Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai - Yamamoto Tsunetomo

It's probably not overstepping the mark to say that most of us these days would find it difficult to imagine a world where the whole point of living was something other than to seek personal happiness or to find ways to feel good. It's what we all do now, consciously or unconsciously, whether by spending, eating, dieting, copulating, abstaining, injecting, snorting, whingeing or just plain believing... in something or anything or nothing. Yet for many centuries in feudal Japan life wasn't like this at all. Life was, in fact, almost a polar opposite of the kind we all now take for granted. Feudal Japan was a society of absolutes; not in ideas, necessarily, but in codes of ...  Read the complete review

I first heard about this book through Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai. It's one of the only times I've ever seen a book mentioned in a film and been compelled to read it. You get snippets of the book during the film to illustrate the samurai way of doing things. A good example of this is when it's pouring with rain and the quote comes up before Ghost Dog leaves his (stolen) car. I'll paraphrase it because you need to read it yourself. It basically says that when it is raining even though you run through it to avoid getting wet, you still get wet though. You should accept the fact that you'll get soaked and not be worried about it. The book itself ...  Read the complete review