Vagabond Review

Inoue's brushwork is the reason to read this and also the reason it is unfinished. The duels are drawn with a sumi-e looseness that makes speed legible without any of the speed lines the medium usually leans on, and the Yoshioka school massacre runs for volumes as one continuous action that never becomes confusing. What the series is actually about is the slow discrediting of its own subject. Musashi begins as an animal who wins, and the more he wins the less the winning explains, until the farming arc removes swords from the story almost entirely and the book gets better rather than worse.

Kojiro's silent childhood volumes are the strongest sustained sequence, told with almost no dialogue at all. Takuan and Otsu are less well served, and the middle stretch is slow in a way that is clearly deliberate and still felt. The indefinite hiatus leaves it stranded well before the duel the whole thing points at, which costs it nothing on the page and everything as a promise.