This is the Eiji Yoshikawa classic jidai novel Musashi Miyamoto, and it’s been lingering in this slightly awkward limbo for me for a very long time now. It’s very long (8 of these volumes) and old about an even older period with antiquated enough language to be intimidating to pick up again, but it’s brisk and zippy and broken up into short numbered chunks within longer chapters so it moves very quickly when actually reading and is always surprisingly readable and pleasant when I do pick it up. I own it digitally, so it doesn’t directly contribute to my goal of downsizing physical unread backlogs, but I’ve decided for whatever reason I want to finish it before reading (more of) its adaptation Vagabond (which I do have in a pile...), or watching its other adaptation, the Samurai Trilogy (yep, a pile...), to say nothing of plenty other takes on the story. It’s a famous novel in a genre space I do find intriguing as one that would be inaccessible to me (except perhaps in a compromised and limited form) if I couldn’t read English, but also the more and more used to it I get the more that excitement dies down. It’s got an accessible storyline that really does a pretty good job at reminding you of characters and keeping them on their radar when they’re relevant, but also reading it in short pieces over years inevitably makes it hard to feel grounded. … In practice it all adds up to a situation where as I’ve transitioned to reading ebooks on my phone, and have organized my ebook tabs into tab groups there (which is a surprisingly significant quality of life boost since it makes sure they don’t go inactive, and also makes it that much easier to pick a book to read instead of scrolling through some social media algorithm in idle moments), I’ve been reading through this more and more, always flirting with the possibility that I might dive headlong into it finally and get the whole thing over with in one feverish extended swoop, while also worrying that instead maybe the right thing to do would be to find a place to drop it to pick it back up later if ever. And so anyway, this specific volume (which covers an arbitrary chunk of the book, I think these were broken up purely for equal page count, not coherent sections) covers some period of that off and on idle moments type of reading with it (so all of what that part covers is a vague blur), and then at the end of this volume, suddenly I felt like I had crossed the threshold where I was just fresh enough on all the different characters that I felt grounded in a way I didn’t want to lose, and so I finally hit a burst of that “I just want to read more!” kind of feeling and read fully half of volume 4… before losing steam after a full day of that and doing other things. Which is to say that now my memory even of that last chunk of 3 is blurred with the first half of 4, and most of what’s swirling around in my head right now about the book and its storyline is a variety of different names and roles that I want to try to keep in there as hopefully I continue with the book from here, either triggering that feverish push again, or just trying to keep a brisk pace going one way or another. See – rather than whatever I pictured this was going to be going on (something like… a shonen battle manga I guess?? Or a bildungsroman centered directly on one character’s journey?), the structure of the novel as you read is sort of… play like? In that there’s a clearcut cast of characters, and each chapter briefly establishes a scene, and then a handful of those characters will turn up in the same place and interact, and the next chapter will be a new scene, and so on. And so characters that are part of the cast will stick around waaaaaay longer than you would think (the clearest example of this is that Miyamoto is STILL menaced by a mean old woman from his hometown hundreds and hundreds of pages in) and they end up threading through each other’s stories in a way that would stretch credulity a bit if you were to expect realism, but works perfectly for the extended drama the book is building, and makes everyone into interesting foils for each other. (And it does make it easy to picture adapting well into film or comics). So something about this flowing, interleaving structure (along with of course my disjointed reading of it) makes it hard sometimes to chart my place in it in retrospect, or to find a stopping place for closure to put it to bed for a while. It’s not exactly that there’s story momentum (not… really that much is happening except characters are wandering around and running into each other, and Miyamoto got in a duel). More like… almost like structural momentum, I guess? It just kind of goes. And sometimes you’ll spend a while in some new context, but you always know it’ll join back up with the main thread somehow, not always in the way you expect it will. Dunno if this makes sense, or is that interesting/different from other books really. But it’s also a lead-in into me trying to remember and write down the different characters and threads I’m trying to keep in my head right now.
… I think that’s it? It’s interesting, the fights are pretty fun when they happen, but they’re not really that common, and I think I maybe prefer the fun of these different character threads braiding together, like when a tense scene between two characters has a third pop up, and it turns out a familiar face and suddenly you’re wondering how they’ll impact things. Or just hoping that one character will finally meet another after ages doing their separate things. I 1000% would have assumed everyone from Miyamoto’s hometown would have been instantly left behind forever when he left back in like volume 1, so it’s an initially baffling but gradually quite rewarding surprise to find that virtually all of them continue to be characters and roughly follow him around in various ways.