African Samurai - The incredible story of Yasuke

In 1579, a Portuguese trade ship sails into port at Kinchotsu, Japan, loaded with European wares and weapons. Also aboard is an East African slave. Taken from his village as a boy, sold to mercenaries and forced to fight in Indian wars that meant nothing to him, he is a young but experienced soldier. Serving as the protector for a high-ranking Italian priest, the young man joins an expedition pushing inland towards the capital city of Kyoto. There they meet Oda Nobunaga, the most powerful warlord in Japan, who is preparing a campaign to unify the country after more than a hundred years of civil war. Under the tutelage of Nobunaga, the young African soldier becomes the great warrior Yasuke, Japan’s first foreign samurai, and the only one ever of African descent. His preoccupation is not a question of power, as it is for Nobunaga, but one of freedom. A timeless, epic story, a magnificent reconstruction and moving study of a lost historical figure, and a truly enthralling narrative, thrilling in its dramatization of the making of modern Japan, from which rises the most unlikely of heroes.

About the author

Craig Shreve was born and raised in North Buxton, Ontario (a final destination for slaves escaping the United States via the Underground Railroad), and is a descendant of Abraham Doras Shadd, the first Black person in Canada to be elected to public office, and of his daughter Mary Ann Shadd, the pioneering abolitionist, suffragette, and newspaper editor/publisher. Craig is the author of One Night in Mississippi (2015, Thomas Allen Publishers). He was a semi-finalist in Amazon’s Breakthrough Novel Award in 2010.

Product details

• Authors: Craig Shreve, Shreve Craig
• Publisher: Canelo
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 01.08.2023
• EAN: 9781804366257
• ISBN: 978-1-80436-625-7
• No. of pages: 304
• Dimensions: 130 mm x 18 mm x 200 mm
• Weight: 220 g
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature; Fiction > Narrative literature > Contemporary literature (from 1945); Japan, Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945), Fiction: special features, Historical fiction, FICTION / Action & Adventure, Historical adventure, FICTION / Historical / Medieval, Historical adventure fiction, Narrative theme: Identity / belonging, FICTION / African American & Black / Historical, Biographical fiction / autobiographical fiction, c 1573 to 1600 (Japanese Azuchi Momoyama period), FICTION / Biographical & Autofiction