This is "great".
I can say that this work is one of the greatest
Comics that I have ever read,because it has
realized a maximum of possibilities which Comics
are able to have in themselves, both in the
artistic pictures and the meaningful stories.
The drawings are detailed and precise,sometimes
hearty,sometimes powerfully gruesome.
The thoughts spoken and showed by Ikkyu are
much more pursuasive than ordinary academic
studies about history and religeon.
This work is the best life-work without doubt
that the autor SAKAGUCHI has completed by using
all his strength and left to future generations
by exchanging his own life.

It was 600 years ago, in the era Muromachi, 15th century when a Zen priest
Ikkyu Sohjun lived. He is nowadays well known to every Japanese for a witty
priest. He was born in 1394 and died in 1481. His father was an Emperor
Gokomatsu who unified two separate Emperor's families, Nantyo(Southern
family) and Hokutyo(Northern family) and his mother was a mistress belonging
to the Nantyo. As the Emperor Gokomatsu belonged to the Hokutyo, his mother
had to leave the palace with their unborn baby Ikkyu.
When he was 6 years old, he became a student at one of the Zen temples
in Kyoto, "Ankokuji", where he had gotten his severe and hard training
for 10 years, in order to be a great priest.
Growing up, he began to feel doubt against his colleages and the nobles
around him, because their lives seemed to him to be full of frauds and
desires. At last he decided to go out of the temple. From then his painful
life began. At first he became a pupil of old Ken-ou Osyou, who was famous
of his extreme poverty and eccentric actions as a Zen priest. What he said
to Ikkyu before he died, I guess, shows a final sipiritual awareness in Zen
Buddism.

When you say "dust", " purity " appears in your mind, when you say
" cleanness ", " uncleanness" comes about in your soul. When you want
" goodness ", the " goodness " in itself causes to be " badness ".
(Volume1,p278)

It was in the process of hard trainings under his third instructor
" Kasou Zen priest" that Ikkyu actually understood these words and
spiritually awoke to the selfless condition in Zen for the first time.
After Kasou Zen priest died, Ikkyu built himself the poorest hermitage
named "Syu-un-an" and lived a freely wild life stained with the earthly
affairs, which was indifferent from honor, wealth and appearence.
The original title of this work is " Akkanbe Ikkyu " in Japanese.
"Akkanbe " means an ironical refusal of political power, honor, wealth
and appearence. His eccentricity at a glance was purity in his mind,too.