Hagakure

The original Hagakure encompasses some 1300 aphorisms, stories, and how-to's from aging former samurai Yamamoto, transcribed over seven years in the early 1700s by the young Tashiro Tsuramoto. As a philosophical and literary work, the language, challenges, and contradictions posed by the diverse entries recall the White Queen's line about believing six impossible things before breakfast. So readers should prepare for widely various and inconsistent bits: from healing a wound with horse dung, avoiding yawning in public, rushing into revenge attack without consideration for consequences, and raising chaste daughters, to living only in the present. Unfortunately, reducing the Hagakure to comics has meant selecting only a dramatic 34 of the 1300, mostly about killings and suicides. Thus the original appears somewhat misrepresented, even with an afterword about context.