Eiji Yoshikawa
Yoshikawa followed up the successful novel with Taiko (1937), which takes place in the 16th century and concerns Toyotomi Hideyoshi, known as "the Taiko", a farmer's son who became general to Oda Nobunaga and after his death attempted to follow through with his master's vision of a united Japan. Hideyoshi in turn was succeeded by Tokugawa Ieyasu, who formed the Tokugawa shogunate after he won the battle of Sekigahara. Musashi is said to have fought on the wrong side of Sekigahara, and the battle provides the opening scene to the novel. The Tokugawa family ruled for two hundred and fifty years, until the Emperor was returned to power with the Meiji government (1868). Thus Yoshikawa, himself from an old samurai family, grew up under the shadow of a regime that had begun in Musashi's day. It was a languorous, twilight era, memorably depicted in Mishima's Spring Snow, with the feudal order of the samurai dying out and Western civilization infringing from all directions. Taiko and Musashi, then, should not be thought of as a wartime call to arms but rather a yearning to return to an earlier, perhaps simpler order of things, an individualistic world where a single man could hold land independently and defend it with a handful of retainers.
Eiji Yoshikawa
During the 1950s and '60s, interest in samurai culture waned. The unifying leaders of the past--Oda Nobunaga, Tokugawa Ieyasu, and Sakamoto Ryoma (who contributed to the Meiji Restoration)--were seen as heroes of management, as Japan built itself out of the rubble into an economic dynamo. But the economic downturn of the 1990s left many disillusioned and longing for the spiritual, rather than material, Japan. At present Musashi has never been more popular; he is the subject of numerous films, mini-series, and comic books. Yoshikawa himself, however, remains obscure, a writer whose characters, like those of Arthur Conan Doyle and A.A. Milne, are destined to outshine him. Twice married, he died of cancer in 1962, not long after receiving the Cultural Merit Award. It is Japan's foremost award for artistic achievement, and Eiji Yoshikawa was the first popular author to receive it. 041b061a72