Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, Episode 618, Live by the Sword.

On the subject of legendary figures in Japanese history and the way they get transformed

from actual people into legends, there's one more person we absolutely have to talk about.

More so than even Yoshitsune.

He's well known in both Japan and in the wider world, and his legend has only grown

in stature, though practically speaking we know almost nothing about him.

His name is Miyamoto Musashi, and like Yoshitsune, the stories that had grown up around

Musashi are so well known, so firmly established, that today it's an incredible

challenge to separate fact from fiction.

Unlike Yoshitsune, though, with Musashi there's one person above all others who probably

deserves credit for creating his legend.

His name is Yoshkawa Eiji, and he's not the sort of writer you'd probably

encounter in a literature class focused on Japan. He's not in that sense as famous as someone

like Natsime Solseki, who he talked about a few weeks ago, or is internationally regarded

as writers like Oa Kan Zaburo or Kalabata Yasunari. Yet within Japan, I would bet more people have actually

read his work or seen one of the many, many works adapted from it. Yoshkawa, alongside his later

contemporary Shiburyo Yotaro, is one of the two most famous authors of historical fiction in

modern Japan.

And as an aside, of course, there's a whole other conversation we could have here about who gets considered literary, whose work is considered pedestrian and beneath serious analysis,

or being included in fancy literature courses.

There's a big component of elitism and classism that I would argue goes into those

distinctions. That's a conversation for another time. Anyway, Yoshkawa Aiji was born in 1892 to a

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