As many other people have said, this book really isn't for the casual reader. If you don't know japanese martial art's phrases, it'll be hard to place a lot of the japanese words. It's a collection of quotes that Maasaki Hatsumi and a few other instructors have said, and it's broken up into different catagories. I'm trying to find this one quote in the book as I write this but I can't find the page...anyway it was one quote that of the hundreds, really stuck with me. It was something like "Taijutsu is not the techniques. Taijutsu is knowing how to take yourself to a safe place." I always thought that was an interesting quote--I sort of interptered it as taijutsu is not the throwing/arm locking/pressure point hitting so much as it is keeping yourself out of harms way. The nice thing about these quotes is their meaning changes over the years as you train for longer and longer periods of time. At first I didn't get a lot of the quotes, but now they're starting to make sense. It's hard to explain why I like this book...some of it is the humor. Some of the quotes really make you think not just about training but about how we see things and treat the world. I'd highly recommend it to anyone in the Bujinkan. I'm only a green belt, but I still get a lot of wisdom out of this book.