Damn these fellas sure loved decapitating one another, according to this account.

It's an interesting book but so many of the anecdotal tales are just about dudes killing each other for seemingly no reason, or being ordered to kill themselves for arbitrary reasons.

The first part of the book about honour and respect and politeness is probably most interesting, as it is almost wilfully contradictory in various areas so it's like a range of thought exercises trying to understand how one could hold the various conflicting ideas in a stable tension. Alternately you could interpret this as the way of the samurai, the way of death, being inherently absurd, which I suppose would explain all the spontaneous murders.

The author basically doesn't think of women as people and is only interested in what it is that makes men worthwhile, despite his never actually seeing battle and directly participating in the culture, spending his life cataloguing it instead to try and find insights.

It's only short and it was very interesting to read anyway, definitely worthwhile.