Samurai Sketches: From the Bloody Final Years of the Shogun

Samurai Sketches -- From the Final Bloody Years of the Shogun is an accurate and realistic study-in-brief of the fifteen years of bloody revolution which culminated with the overthrow of the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1868. In this collection of historical sketches written in short-story form, Romulus Hillsborough depicts scenes of human strife, courage, fidelity, self-sacrifice, heroism, good and evil, in prose which are always concise, often intensely vivid, at times poetic. He throws light upon a period in Japanese history which has either been sadly neglected or grossly misinterpreted by Western writers. Sketches is Hillsborough's sequel to RYOMA -- Life of a Renaissance Samurai, which chronicles this historical era through the life of one of its most important heroes, Sakamoto Ryoma. As a Japanese man, and as a life-long student of Japanese history, I am at once proud and happy to recommend both Samurai Sketches and Ryoma to people interested in Japanese culture and history, or, more broadly speaking, the human condition.

In Samurai Sketches From The Bloody Final Years Of The Shogun, Romulus Hillsborough offers historical sketches of the world of the samurai during the mid-nineteenth century which saw the collapse of the Tokugawa Shogunate and the rise of the Meiji Restoration -- an age of unprecedented political turmoil and bloody conflicts between clans and war lords. Here is a "window in time" through which we can observe those bygone days when the samurai class underwent social, cultural, and political upheavals with attendant pressures on their stoic codes of life and death. Samurai Sketches is a "must" for all Japanese history students and samurai buffs.