Vagabond, Volume 10

Vagabond is a seinen manga by Takehiko Inoue, created after Slam Dunk and adapted from Eiji Yoshikawa's novel Musashi. Set in the late Sengoku and early Tokugawa periods, it follows Miyamoto Musashi from a violent country ronin to a man groping toward the "way of the sword" through life-and-death combat and self-doubt. It is celebrated for its explosive ink-brush artwork, its nearly wordless psychological passages, and its solid research into swordsmanship, and is one of the representative works of Inoue's mature period as both artist and storyteller. It has won the Kodansha Manga Award and the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize for manga. This volume is the tenth in the Vagabond series, a middle chapter in which Musashi has left his home village, wanders challenging the strong, and gradually confronts his own bloodlust. The Japanese tenth volume was published by Kodansha in its Morning KC line in 2001, with a Chinese edition from Hong Kong's Tianda Publishing appearing around the same time; a Taiwanese edition was also issued by Sharp Point Press under the title Ronin Swordsman. Page counts and chapter contents vary slightly between editions; this entry follows the Chinese edition from Tianda Publishing (International) Co., Ltd.