Samurai: A History

British historian Man (Ninja) adds to his solid series of general-audience books on Far East military subjects with this analysis of Japan’s military nobility. Taking an unusual perspective, he focuses on Saigo Takamori, whose iconic status as a 19th-century embodiment of the samurai ideal gave him “semidivinity... even before his death.” Man perceptively describes “samurai” as a sense of being: a way of the warrior built around the cult of the sword; seppuku, ritual suicide, as the ultimate proof of loyalty; and bushido, “freedom that is bound to service,” as the highest ideal. Renewing their identity to fit new circumstances, the samurai became “the very essence of Japanese society.” Saigo’s lord, Shuzami Nariakara, saw him as honest and trustworthy, fearing neither authority nor evil, and “the kind of man who cannot be manipulated.” Saigo became a key figure in the Meiji Restoration, but his conviction that “the duty of government is to serve the people” led him to reject the new Japan’s “politicians, bureaucrats, and capitalists.” Seeking the life of a “Confucian gentleman-scholar,” he resigned his offices. Drawn unwillingly into leading a doomed rebellion, he committed seppuku; in death he became “a national treasure” whose life and death embodied “the self-destructive courage, the nobility of failure, that was so much a part of the Japanese character.” (Feb.)