Shūhei Fujisawa (1927–1997)

I was watching an interview with Yoji Yamada on his The Twilight Samurai DVD, and he said he had gotten some of his inspiration from a short story called "The Bamboo Sword." Indeed, the short story and the end of the movie track very closely.

All of the eight stories in this collection are set in the early years of the Tokugawa shogunate (~1600-1620). Most of them take place in small towns; although the stories are each separate, one almost expects a character from a prior story to stroll through at some point. Quite a few of the stories have some "trick" ending, which does lessen the enjoyment a bit (for example, in the titular story, a samurai sent to kill a traitor to the clan admits that he is so poor that he had to sell his "good" sword for money and replace it with one of bamboo; the story then hinges on what the main character knows but the traitor -- and the reader -- does not). There are other spots where it's hard to tell if the story is at fault or it's a problem of translation: In "Out of Luck," the story starts with the viewpoint of a woman restaurant owner, but switches to that of a young playboy a page or two in and stays there through the end of the story. Still, these were generally enjoyable character studies in a very interesting period in Japan's history.

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LT Haiku:

Short stories set in
Japan when politics kept
shifting like the wind.… (more)