Something I stumbled on while researching a script for Eureka’s Zen and Sword extras: a meeting between the historical novelist Eiji Yoshikawa, and Tomu Uchida, the director who was adapting his Musashi novels for the screen.

—

Last year [c.1962 – JC], I visited Eiji Yoshikawa at his villa in Karuizawa to ask his opinion on the second part of Miyamoto Musashi for my film adaptations. He was in the middle of writing the final part of the Ashikaga chapter of his Private Taiheki…. I had heard that he was in poor health, so I intended to limit my talk to the main issues, but he suddenly held out his hand.

“As the days of the Ashikaga come to an end,” he said bitterly, “I feel as though my family will die, and my hand will rot as it holds the writing brush. You can sing the story of the tragic end of the Heike clan at Yashima and Dannoura, but I don’t like the stories of the Ashikaga clan. It’s a path of power and famine. There are no people there.”

He spoke in a low voice but with a strong tone, and looked at us with sharp eyes, as if to express a writer’s anger towards the rotten history of humanity…. It was only later that I finally grasped the meaning of what he said at the time.

One was the spirit of his anger about writing a history of a corrupt era. The other was: don’t start a song you can’t sing.

From Tomu Uchida’s posthumously published memoir, Fifty Years a Film Director (1999). Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of the Samurai.

“…he leaned on different sporting allusions, particularly a fusion of pilot and mecha evocative of equestrian sports or bicycle racing – where Gunbuster imagined the machines as fighter jets, Diebuster reconceived them as more like living mounts with wills of their own. They were not so much vehicles now as participants in school life, organic personalities that invited a form of cross-species bonding, like a young girl befriending her pony, which can fly, and shoot things.”

From my essay in the sleeve notes to Anime Limited’s release of Diebuster.