Vagabond vol. 35

Though he’s meant to be the star of this series, Miyamoto Musashi has been the biggest drag on its momentum for a while now.  We start to see that change with this volume as his sojourn in the wilds finally starts to develop a point.  The swordsman acknowledges early on that he can’t beat his rival Kojiro as trying to fight someone like him would be like trying to beat water.  So Musashi spends months trying to learn the ways of the land.  He helps the kid Iori build a runoff canal outside of his hut to deal with flooding during the rainy season, and the villagers even pitch in even though they don’t quite know what to make of this strange samurai.  Then, Musashi tries to make a rice paddy field and only gets hassled by the one arrogant villager who’s capable of growing good rice.  This all prepares to come to naught when emissaries from Kokura castle show up to “recruit” the samurai by any means necessary, and are subsequently followed by locusts.

It’s taken a while to get here, but this arc of “Vagabond” is basically another riff on the trope of the protagonist going off to train and learn better techniques through unorthodox means.  Only without a training montage or “Eye of the Tiger”-style motivational music.  As is the case for a series that is basically the Shonen Jump “I’m going to be the best at [fill in the blank” storyline re-staged as art, mangaka Takehiko Inoue has the skill to pull it off.  The man also knows when things need to be taken seriously and when it’s good to back off and laugh a little as well.  We see that in how Iori’s relationship with Musashi develops, as the samurai makes a terrible surrogate parent but winds up being a good role model almost in spite of himself.  Things end with the indication that our protagonist’s time in the boonies is coming to an end and things can finally start ramping up for his inevitable confrontation with Kojiro and the long-advertised end of the series.  Though there’s an upward trend in quality and momentum over the course of this volume, I’ll still be glad to see the end of this arc.