The Signore: Shogun of the Warring States

To his 16th-century contemporaries, ``the Signore''--the warlord Oda Nobunaga who reunified Japan after two centuries of civil war--was a brutal, merciless tyrant fond of mass slaughter. But to the Italian adventurer who serves as nameless narrator of Tsuji's historical novel, Nobunaga is introspective and acutely sensitive, a supreme rationalist destroyed by his will to power and by utter isolation from his fellows. Although the narrative never fully resolves these contradictory sides of the hero's personality--a duality that may symbolize Japan's national character--the action depicts the birth of modern Japan as Nobunaga battles rival chieftains and Buddhist soldier-monks before his castle is consumed by flames. In counterpoint to the ruler's tragedy is the narrator's own story: having murdered his wife and her lover in a fit of rage, he leaps into an existential void and attempts to remake himself. Tsuji's cadenced prose, felicitously translated, evokes a bygone age. (Mar.)