Narrative in Eiji Yoshikawa's Musashi

Paper Summary:

This paper describes the narrative form of Eiji Yoshikawa's novel "Musashi," and shows how it served a dual role of entertainment and a way of indoctrinating citizens into a given culture. The writer explains how the transformation of the ignorant and rural Takezo through education into a respectable samurai and idealized hero, master of self-control and personal strength, appealed to the literate middle-class laborers by providing them a model for hope. This social mobility shows how narrative also functions as a medium for challenging rigid cultural institutions in an imaginary world where they can be discussed without being perceived as a threat to current social institutions by those in power. This paper includes a figure.

From the Paper:

"Narrative, in its most elemental form, presents an equilibrium, a small rural village, for example, that is somehow disturbed, and it follows that a new equilibrium must then be reached. This forms the most important component of any narrative, the plot. In Musashi this equilibrium is disrupted by Takezo's desire to join the great wars, and become a famous samurai. Taking the basic narrative structure a few steps further, a rising action, climax, and falling action,can all be nestled neatly between the initial and final equilibriums."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Miller, J. Hillis. "Narrative." Critical Terms for Literary Study. Ed. Frank Lenticchia, and Thomas McLaughlin. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995. 67.

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