Vagabond, Volume 5

Vagabond is a seinen manga by Takehiko Inoue adapted from Eiji Yoshikawa's novel Musashi, serialized in Kodansha's Weekly Morning since 1998. Set from the end of the Sengoku period into the early Edo period, it follows the seventeen-year-old Takezo Shinmen (later Miyamoto Musashi) as he flees after the Battle of Sekigahara and gradually takes up the way of the sword amid violence and confusion; Inoue also wrote an original storyline for Sasaki Kojiro that forms an intertext with the source novel. This is Volume 5, continuing the events after Musashi returns to Miyamoto Village and is surrounded and hunted by villagers and soldiers: he is strung up in a large tree before Shippoji Temple, exposed to sun and rain and near the boundary of life and death, yet still struggling in frenzy and stubbornness; the persuasion and protection of Takuan, Otsu, and others force him, for the first time, to face what kind of person he wants to become. This volume includes episodes such as "Invincible Under Heaven," "The Shame in the Tree," "The Devil's Child," and "Death," and the art already shows the sharp, ink-wash-laden brushstrokes that characterized Inoue's work after he began painting with a brush. The book contains no other works listed in the table of contents; it is a single volume in the Vagabond series.