The African Samurai Av Craig Shreve

The incredible story of the slave who became a Japanese samurai.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 as a slave 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. In central Japan, they meet Oda Nobunaga, the land's most powerful warlord who is preparing a campaign to complete the unification of a nation that's been torn apart by over a hundred years of civil war. Under the tutelage of Nobunaga, the young African soldier becomes the great warrior Yasuke, who against all odds becomes Japan's first foreign samurai, and the only one 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.