of itself as an historical document. We have accounts of accounts, second and third hand information and accounts, romanticizations of many incidents, compounded by generations of handlers who have their own mental impositions on such texts. But this is a wonderful dream. A marvelous dream. And dreams are OK. Dreams are great. I love a good daydream. And for a good one, and one that comes in bite-size passages, this is a great book. So get it and let your mind sift through the fallen leaves of samurai folklore and legend. Enjoy the beauty of the aestheticized past. It is a dream that has been dancing on the mists of our imaginations of the samurai warriors of old for centuries.
Mark Groenewold
Kanazawa, Japan
December, 2003
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