Vagabond is Takehiko Inoue's adaptation of Eiji Yoshikawa's novel Musashi, which is itself a fictionalization of a man who really lived. Miyamoto Musashi was born around 1584, fought his first duel at thirteen, survived Sekigahara on the losing side, and died in a cave having written a book about strategy that is still in print.
The manga is about what it costs to become the strongest man alive, and it keeps arriving at the answer that the ambition is the problem. Here is who the figures are, and where the artwork in our Vagabond collection comes from.
Takezo becomes Musashi
He starts as Shinmen Takezo, a violent seventeen-year-old from a village that fears him, lying in a field after Sekigahara with his friend Matahachi. He is strong, fast, and entirely untrained in anything except hurting people, and the first volumes are closer to a horror story than a samurai one — a feral boy hunted through the countryside by soldiers and by his own neighbors.
The name change is the turning point. The characters in Takezo can be read differently, and the priest who catches him renames him Musashi, which is the first act of making him into something other than an animal. The series treats the whole of his life as that project, continued by hand, badly, over decades.
Takuan, Otsu and the rope
Takuan Soho is a monk — a real historical figure, a Zen priest who wrote on swordsmanship — and in the manga he is the man who catches Takezo with a rope and hangs him from a tree for days. It is not a punishment so much as a demonstration: the boy's strength is useless against patience.
Otsu is the woman who cuts him down, and the relationship between them runs the whole length of the story without resolving. She waits; he goes off to duel. The manga is unusually clear-eyed about this. Musashi's pursuit of invincibility is presented as something he does instead of living, and Otsu is what "instead" means.
The Yoshioka school
The long middle of the manga is the Yoshioka arc, and it is the best sustained work Inoue has done. The Yoshioka were a real fencing school in Kyoto, instructors to the Ashikaga shoguns, and by Musashi's time in decline under two brothers — Seijuro, who has talent and no interest, and Denshichiro, who has appetite and no discipline.
Musashi challenges the school and then fights it. The final confrontation, against seventy or more men in a field at Ichijoji, is drawn over hundreds of pages in near-silence, and it is where the manga stops treating swordsmanship as skill and starts treating it as a mental state. What Musashi finds at the end of it is not triumph.
Brush and blade pieces
Sasaki Kojiro
Kojiro is the rival the story is walking toward, and Inoue's choice about him is the boldest thing in the manga: here he is deaf, and has been since birth. He learns the sword by watching, is raised by an old swordsman on a stretch of coast, and moves through the world without ever quite understanding what other people want from him.
His long chapters are told almost without dialogue for that reason, and they are the most formally interesting pages in the series. The historical Kojiro is barely documented — a swordsman with a very long blade and a technique called the Turning Swallow Cut — which gave Inoue room to invent, and he used all of it.
What is history and what is not
Musashi existed. The duel at Ganryujima against Kojiro is recorded, as are the Yoshioka duels in some form, and the Book of Five Rings is his. He also painted and made sculpture, which is why Inoue's version spends as much time on the hands as on the sword.
Much of the rest is Yoshikawa's novel from 1935, which is where Otsu and Takuan's roles largely come from, and much is Inoue's own. The manga is not a documentary and does not pretend to be. What it takes from the record is the shape: a man who won everything by thirty and spent the rest of his life trying to work out what that was for.
How this translates onto cloth
Inoue draws Vagabond in ink and brush, often with no screentone at all, and the pages that people remember are the ones that are mostly empty. That is a difficult thing to put on a garment and an easy thing to ruin, so the collection keeps the prints sparse: a brush stroke, a figure at a distance, a single blossom, a lot of unprinted cloth.
The tees are garment-washed cotton with a bonded matte print, which is the right surface for brushwork — a glossy print would make an ink line look like plastic. Where a design sits on the garment varies by piece and is stated on each product page.
Measurements for every size are on the sizing page, and the full set is in the Vagabond collection.
Read next: Vinland Saga's history against the manga, or vintage tee versus classic tee.
Torazen designs are independent fan-inspired work — not affiliated with or endorsed by the rights holders. Character and series names are used to describe what the artwork refers to.