New on DVD: The Art of Zen and Hacking Your Rivals into Stew Meat

Famously, the samurai film is Japan's western, Akira Kurosawa is its John Ford, and the legendary figure of Miyamoto Musashi is... Jesse James? There might not be an equivalent; Musashi was a 17th-century vagabond warrior with a distinctive double-blade sword style and a philosophy to go with it. His manifesto, The Book of Five Rings, is still in print and commonly used by businessmen busy strategizing about how to annihilate the competition, while fiction about Musashi proliferates like dandelions, making him a national icon. We don't have Western heroes like that, but Japan savors its own -- particularly onscreen.

Japanese pop culture has yielded at least 32 Musashi films, three TV series and multiple video games. The most complete film version of the saga -- in which Musashi evolves from a battle-hewn psycho beast to the fastest blades in the East -- is director Tomu Uchida's five films spanning from 1961 to 1965. Now available in a traget="blank">new DVD collection, they make up an almost 10-hour mega-opus that could be retitled A Portrait of the Swordsman as a Young Badass and should be enjoyed with plenty of sake and wasabi.

The Musashi saga progresses as a series of escalating duels, the largest of which -- 1964's Duel at Ichijyo-ji Temple -- pits Musashi up against an entire 72-man dojo. But that isn't even the climax of the tale; that'd be Duel at Ganryu Island, against the epic's equivalent of Voldemort. Uchida shoots the battles simply, straight on -- no special effects, no baloney, just plenty of frantic mincemeat sword flailing, fiery-eyed rage and crumpling bodies, in a dreamy ancient Japan that's half looming landscape and half moodily stylized set.

Musashi's trials also involve a good amount of relentless espionage and betrayal, the protracted impossibility of his love for a beleaguered maiden, and the political gamesmanship between clans in the shogun era. Uchida's movies take their time etching out the plot curlicues, but what emerges finally is the figure of Musashi himself, embodied with muscular fury by Kinnosuke Nakamura (who spent 40 years essentially playing nothing but samurais). He means something historically because he's a fearless guerrilla death machine who invented the idea of tactically gaining psychological advantage over your opponent in a culture hidebound by honor codes. No wonder MBA suits everywhere read his book on the crapper. Would Sony, Toyota, Mitsubishi, Honda and Nintendo have thrived without his instruction?