African Samurai

by Craig Shreve

Genres: General Fiction; African American; African American Historical

Synopsis

Warrior. Samurai. Legend.

The remarkable life of history’s first foreign-born samurai and his astonishing journey from Northeast Africa to the heights of Japanese society.

When Yasuke arrived in Japan in the late 1500s, he had already traveled much of the known world. Kidnapped as a child, he had ended up a servant and bodyguard to the head of the Jesuits in Asia, with whom he traversed India and China, learning multiple languages as he went. His arrival in Kyoto, however, literally caused a riot. Most Japanese people had never seen an African man before, and many of them saw him as the embodiment of the black-skinned (in local tradition) Buddha. Among those who were drawn to his presence was Lord Nobunaga, head of the most powerful clan in Japan, who made Yasuke a samurai in his court. Soon, he was learning the traditions of Japan’s martial arts and ascending the upper echelons of Japanese society.

In the 400 years since, Yasuke has been known in Japan largely as a legendary, perhaps mythical figure. Now, African Samurai presents the never-before-told biography of this unique figure of the 16th century, one whose travels between countries, cultures, and classes offers a new perspective on race in world history and a vivid portrait of life in medieval Japan.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.  

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Release date: August 1, 2023

Publisher: Harlequin Audio

Print pages: 304

Sample

Chapter 1

1
Home is a lost place, more dream to me than memory.

Even the fragments I held on to felt foreign and distant, like things that had happened in another’s life. The life of someone who had not been taken away, who had not been severed from his own beginnings. And yet sometimes, a memory would come through so clearly it ached.

As a child, my family and a few others from the tribe made the long hike from our village in the shadow of Mount Namuli to the coast. It was late in the year, the time of the laying of eggs. We set our camps on the edge of the beach and watched the turtles come ashore at night, waves of them, with hard, dark shells and soft, speckled underbellies. They seemed to be moving both independently, and in unison. They used their flippers to create indentations in the sand and rested atop them. We committed the spots to memory, and slept.

In the morning, when the turtles had gone, we dug up the eggs, taking only what we needed. We made the trek back to the village with the eggs carried carefully in baskets. About two months later we would make the long hike to the beach again. We set our camps in the same place on the beach’s edge. Under the light of the full moon, the sand began to pucker and shift. One tiny bill poked out from beneath it, then another, then a dozen more, a hundred. A mass of tiny turtles crawling toward the yawning expanse of green froth, drawn there by something we could never understand. I wanted to believe that they were crawling out to sea to find their mothers, to reunite themselves.

The first trip to the sea had been to gather food. The second trip had been to learn why to leave as many as possible, to take only what was needed. I can remember my mother’s voice, but not her face. Nor can I remember my father’s. I have flashes of reading and writing lessons under a mango tree. Of working alongside the other boys inside the mines, stripping the cave walls for ore; playing with them in the fields, using small pebbles for games of mancala in the dirt of the streets. Of festivals with drums and masks and brightly colored robes, the thrill of seeing visitors from other lands and the wares they brought to trade. And I remember the turtles, rising out of the sand and making their way to the sea.

It was the last time I was free.

“YOU DON’T NEED TO HOVER over me, there is no one on the boat but our own men.”

Father Valignano spoke without looking up from his work. The Jesuit looked aged in the thin rays of sun from the porthole, the shadows highlighting the lines on his cheek and forehead and deepening the hollows around his eyes. His head bobbed in and out of the stream of pale light, showing the short gray hair atop it. His equally gray beard, trim and narrow, hung almost down to the paper he scrawled upon. His hand, though, was steady as he dipped the quill and quickly but carefully drew it across the page, and his voice, as ever, held the steadiness of one used to command.

“My job is to protect you from all men. Not just other men,” I replied.

“Have you so little trust in our fellow travelers?”

“A bodyguard who relies on trust often fails at his task.”

“In Japanese, if you will.”

Valignano had still not looked up from his desk. I hesitated, searching for the words. I’d spent many months learning Japanese language and history, both leading up to this voyage and during the long days aboard the ship, but I always struggled to make the switch from Portuguese. After a moment, I repeated my statement in Japanese. Valignano nodded approvingly, and made a few small corrections, then continued on in this language that was new to both of us.

“Why don’t you go above, get some air?” Valignano asked, waving me away.

“You know I do not like the sea,” I said.

“Yes. For such a large man you are afraid of so many things.”

“A man who lacks fear also lacks caution.”

“A man who fears too much lacks faith. You must trust in God, my son. He whose faith is strong walks untouched in this world. Unafraid.”

I accepted the rebuke silently. I’d learned much from the Jesuits. I could recite large swaths of their Bible in both Portuguese and Latin, and increasing amounts of it in Japanese. I admired the belief of the priests, and I believed it to be genuine, but a small part of me had resisted giving in to it completely. It seemed to me that a man who calls on God to fight his battles quickly forgets how to fight his own. Faith seemed a privilege that could be afforded to the protected, the comfortable, but I would always choose a sword to protect me over a cross.

Though he’d never say it, I suspected Valignano would agree.

The steel-eyed priest looked up from his work, his famously thin patience worn through.

“We will be to port soon, and there will be plenty of opportunities for you to tower behind me and scowl.”

I scowled at the comment, then smiled when I realized I was doing it. I bowed and ducked my head beneath the doorframe as I exited.

I had marked my twenty-fourth birthday on this boat, sailing toward Japan. It had been twelve years since I had last seen my village, and I had long since given up hope of seeing it again. I’d been away now for the same length I had lived there. Twelve years free, in Africa; twelve years enslaved, in India, Portugal, China, sold to mercenaries, to an army, to a church. Half my life amongst family, half my life amongst strangers. Half my life a child, half my life a soldier.

I loathed the deck, but I climbed up to it regardless. I had observed the captain carefully and had picked up the basic working of his tools and calculations, but I still could not fathom how men could navigate when there was nothing but water to be seen in all directions. I had tried to read the stars the way I had seen the captain sometimes do, but it was something I had little aptitude for. It frustrated me. In all other things I had proven a fast learner, whether the weapons and strategies of the mercenaries or the books and languages of the priests, but the ways of the sea remained a mystery to me.

I stood at the rail on the leeward side and avoided looking at the sea by watching the ruffle of the sails instead. A handful of men wrestled with ropes and knots while others scrubbed the accumulated salt from the ship’s forward deckboards. The decks, the masts, and the entire ship had been blackened with pitch, and the glittering white stain from the seawater showed the evidence of how far aboard the previous day’s waves had reached.

Most of the men were belowdecks, and while they had invited me to join them on a few occasions, they trusted me even less than I did them. I had sat alongside them while they told stories, and I had wagered a few coins against them while they threw lots, but it was my duty to remain vigilant at all times, so I did not drink with them, and that made them suspicious of me. Besides that, we had reached the point in the voyage where violence was just below the surface, ready to emerge over the slightest squabble, or the most innocent of slights. Valignano’s route to Japan had included stops in India and China, and though we had switched boats and crews at points along the way, this crew had still been close to a month at sea. I had no desire to play peacemaker, and had no patience to listen to the complaints of the men. Their cramped quarters and stale rations were luxuries compared to my own experience on ships.

One crewman, heavily bearded and probably heavily drunk, was berating another while standing over a crate that had been dropped and cracked. At their feet, vibrantly colored silks from China spilled out from the breach onto the salt-scrubbed deck.

In the cargo holds below us, an impossible number of crates held Bibles and crosses and European weaving, jewelry, and other fine items. But mostly guns. Crate after crate of matchlock pistols and long rifles and, Valignano’s prize, three powerful new cannons capable of tearing down a fortress wall, or laying waste to a row of cavalry.

The weapons would be offered to the Japanese if they proved pious enough. If they let the Jesuits build their churches. If they let them teach their religion to their Japanese sons and daughters. If they converted, and ordered their clans to convert as well, then they would have powerful European weapons to use against their rivals, and Valignano would have his foothold in Asia. Guns in exchange for souls.

There were parts of the Jesuits’ religion that still remained unclear to me, but trade was something I understood all too well. I had been given to Jesuits. In their schools I learned to read and write, was taught the white man’s history, the white man’s religion.

The stern-looking Jesuit priest who received me clucked his tongue in disgust upon hearing my name and gave me a Christian one instead. They named me after the son of Abraham. They told me the story of God asking Abraham to prove his belief by killing his only son. How Abraham built an altar and tied his son upon it and sharpened his blade, but God told him to hold fast. That he was pleased.

The Portuguese had named me well. Isaac. A man to be sacrificed. A thing to be offered.