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Based on the 1992 Japanese original, the book provides the inventor's point of view on the Hirota method (known as the direct method in Japan). Circumventing the advanced techniques of soliton theory, Hirota's method provides a practical and efficient tool to find the multisoliton solutions of nonlinear PDE and explore their properties. Chapter 1 uses the famous KdV equation to explain the main lines of thought that led to Hirota's remarkable invention: a perturbation method to obtain approximate solutions that turn out to be exact under suitable conditions. Then the role of the bilinear operators \((F,G) \mapsto D_t^p D_x^q F \cdot G\) is explained and several methods to rewrite equations in the bilinear form are outlined. Chapter 2, indispensable for understanding the rest of the book, is devoted mainly to Pfaffians. The focus is on determinantal and Pfaffian identities, and their diagrammatic form -- the Maya diagrams. As demonstrated in Chapter 3, many soliton equations that admit solutions in terms of Pfaffians (e.g., Wronskians) are nothing but Pfaffian identities (e.g., the Plücker relations). Proofs of these facts essentially reduce to writing the relevant Maya diagrams. Finally, Bäcklund transformations are derived from the ``exchange formulae'' in Chapter 4 and shown to be Pfaffian identities again. Intended to serve practitioners of soliton theory, the book is a nice example of a mathematical writing that can be read at nearly normal pace, which is extremely rare nowadays.