This book contains 171 highly detailed alphabetical entries and essays on a broad variety of intriguing topics, including the following:
Samurai weapons and armor, including the fearsome katana sword
Famous Samurai including Miyamoto Musashi, Japan's greatest swordsman;
Tokugawa Ieyasu, the founder of the Tokugawa shogunate;
and Toyotomi Hideyoshi, a uni er of Japan and notorious persecutor of Christians in the 16th century
The Battle of Sekigahara, the largest battle ever to take place in Japan, and the Boshin War, which led to the fall of the shogunate and restoration of imperial power
This piece of writing by famed samurai Musashi (1584-1645) is the single-most influential work on samurai swordsmanship, offering insights into samurai history, the Zen Buddhist state of "no-mind" that enables warriors to triumph and the philosophical meaning of Bushido—"the way of the warrior."
Bennett's translation is the first to be based on a careful reconstruction of the original text by Japan's foremost Musashi scholar.
