HAGAKURE - O Livro do Samurai

" On May 16, 1700, Nabeshima Mitsushige, the third daimyõ of the area now known as Saga Prefecture, died at the age of sixty-nine. One of his closest retainers, Yamamoto Tsunetomo, who had gone into the service of Mitsushige as a child, was at that time forty-two years of age. Prohibited from committing disembowelment in simpathy with his master's death by edicts both of his own fief and of the Tokugawa government, and disappointed by the tendencies of Mitsushige's successor, Tsunetomo requested and was granted permission to retire and become a Buddhist priest. That summer he moved to a small hermitage in a place called Kurotsuchibaru, about twelve kilometers north of Saga Castle, and lived there in semi-seclusion. In 1710 he began to be visited by Tashiro Tsuramoto, a young samurai who for unknown reasons had been released from his service as a scribe the year before. Their conversations lasted for seven years, and on September 10, 1716, Yamamoto's utterances, as recorded by Tsuramoto, were arranged as a book and givem the title of Hagakure, a word that could mean either "hidden by the leaves" or "Hidden leaves". Three years later, Yamamoto passed away at the age of sixty-one"

Esta é a origem do livro " Hagakure - The Book of the Samurai" de Yamamoto Tsunetomo publicado pela primeira vez em 1979, em inglês, pela Kodansha International,Ltd, com tradução de William Scott Wilson.