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‘The African Samurai’ Imagines the Life of Yasuke, Japan’s First Black Warrior
Toronto author Craig Shreve’s new novel, already optioned for a Netflix series, celebrates an unsung hero and cements his place in history / BY Kim Honey / August 4th, 2023
When Craig Shreve saw a short YouTube video on The Shogunate channel about Japan’s first foreign-born and Black samurai, the Toronto writer was intrigued.
“The more I dug into it, the more fascinated I became,” he says about the African man who won the trust of a feudal warlord in the 16th century. “If 12-year-old me would’ve known who he was, I would’ve had his poster on my wall.”
Shreve’s novel of historical fiction, The African Samurai, imagines a rich, loving childhood in Mozambique for the man known as Yasuke (YAS-uh-kay). But when he is 12, white men slaughter most of the adults in his village; he is captured and sold for two bags of salt to a mercenary in India, who beats him into submission and trains him to be a soldier. “I was a slave,” Shreve writes in the novel, told in first person by Yasuke. “I no longer needed my chain.”
All that is conjecture, because there is no record of Yasuke before he arrived in Japan as a bodyguard and valet for a powerful Jesuit missionary, Father Alessandro Valignano, in 1579. No one knows where and when Yasuke met the proselytizing priest who had no compunction about providing warlords with “guns in exchange for souls,” as Shreve writes.
Yasuke’s verifiable history ends three years later, when his name vanishes from accounts written by the Jesuits and the Japanese. There have been meticulously researched non-fiction books about the African and his close relationship with the warlord Oda Nobunaga, who gave him the rank of samurai, “but they don’t try to recreate what kind of person he might have been or how he might have addressed things; how he might have felt about things,” says Shreve, explaining why he wanted to write a fictional account to fill in the gaps.
Although no one knows Yasuke’s real name or exactly where he was born, the author went with the generally accepted theory that the dark-skinned, six-foot-two mercenary belonged to Mozambique’s Makua tribe before he was enslaved. Yasuke wouldn’t have been the first African seen in Japan at the time – others would have visited port cities on ships – but Shreve says he would have been a rarer sight in central Japan, where Nobunaga really did think Yasuke’s skin was dyed and tried to have it scrubbed off, as described in the novel.
Shreve concedes anyone can Google Yasuke and find out what happened during his three years in Japan: The Italian priest gave his loyal vassal to Nobunaga as a novelty and a gift; Yasuke became a trusted confidante; he fought alongside the lord during the Sengoku period, a violent time of clan-on-clan warfare. The author says it’s probably best not to give away one major plot point in the novel, “but, again, it’s a 400-year-old spoiler,” he laughs.
Shreve, who works full time in IT for Enbridge Gas, wrote the book in his spare time during the pandemic lockdown in 2020. While it was in edits, Netflix came out with a fantasy series called Yasuke in 2021, an anime loosely based on the samurai’s story. After Shreve’s Canadian publishing deal was announced in September 2021, the Los Angeles-based production company 21 Laps Entertainment optioned it for a five-part, live-action Netflix series, with Yasuke head writer, Nick Jones Jr. – an African American who served in Japan as a marine – on board, and Lupin star Omar Sy in talks to play Yasuke. A previously announced adventure film about Yasuke starring Chadwick Boseman was shelved when the Black Panther star died in 2020.
While North Americans like Shreve and Jones Jr. see a Black hero hiding in plain sight, Yasuke is largely undiscovered in Japan, where the country’s monoculturalism has been touted with pride. In 2020, for example, Japan’s gaffe-prone deputy minister asserted, “No country but this one has lasted 2,000 years with one language, one ethnic group and one dynasty.” Prominent Black Japanese citizens like basketball player Rui Hachimura, former Miss Universe Japan Ariana Miyamoto and tennis star Naomi Osaka have endured racist commentary from fellow citizens and journalists, some questioning whether they are truly Japanese. As Osaka wrote in an Esquire essay in July 2020, “Japan is a very homogeneous country, so tackling racism has been challenging for me.”
In The African Samurai, Yasuke contemplates the parallels between his culture and Japan’s – in dance, mask carving and mythology, for example. Shreve initially wanted to write a book about culture clash, but, as the connections between African and Asian culture came up, “I wanted then to write more about discovering their similarities, as opposed to originally having the idea of overcoming differences.”
The main goal, however, was to tell the world about Yasuke, because he saw a character who “belonged in the mainstream,” that “a lot of people could connect with.” He also wanted to lay bare how slavery erased so much human potential – the would-be lawyers and scientists and artists who were denied the freedom to choose their destiny, subjected to the will of another human being and suffered unspeakable cruelty, sometimes leading to their deaths. “I think Yasuke is an example of that,” says Shreve. “He’s representative to me of somebody who was really a hair’s breadth away from being lost to history, but instead is still with us.”
The author’s debut novel, One Night in Mississippi, was also historical fiction, about the fight for justice for a murdered civil rights activist. The major themes of Shreve’s work have roots in North Buxton, the southern Ontario town where he was born in 1974. He grew up hearing stories from his grandmother about the community, a terminus for the Underground Railroad founded by, and for, African Americans fleeing slavery in the American south. He’s also a descendant of Abraham Doras Shadd, an American abolitionist, activist and Underground Railroad conductor who emigrated to North Buxton in 1853, and became the first Black politician elected in Canada.
In The African Samurai, this emotional attunement to Black history and slave narratives imbues Yasuke’s narrative with pathos, as well as hope, and informs Shreve’s graceful prose. At a time when the world needs to discover more unsung Black heroes, Shreve is happy to deliver.
This story appeared in the August-September 2023 issue of Zoomer magazine under the headline, “Spoils of War.”