Miyamoto Musashi
Miyamoto Musashi is an author.
Musashi's reputation was made with a sword rather than a brush. He is remembered as an undefeated duellist credited with sixty-two victories, the founder of the Niten Ichi-ryu school and its two-sword method, and one of the handful of figures Japan calls a kensei, a sword saint. He was also a painter and a calligrapher, which is the part that usually gets left out of the legend.
The writing came at the very end. He produced The Book of Five Rings, a treatise on strategy organised as five scrolls, and Dokkodo, a short list of personal precepts. Everything else attributed to him on this page is essentially that same small body of work in later English packaging, retitled and recombined by modern publishers for modern shelves.
He died in 1645, having spent his last years writing instead of fighting.
Books (4)
Where to start with Miyamoto Musashi
Gorin no sho is the actual text, The Book of Five Rings under its Japanese title, and it is the only thing here you strictly need. Read it as a technical manual rather than as philosophy. Most of it concerns distance, timing and how to hold a weapon, and the famous lines about strategy land considerably harder once you can see what surrounds them.
After that the choice is between packagings rather than between books. The Way of the Warrior and Spirit of the Warrior read as modern editions pitched at readers arriving from the business and self-improvement shelves, and The Art of War - a Samurai Master Class frames the material the same way. If you want the historical Musashi rather than the motivational one, stay with the primary text and find a translation with a serious introduction attached.