The most recommended Samurai books

These eight short stories are samurai-focused historical fiction done with an appreciation for the traditions and the legacy of the warrior class of Old Japan. They all come from the years of the Warring States period, which many argue was the heyday of the samurai and the height of their prowess. These stories capture the values and emotions that drove these warriors, even outside the battlefield. These stories are framed almost like snapshots or sketches, capturing the moment and the character of that moment in vivid fashion.

The 34th grandmaster of ninjutsu, Dr. Masaaki Hatsumi has written many books on the art of the ninja. This is one of his best and examines over 1,000 years of the history and legends of the shadow warriors. A seminal book that provided the foundation to my own ninjutsu practise under one of Hatsumi’s students, Sensei Peter Brown. The secrets I learnt proved crucial to writing book 4 of the Young Samurai series, The Ring of Earth when Jack is taken in by a ninja clan.

The title is a pun: in 1676, Cornelia van Nijenroode married Johan Bitter in “Batavia” (then capital of the Dutch East Indies, now Jakarta) and thereafter tried unsuccessfully to break the bonds of matrimony, first in Indonesia and then in the Netherlands.

The story is such a page-turner because it links Dutch sources in both Indonesia and the Netherlands with material from Japan (where Cornelia was born to a Japanese mother and a Dutch father).

It includes a family portrait from 1663, in which Cornelia stands proudly beside her first husband, a prosperous Dutch official, with their two daughters (left in the family portrait) and two of their enslaved people (right). This book tells her astonishing life story from penury (as an orphan) to wealth and then (thanks to her Bitter experience) back to penury.

Another Litrpg, Seth enters a Virtual Reality game set in a fantasy feudal Japan as the technology allows him to function better while recovering from an injury taken during a martial arts tournament. For me, the setting got me worked up. I spent a decade of my gaming life playing Legend of the Five Rings, a similarly feudal Japan-inspired game world. Clans, factions, betrayals, and samurai. It brought me back to my youth in a way that few pieces of media do. 

Who could resist a book whose topics range from tea caddies, Chinese and Japanese tea bowls and paintings, severed heads, swords, falcons, and even a deified hegemon (Tokugawa Ieyasu)? This book about “things” and the famous people who collected them in the late sixteenth (before the onset of the Tokugawa period) and the first few decades of the seventeenth century uses material culture as a window into the politics and society of the military elite. It will entice those who are interested in non-linear history and the social life of things.

I loved this deep dive into a history that I knew absolutely nothing about.

It’s the story of an enslaved man from East Africa transported by the Portuguese to Japan, left behind there with a Jesuit mission. He came to fight alongside feudal lord Odo Nobunaga to become Japan’s first foreign-born samurai. What? He’d been in India before that?

Every chapter yielded something new I didn’t know and it’s all really well contextualized. The writers make it clear where the gaps in documentation lie, even as they tell a gripping story and bring a larger-than-life character to the page.

Japanese Samurai culture has been dumbed down by film and TV until it’s not much different from Hollywood’s portrayals of the Wild West. What of the real 16th-century Samurai? What does he have to say? What of the deepest Zen wisdom that enabled him to survive and stay calm while fighting against overwhelming odds?

According to legend, the greatest Samurai swordsman of all time was Miyamoto Musashi, who penned this book. Musashi’s Zen wisdom – straight from feudal Japan - reads like fine poetry and can be applied to today’s world, much like Sun Zu’s The Art of War. Zen is a part of Buddhism and yet, paradoxically, a part of combat.

This book makes me think, makes me feel, makes me ponder the nature of life, spirituality, and death. Highly recommended! 

Don’t be fooled by the cover! This might be marketed as a children’s book, but the message about the mind-body connection is so beautifully and brilliantly portrayed, this becomes a book for everyone. We have more power than most of us believe, and many have no idea how to tap into that power, but this book, if used correctly, can become a focal point for the most powerful mental shift you’ve ever taken. It’s a beautiful story with absolutely mind-blowingly brilliant illustrations that bring the whole thing alive and crystalize the visualization that you could implement into your own life.

Want to know how samurai women managed their high status but meager incomes? This engaging memoir takes us inside the nitty-gritty of their everyday life that was frugal by necessity. We learn how samurai women dressed, the importance they placed on meticulous grooming, and how they dealt with in-laws, concubines, and a runaway daughter. It shows how in principle samurai women were expected to practice the martial arts with the naginata (a long, thin halberd), but in fact, they were too busy with household chores to receive more than token training.

For the history buff, the memoir also paints a vivid picture of the civil war that erupted in the Mito domain in 1864 and its devastating consequences for the women whose families ended up on the losing side. 

At the moment Yasuke - the Black Samurai is very prominent in the samurai enthusiast community, and rightly so, he was an African samurai who made his way up the ranks. However, not much is known about his story, so while it is fascinating, there is too little documentation to delve further. This is not the case with William Adams, a Londoner who made his way to Japan, who not only became a samurai but then also became a banner-man (Hatamoto) and leader of a small state. We have so much historical documentation about him and his story is captivating.

While he only arrived at the end of the wars, he was still around at one of the most important times of Japanese history. He never made it back home, but this was one Englishman who made his mark on Japanese culture. Something I hope to do.