He Drew His Snicker Snee...

Boy, you can see why this culture is so good at the comic book:

And loosing off his twenty-four arrows like lightning-flashes he slew twelve of the Heike soldiers and wounded eleven more. One arrow yet remained in his quiver, but, flinging away his bow, he stripped off his quiver and threw that after it, cast off his foot-gear, and springing barefoot on to the beams of the bridge, he strode across. All were afraid to cross over, but he walked the broken bridge as one who walks along the street Ichijo or Nijo of the Capital. With his maginata he mows down five of the enemy, but with the sixth the halberd snaps asunder in the midst and flinging it away he draws his sword, wielding it in the zigzag style, the interlacing, cross, reversed dragonfly, waterwheel, and eight-sides-at-once-styles of fencing, and cutting down eight men; but as he brought down the ninth with an exceeding mighty blow on the helmet, the blade snapped at the hilt and fell splashing into the water beneath. Then seizing his dirk which was the only weapon he had left, he plied it as one in the death fury.

—Tales of Heikie 54-5 (1928; Charles E. Tuttle Co. ed. 1972
trans. A.L. Sander)

I read somewhere that the Japanese mine this stuff as a source for dramatic plots, the same way 19^th Century opera conductors pillaged Shakespeare.