Standing in front of a centuries-old suit of samurai armor, it's almost comical when you picture real people fighting in them. The imaginary warrior ritualistically suits up, an epic soundtrack rising in the background. Cut to a wobbling pile of iron and lacquered scales held together by silk cord, topped by a Darth Vader helmet decorated with long, waving pheasant feather antenna and a precisely trimmed blond mustache. It steps forward. It mounts a black horse. It rides off to battle, rigidly hanging on for dear life.

Then again, there's something about this suit that isn't funny at all. Austere might be a better way of describing it, actually. Awe-inspiring might be another. Darth Vader's costume would be a sagging wannabe next to this piece of artistry. Sitting in a display case at San Francisco's Asian Art Museum-upright, stoic-it is more like statue than flexible protection you might expect would be necessary for a daimyo (a provincial warrior lord in feudal Japan).

Maybe that's the irony of Lords of the Samurai, an exhibition featuring more than 160 pieces from the Hosokawa family collection, many of which are considered Important Art Objects by the Japanese government. The samurai is a figure so ingrained in our collective imagination that it is difficult to separate the stereotypes from the reality: the art depicting the samurai and the art created by and for the samurai.

When you finally have the objects in front of you, the painstakingly preserved manifestations of a tradition dating back to the 1100s, you would expect things to be lost in translation. You prepare yourself to be underwhelmed by the fading reality of history, which, unlike fiction, is limited by the facts.

But Lords of the Samurai doesn't underwhelm. The exhibition doesn't need gimmicks or gaudy multimedia presentation to make raw history exciting. It nods politely to the samurai's influence on popular culture with a screen showing Japanese director Akira Kurosawa's films and the anime series "Samurai Champloo" in the Daimyo for a Day Art and Activity Room, but the exhibition doesn't need to convince you that these men were the kick-ass warriors that they are in the movies-and more. They were poets and painters, politicians and scholars, on top of being fighters with the skill to literally cut your heart out if you stepped out of line.

Nowhere was this juxtaposition more pointed than in the work of a famous ronin, or rogue samurai, Miyamoto Musashi. A panel explains how Musashi lost his master in battle, then proceeded to win dozens of other duels before taking up painting and authoring "The Book of Five Rings," a treatise on his unique brand of dual sword-wielding martial arts. It is the stuff of legend, a seemingly exaggerated laundry list of samurai virtue.

But it's all there. Musashi's scrolls are laid out on a table. The calligraphy spells out names of maneuvers like The Crimson Foliage, rendering cinematic imitations like The Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique of "Kill Bill" inefficient by comparison. Pairs of fastidiously detailed-not to mention sharp-swords act simultaneously as paradigms of a streamlined aesthetic and reminders of the nearness of death.

Musashi's painting prowess isn't just a historically imposed feather in his samurai cap, either. Depicted with an economic brushstroke on a large screen, his inky cranes and abstract foliage are perfect examples of Japanese fusing of aesthetics and utility.

The exhibition highlights how the culture makes the functional beautiful and the beautiful functional, much as the samurai themselves did. For every ceremonial saddle lacquered with gold powder, there was a silk flag adorned with the Hosokawa clan's elegantly simple nine-planet insignia that had been used as an identifier in countless battles. The reign of the samurai has long been over, but Lords of the Samurai shows that their history and their culture retain their power through the battle gear's function as art.