Hagakure

What It Is

Not a book its author wrote, and not one he meant anyone to publish. Between 1709 and 1716, Yamamoto Tsunetomo — a retainer of the Nabeshima clan of Saga, living in a hermitage after the death of his lord — talked, and a younger samurai named Tashiro Tsuramoto took it down. The result is some thirteen hundred fragments: instruction, complaint, anecdote, memory, and rules of conduct so precise they are almost domestic. Hagakure means hidden by leaves.

The circumstances matter more than usual here. Tsunetomo was born into a hundred-year peace. The Tokugawa settlement had turned the warrior class into a salaried bureaucracy; the samurai around him were administrators who happened to wear swords. He never saw combat. What he is giving you is therefore not a working code but an argument about what the code ought to be, made by a man convinced his own class has gone soft. Nostalgia and polemic, delivered as fact.

It circulated in manuscript among Nabeshima retainers and was not supposed to leave them.

Why It Matters

Its most quoted line — that the Way of the Samurai is found in death — is why the book is both revered and distrusted. Read carelessly it is a death cult. Read closely it is a claim about decision: that a man who has already accepted the worst outcome acts cleanly, because he is no longer bargaining with it. Hagakure is the most uncompromising statement in world literature of the idea that hedging is itself a moral failure.

That is also what made it useful to people it should never have reached. Barely known for two centuries, it was taken up in the 1930s and taught to a generation of Japanese being prepared for war, which is how a private book of grumbling and advice became a national text. After 1945 it was widely treated as poison. Then Yukio Mishima, who loved it past the point of reason, wrote the commentary that is still the best-known case for taking it seriously.

Its faults are not hidden. It is inconsistent, parochial and often petty; pages of it concern tiny points of Nabeshima etiquette. The ethics are unusable whole — absolute loyalty to one particular lord, contempt for calculation, an appetite for violent death that no reading can domesticate. Anyone who tells you it is really a book about focus and commitment has sanded it down into something it is not.

Before You Read

Two or three hours in Wilson's selection, and no reason to hurry. The fragments are self-contained. Read ten and put it down.

Bring no expectation of coherence. It does not build. Passages contradict each other because they were spoken years apart to an audience of one.

You will meet passages you find repellent — on revenge, on ritual suicide, on the uselessness of being clever. Do not skip them. They are the book. A Hagakure with the disturbing parts removed is a motivational pamphlet.

Which Translation to Read

• William Scott Wilson (Kodansha International, 1979; now from Shambhala) — recommended. Wilson is the leading translator of Japanese warrior literature, and this is the version everyone quotes: three hundred selected passages, spare, clean, and rhythmically alive in English. The cost: it is a selection, roughly a quarter of the whole, and Wilson worked from a modern Japanese rendering rather than the Edo manuscripts, so you are reading at one remove. View on Amazon →
• Alexander Bennett (Tuttle, 2014), Hagakure: The Secret Wisdom of the Samurai. Translated from the surviving Edo-period copies, with the first two books complete and the most reliable passages from the third, and by far the best historical introduction in print. The cost: more literal and less quotable, with heavier apparatus.
• Takao Mukoh (Hokuseido Press, 1980). An older Japanese-published version, still cited by specialists. The cost: long out of print, awkward in English, and hard to find. For completists.

Take Wilson. If the book gets its hooks into you, take Bennett next and find out how much Wilson left out. Mishima's The Way of the Samurai, translated by Kathryn Sparling, is the companion worth having.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read Wilson's introduction first. You need the history to know what you are holding.

Then read a few passages a day, in the morning, over weeks. Watch the domestic detail in particular: how to answer a summons, what to do about a yawn, how to behave when you are drunk. The pettiness is not a distraction from the philosophy. It is the philosophy. A code that only operates in a crisis is not a code.

The commonest mistake is to mine it for lines about commitment. The second is to dismiss it as fanaticism and stop. It is a strange document, and the strangeness is the point.