Vagabond: Volume 8

by Takehiko Inoue, based on the novel Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa, 211 pages

Childhood friends Takezô and Matahachi barely survive the great battle at Sekigahara. Being alive when they've no business being so, they vow to do great things with their unexpectedly intact lives. But being on the losing side, and being young and rash, they avoid going home right away, get involved with bandits and other people's complicated lives, and are separated when Matahachi betrays his friend and runs away with a troublesome woman. By the time Takezô makes it home, he's tired and beaten and a wanted criminal, and Matahachi's family blames him for their son's misfortunes. A wise and martially-skilled monk named Takuan helps Takezô to momentarily calm his rage and find some internal focus before he sets out on his own, under a new name, vowing to become the strongest swordsman there is. Unbeknownst to him, Matahachi has fallen on his own troubles, stolen a dead man's name, and done as his family has by placing all the blame on the friend who convinced him to go to war in the first place.

This volume covers the conclusion to Musashi's rematch with Inshun, an ambitious young monk and heir to the title at the Hozoin Temple. The young men had fought before, at Musashi's instigation, and Inshun soundly defeated him but couldn't forget the feeling of actually fighting with his life on the line--which, against the wild man Musashi, is the only way to fight. But this time, Musashi has had some time with Inshun's quiet, aging master and has learned a little something more about himself. When Inshun confronts him, the monk finds he not only faces a different, stronger opponent, but his own long-suppressed demons. Does he really want to fight to the death? And if he changes his mind, will Musashi let him?

Inoue's depiction of Takezô's transformation into Miyamoto Musashi is loosely based on Yoshikawa's classic novel Musashi, itself a fictionalized version of the life of Japan's greatest swordsman. I love the man's artwork and storytelling, and I can't help but care about his characters, even when they don't spring fully formed from his own imagination but from a combination of his and others' creativity and history's intriguing and frustratingly indeterminate puzzle pieces. He puts them together and makes them his own.

In 2000, Vagabond won the Grand Prize for manga at the Japan Media Arts Festival as well as the Kodansha Manga Award. It also received the 2002 Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize and, on this side of the world, earned Inoue an Eisner Award nomination in 2003. The man is cool beans, people.