The Book of the Samurai

Yukio Mishima is one of the best-known and most sought-after Japanese authors in the world. He gained fame not only through books of the widest range of genres—from novels and plays to short stories and essays—but also through a provocative, dramatic biography that ended in ritual suicide following a failed attempt at a monarchist coup.

“The Samurai Book” is Mishima’s reflection on the treatise “Hagakure, or Hidden in the Leaves,” devoted to the samurai code of honor (bushidō). Written in the spirit of Zen Buddhism, Shinto, and Confucianism, the text is based on conversations with the samurai of the seventeenth century, Jōtō Yamamoto. Reflections on martial valor and duty, conscience and responsibility, recorded by one of Jōtō’s students—are not a list of instructions, but a distinctive way of seeing the world and drawing closer to wisdom. “Maybe ‘Hagakure’ is, from the very beginning, a book of paradoxes,” Mishima writes. “During wartime it emitted light, but in broad daylight it was not very noticeable, and only in the darkness did the book truly shine. This book preaches freedom. This book calls for the heat of the human heart.”

This edition is published for the first time in a translation made directly from Japanese: previously, Russian publications of “The Samurai Book” relied on the English translation.