At its core, this initial three-volume collection of Takehiko Inoue's (Slam Dunk) adaptation of Eiji Yoshikawa's fictionalized biographical novel Musashi is about the terrible life decisions made by two seventeen-year-old boys. Full of hormones and desperate to prove themselves, Takezo and his childhood friend Honiden Matahachi seek glory in battle. Unfortunately, instead of becoming swordsmen, they're handed machetes and told to cut back undergrowth impeding the real warriors. When the majority of said warriors meet a violent end, Takezo and Matahachi are left scrambling among the dead bodies, desperately avoiding “refugee hunters,” soldiers tasked with slaughtering survivors.

Dying of exhaustion and starvation, they're rescued by fifteen-year-old Akemi and her recently widowed mother Oko, a duo of battlefield thieves who relieve corpses of their armor and weaponry. While Matahachi is initially desperate to return home to his fiance, Otsu, and the village he grew up in with Takezo, Takezo wants to wander the land, fighting and getting stronger. When a group of brigands attacks Oko and Akemi's household, Matahachi and Takezo make opposing choices that separate their paths and the courses of their lives. Vagabond charts both of their tales, running in parallel, for the moment without direct intersection.

Matahachi chose the “easier” option, which is to succumb to Oko's mature, seductive charms. While Takezo desperately fights off the brigands in a brutal orgy of bloody violence, Matahachi has desperate, fear-fueled sex with Oko on the forest floor near the house. Abandoning his fiancee and village, he cowardly leaves Takezo to fend for himself, following Oko and Akemi to Kyoto.

Conversely, after slaughtering the brigands, Takezo realizes his friend has absconded with a woman other than his fiancee. He returns home to Miyamoto village, where the reception is less than warm. Matahachi's Machiavellian mother hates Takezo for dragging her son to war and refuses to believe his story. She conspires with the local castle's soldiers to have him killed. Unfortunately for them, Takezo's been essentially feral since childhood, surviving by himself in the mountains without adult supervision. He first killed a man at the age of thirteen! He makes short work of dozens of soldiers, and it's only the intervention of wily monk Takuan and Matahachi's heartbroken fiance, Otsu, that eventually leads to his capture.

It's Takuan who has the most profound effect on Takezo – confronting him over his narrow view of life and his basic ambition to become stronger and then die young. He allows Takezo to approach the brink of death, forcing him to realize the value of life, forever altering his mindset. Not that this prevents Takezo from pursuing his goal of “becoming invincible under the sun,” but at least he decides that throwing his life away is pointless. Takuan renames Takezo “Miyamoto Musashi,” and the real story begins.

The above details events from only the first two volumes contained in this handsome three-in-one oversized hardback edition of Inoue's justly celebrated Vagabond. Initially serialized in Kodansha's seinen magazine Morning in 1999, it ran for 37 volumes, entering a hiatus in 2015, and has sadly never resumed publication. I first read the contents of these volumes back in 2001-2002, when Viz Comics experimented with “unflipped” manga, publishing Vagabond in unprecedented 96-page right-to-left-reading floppy comic form, three times the page count of a standard single manga issue. This was around the same time they published Bastard!! in a similar 64-page format, plus both flipped and unflipped issues of Neon Genesis Evangelion's manga. The early 2000s were a good time for Inoue fans, as the tragically short-lived Weekly Raijin Comics were also the first to publish his seminal Slam Dunk in English.

This edition of Vagabond is similar in size and form to Dark Horse's beautiful Berserk deluxe editions, comprising 768 pages of stunningly detailed art, collecting 31 chapters, three whole volumes, or the first eight floppy issues (of which there were sixteen before Viz dropped the floppy format and switched to directly publishing entire individual Vagabond volumes). This is essentially a hardback reprinting of the previous 3-in-1 VizBig editions, so if you already own those, all you're upgrading to is a larger, prettier, hardback edition. Even so, that may be worth it!

Inoue's art is startlingly good. His keen eye for composition and posing, already put to amazing use in Slam Dunk, almost makes the characters leap from the pages. Sometimes entire pages are single panels depicting dramatic moments, such as Musashi standing menacingly over an opponent, fire casting a demonic shadow against the wall behind him. There are even a few spectacular double-page spreads that wouldn't look out of place in an art gallery – though these images are often more drenched in blood than what the average highbrow establishment might display. Instead of schoolboys battling it out on the basketball court, these seventeen-year-olds hack and slash at their opponents. Takezo is particularly brutal, using whatever weapons come to hand, caving in brigands' heads with a wooden practice sword. Even his later Musashi persona retains overflowing bloodthirst, challenging an entire dojo to battle, killing five without brandishing a blade.

Although Inoue's mastery of pacing and paneling draws the reader's eyes forward with irresistible velocity, meaning Vagabond has the potential to be a quick read, it is perhaps better to take time to savor his immaculate artwork. While Inoue's character art and facial expressions are peerless, the backgrounds drawn by his talented assistants are also superb, really grounding the story with an impeccable sense of place and time. From heavy forests to sleepy villages to bustling cities, the early Edo Period world of Vagabond looks organic, lived-in, and real.

A damaged young man, this Musashi isn't anywhere near the learned, multifaceted “saint” he's destined to become. As his detractors claim, he's more beast than human, thoughtlessly killing others mostly for the sake of it. He's not the most sympathetic of protagonists, at least not to begin with, not until we learn a little of his difficult childhood at the hands of his hard-hearted father, following abandonment by his mother. Only once Takuan skilfully tears down the walls around his heart, offering him a better way of life, does he become anything close to a human being.

In one of several pivotal scenes, Takuan goads the captured Takezo: “You might be big, but your heart is small.” He later challenges him, asking what gives him the right to kill others in cold blood and then selfishly beg for an honorable death for himself. He commands the newly renamed Musashi to “live on and endure the shadow, and brightness will come your way.” Takuan's appearance, compared to the scope of the grander narrative, is relatively short, but his effect on Musashi's life is transformative.

Deuteragonist Matahachi exists mostly as comic relief, and also as a counterpoint to Musashi. As Takezo, despite his love of fighting and killing, Musashi was at least honest and even fairly honorable. Matahachi gets himself into dreadful, completely avoidable messes to the point where he'd be irritating if he wasn't one of the most painfully human characters in the entire cast. Everyone's made bad decisions in their lives, but Matahachi appears to have made no good ones. “I'm rotting inside,” he bemoans after the third volume's four-year time skip, and it's easy to see why. Oh dear, if it isn't the consequences of his actions…

Matahachi's former fiancee, the orphaned Otsu, is interesting – at first, she's devastated to hear of his betrayal, becoming a mess of tears and snot. Initially under the thumb of her betrothed's horrible mother, she eventually grows a backbone and seeks out her own future. It seems she mainly liked Matahachi because he was the only village boy who remained friends with Takezo after his very public first kill, suggesting perhaps a sublimated attraction to the feral boy. Inoue draws her as a beautiful yet realistic young woman with as much complexity as the main characters.

It's hard to believe this incredibly substantial volume is barely one-twelfth of the entire manga, so potential readers are in for a long haul (and probably a large expense) if they want to continue to follow Musashi's road toward sword sainthood. This is an incredible first collection though, justifiably considered a classic in the historical manga genre. Easy to read, with phenomenal artwork, plus complex and relatable characters, it's an example of a peerless manga creator at the height of his powers. Vagabond deserves a place on every manga reader's shelf.