Author Craig Shreve, whose second book, The African Samurai, was released in August, at Queen Books in Toronto.Galit Rodan/The Globe and Mail
It’s 1579, and a Portuguese trade ship arrives in Japan, bringing goods, weapons and a powerful Jesuit missionary. Accompanying him is an African man whose presence draws crowds and whom the priest eventually “gives” to a conquering warlord in exchange for the permission to build a church. Yasuke, as he will be known to history, rises through the ranks and is granted the status of a samurai. Craig Shreve’s novel The African Samurai – now also optioned for a five-part Netflix series – imagines Yasuke’s life from up close. The author spoke to The Globe and Mail over coffee.
How did you first hear of Yasuke?
I came across a YouTube video, and started researching him. There’s a lot of things that attracted me to the story but the first thing that stood out early on was how adaptable he was – throughout his life, his circumstances changed drastically, but he always seems to make the best of the situation.
He arrived in Japan in the company of Italian missionary Alessandro Valignano, to whom he was probably a trusted servant. Later, the Japanese warlord Oda Nobunaga was a mentor and perhaps a friend?
Jesuits were not supposed to have bodyguards, so Yasuke was … an intimidating-looking “servant.” His rapport with Nobunaga was different. What is known is that Yasuke dined regularly with Nobunaga and sometimes alone, and that’s a significant honour and a solid sign that there’s a legitimate relationship between them. As for Nobunaga elevating him to samurai – there is at least one precedent, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who came from a peasant background and rose to a high position. Those were the rare cases when Nobunaga ignored class and tradition.
Books we're reading and loving this week: Globe staffers share their book picks
This is when Japan was being unified into a nation state by conquest. What was combat like – face-to-face, individual skills, swords?
It was something of a transitional period but the history of Japanese warfare was the mentality of one-on-one combat. Though I might bring 50 people and you might bring 70, there wasn’t a lot of formation and strategy, it was more one-on-one and individual skill and valour. I was really curious why shields were never a big thing in Japanese warfare and I found out it’s because they didn’t use formations the way Romans, for example, did. And by the time they started to use formation, guns had already entered the equation, and shields were becoming redundant. Nobunaga was starting to include more formal methods and some of the reason for that, it seems, was economic. Buying spears was cheaper than buying swords. You can arm a hundred spearsmen rather than ten well-trained swordsmen.
He travelled the world in the 1500s, when our current concept of ‘race’ wasn’t around. How was he regarded by the Europeans and the Japanese?
His size was kind of the first thing. He’s listed as being 6′2″ and the average height of the Japanese male in the 16th century was about 5′1″. He was a very tall person with a skin colour [they’d] never seen. He wouldn’t have attracted as much attention in port cities but in central Japan when he arrived he was an attraction. There was reportedly a riot when people came out to see him and three people were crushed to death by the crowds. The Japanese, not having any experience with Africans, apparently didn’t have pre-established prejudices and stereotypes. Yasuke was measured as an individual because they had no other means to measure him. So he didn’t really have obstacles to clear because of his race. But he had obstacles to clear because he was not Japanese.
I was reading about race relations around that time, and it seems that the Japanese, initially, before they started to understand the dynamics between the Europeans and the Africans, from outside observations, held the Africans in higher esteem. They thought them hard-working and quiet etc., and the Europeans are lazy and barking orders all the time. Also, Yasuke, coming from a history where he has to be obedient, probably connected with the Japanese fairly well when he initially arrived.
It’s a book of larger-than-life male characters, so I have to ask, how do we get men to take an interest in literary fiction again?
It’s hard for me to say because I’m obviously a big reader and I’m not sure why men are not into contemporary fiction as much. It’s funny, after this book and my previous one, a number of my male friends said to me, ‘This would be the first novel I’ve read since high school.’ I wonder what it takes to lure them in.
I wanted to create a book that could appeal in part as an action genre, but also tells a literary story that appeals on an emotional level. I tried to walk that line.
What kind of fiction do you like?
I read a lot of science fiction. I don’t write sci-fi because I don’t really enjoy the process of world-building but I like reading it when it’s done well. But Cormac McCarthy is probably my favourite author. I like Kim Echlin. I read a lot of foreign translations – Roberto Bolaño, GG Marquez, Yukio Mishima.
I wonder if men abandoning fiction has something to do with identity. I can enjoy books that are not about me. It’s fine. I don’t need to be able to picture myself at the centre. But a lot of readers don’t. Maybe it has to do with not being able to place themselves in the story, unless it’s a very specific kind of story.
What are you currently working on?
Researching another piece of Black history in the context of world history – the life of Abram Petrovich Gannibal. He was a minor prince probably from Central Africa who was taken hostage by the Ottomans and spent a year in the court of the sultan, after which a Russian diplomat arranged for his purchase and sent him to St. Petersburg. This is late 17th, early 18th century, when Peter the Great wanted Russia to be one of the great Enlightened countries and part of that was trying to eliminate Russian xenophobia. He wanted to prove that, if you give people the same education, they’re capable of the same things. So Abram Petrovich ends up being raised by Peter the Great and eventually becomes a Russian general.
I love this mixture of cultures and seeing histories intersect with one another. That kind of thing will always interest me.
This interview has been edited and condensed.