When I read about Hatsumi's *Kizaru* (木猿), I can't not think about the word *nokizaru* (often written as 軒猿), mentioned in Bansen shūkai (like only twice?) or in Yamada (2016: 59), without further specification or verification. Is it (from the context) any possible that Hatsumi's "Kizaru" is some sort of garbled "nokizaru"?
Oh yeah, good catch. It's possible that ノ木猿 (no kizaru) is a garbled version of 軒猿 (nokizaru) or maybe the other way around. Wikipedia says that the term nokizaru is also found in the Odawara-ki/Hōjō-ki, but I haven't verified that.
It's completely possible for a term to be garbled from one text to another; copy errors were fairly common with hand-written manuscripts in the premodern period, and would be likely if (as I think is possible) early manuscripts of e.g. BSSK used mostly syllabic script rather than mostly kanji. Easy to see how someone copying out and re-punctuating an earlier version could mis-parse "nokizaru" as "no kizaru" or write "Kōzuki" for "Kōzuke."
It's also worth noting that even modern Japanese ninja writers can be remarkably sloppy about their source material (quelle surprise). Just off the top of my head I think Inagaki Shisei (of Mochizuki Chiyome fame) mixed up Shōninki and BSSK, Okuse Heishichirō regularly got the kanji wrong when citing Chinese military manuals, and Hatsumi claims that the Heike contains mention of people throwing metal plates, which so far as I can tell it doesn't.
When I read about Hatsumi's *Kizaru* (木猿), I can't not think about the word *nokizaru* (often written as 軒猿), mentioned in Bansen shūkai (like only twice?) or in Yamada (2016: 59), without further specification or verification. Is it (from the context) any possible that Hatsumi's "Kizaru" is some sort of garbled "nokizaru"?
Oh yeah, good catch. It's possible that ノ木猿 (no kizaru) is a garbled version of 軒猿 (nokizaru) or maybe the other way around. Wikipedia says that the term nokizaru is also found in the Odawara-ki/Hōjō-ki, but I haven't verified that.
It's completely possible for a term to be garbled from one text to another; copy errors were fairly common with hand-written manuscripts in the premodern period, and would be likely if (as I think is possible) early manuscripts of e.g. BSSK used mostly syllabic script rather than mostly kanji. Easy to see how someone copying out and re-punctuating an earlier version could mis-parse "nokizaru" as "no kizaru" or write "Kōzuki" for "Kōzuke."
It's also worth noting that even modern Japanese ninja writers can be remarkably sloppy about their source material (quelle surprise). Just off the top of my head I think Inagaki Shisei (of Mochizuki Chiyome fame) mixed up Shōninki and BSSK, Okuse Heishichirō regularly got the kanji wrong when citing Chinese military manuals, and Hatsumi claims that the Heike contains mention of people throwing metal plates, which so far as I can tell it doesn't.