Eiji Yoshikawa
Musashi
Gekiga, after Hiroshi Hirata
- 60 plates
- Hiroshi Hirata
The book
The same book, at its harshest.
Why Hiroshi Hirata
Hiroshi Hirata (1937–2021) came up in the rental-library boom that turned comics for adults into gekiga — 'dramatic pictures' rather than whimsical ones. He took the samurai as his subject and never let go: the Edo period not as costume romance but as a machine of obligation, where a man's honour and his lord's convenience are constantly and brutally at odds.
His atelier was trained here from 484 panels extracted out of 23 volumes, which makes it the most specific dataset in the library.
What to look for
Ink weight as emotion, and faces that are allowed to be ugly. This is the edition where the violence is neither elegant nor distant.
