Review of THE AFRICAN SAMURAI by Craig Shreve

 3.5 Stars

This novel is set in the late sixteenth century in Japan and is the fictionalized story of the first foreign-born Samurai, a black man from Africa.

The plot follows the story of a young boy, eventually given the name of Yasuke, who is kidnapped by the Portuguese from an unspecified African tribe. He is taken to India where he is trained to be a slave-soldier but then later finds himself amongst the Jesuits where he comes to the attention of Alessandro Valignano who educates him. Eventually he becomes the bodyguard for Valignano, the highest-ranking Jesuit in Asia, until he gifts him to Oda Nobunaga, a Japanese feudal warlord, in exchange for permission to erect a church. Nobunaga comes to trust and respect Yasuke and eventually he gives him the title of samurai.

The novel is narrated in first-person by Yasuke, though he tells his story in a non-linear fashion. The story alternates between his experiences in Japan and flashbacks to his childhood in Africa, his time enslaved and forced to fight in India, and his years spent in Europe with the Jesuits.

This is not my usual genre so it’s probably not a book I would have chosen to read were it not the 2024 SD&G Reads choice. It is a male-dominated book with few women. Yasuke thinks often of his mother but she features only in the flashbacks. Tomiko, one of Nobunaga’s servants, appears a few times but she is certainly not a central character and seems to have been added as a token female. I would have liked to learn more about Nobunaga’s home life. A quick Wikipedia search reveals that he had a wife, numerous concubines, and several children.

I understand that the author’s purpose was to tell Yasuke’s story, but I felt I got little sense of his daily life outside of training and fighting. I also get the impression that the author didn’t want to deviate from or take too many liberties with the limited historical information available about the protagonist. There is a non-fiction book about Yasuke which the author mentions in his bibliography. Why write fiction if not to imagine and dramatize that which is missing in biographical information? I guess I was looking for a richer, more in-depth imagining of Yasuke’s life.

It’s my failing, but I have to admit having difficulty with the Japanese names like Toyotomi, Tokugawa, and Takeda as well as Akechi and Azuchi. There are overly long passages describing the hierarchy of Japanese nobles, political rivalries and machinations, and military strategy; these bored me and some of them proved to be unnecessary to an understanding of events.

The book is very much an exploration of enslavement. At the age of twelve, Yasuke loses his identity, family, and freedom. He has no free agency; decisions are made for him by others. His value is only in his service: “It was the lesson I had learned many times over . . . That no matter how many years I had served . . . no matter how faithfully and how well, and regardless of the good treatment and fine clothes and training and occasional freedoms, in the end I was still a thing to be traded. I was still property.”

Yasuke learns to survive. He learns that “Adapting to new circumstances meant releasing any attachments to the old” and “Making myself valuable was one element of my survival. The other was learning everything I could of my new environment.” He proves to be intelligent and diligent, always observant and alert to dangers. Given what he endures, it is impossible not to find him a sympathetic character. It is heartwarming to see him finally be given freedom and the home he has long sought, though he questions the price he has paid: “was it worth it? Taken from my village, forced into war, . . . were the horrors suffered along the way justified by the honor waiting at the end? I could not bring myself to say yes. Too many had died, some at my own hand. . . . All justified by my own survival. . . The price was too high. But the price had already been paid, regardless.”

There are a couple of passages that I really liked. One is Yasuke’s reflection that humans are the same regardless of where they live: “So many reminders of home, in this place so far away from what should have been my home. The traditions of painted faces and carved masks, and song and dance. The beliefs that we can be guided by the spirits of our ancestors. Even the legends, of holy mountains and gods that fought over the land. All these things made me wonder if maybe men everywhere were the same.”

I also liked Tomiko’s rebuttal to Yasuke’s comment that he finds Japanese culture strange: “’No . . . you are just seeing it with strange eyes.’” He reflects “I suddenly understood how the foreign slavers and priests could look at my people as savages, not understanding our ways, evaluating our customs and practices against their standards, their experience.”

What the book also emphasized for me is the evils brought by Christianization. Yasuke mentions to Nobunaga that “’Many of [the Jesuits] are harmless priests and true believers. But some of them are far from that. Some are soldiers, criminals, killers, who were offered a choice between execution and salvation. There are dangerous men amongst them.’” Valignano chastises a priest for not baptizing Yasuke, stating, “’Why do we send our missionaries out to the farthest reaches of the world if we don’t believe the people we find there to be God’s children?’” However, he has little respect for the culture and beliefs of others and will do whatever he thinks is necessary to build his churches. He treats Yasuke like property in the belief that “’How can something that is necessary be evil?’”

This is an interesting novel about a largely unknown historical figure, though I would have preferred a more detailed depiction of all aspects of a samurai’s life. Readers should be forewarned that there is a lot of graphic violence: men are brutally tortured and killed and several commit seppuku, ritual suicide.