I’m a bit of a Inoue Takehiko fan. A bit since I like his drawing style, “REAL” is one of my favorite manga, but “Chameleon Jail” not so much. I also like Eiji Yoshikawa’s book (this link contains some spoilers; check Amazon for info without spoilers) though it lacks subtlety and it borders at times on flowery, at least in the translation I read, and I rec it to people who like history, samurai, Musashi, even Zen. I also rec (and even provide a handy link to random translations I found ^^) Musashi’s Go Rin No Sho translated by Victor Harris, complete with notes and Sun Tzu’s Art of War with annotations that Wikipedia considers dated and a link to the annotations-free version.

All right, Go Rin No Sho obviously has a connection with this post, but what about Sun Tzu? Well, Sun Tzu’s Art of War is in fact mentioned in “Musashi”, though the scene was changed beyond recongnition in “Vagabond” (see bellow, no 3).

The post(s) will be about the differences between the book and manga. Some things have to be said first. One, while this is an anime/manga blog, and I do like Inoue Takehiko, I am not partial to some of the changes the manga made. Two, I won’t get much into the changes that are either explained by the different medium (no matter how much we talk about “visual novels” a manga is not a book and many details are lost to accomodate the format) or probably due to a need for brevity - at least when the first volumes were written.

Great. Let’s get to it.

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