The Asian Reporter's
BOOK REVIEWS

From The Asian Reporter, V17, #43 (October 23, 2007), page 15.

By Stephen Hunter

Simon & Schuster, 2007

Hardcover, 372 pages, $26.00

By Jeff Wenger

Stephen Hunter has a day job (he’s the movie critic for The Washington Post) so he doesn’t turn out a new thriller every year. His books are worth the wait.

The 47th Samurai is a story of Bob Lee Swagger, hero of the previous books Point of Impact and Time to Hunt. For the better part of 15 years, Hunter has been telling Bob Lee’s stories and those of Bob Lee’s father, Earl Swagger. Because the junior Swagger was in Vietnam and is around 60 years old in The 47th Samurai, and because the elder Swagger, a World War II vet and Arkansas state trooper, was killed in 1955, Hunter may be running out of timeline into which to squeeze his stories. If The 47th Samurai proves to be the last of the bunch, Hunter finishes strong.

The 47th Samurai effectively moves between the present day with Bob Lee, and the Marine landing on Iwo Jima where Earl fought. Defending Iwo’s black volcanic sand was Hideki Yano who, as the Japanese Empire collapsed, no longer believed in glory, but only in duty.

In the modern day, Bob meets Philip Yano, Hideki’s son, and the plot proceeds with old letters and pursued relationships. An old sword is obtained that binds the sons of the fathers, and Bob visits Japan.

None of which is inconsequential, but it soon yields to tragedy, and the insatiable hunger for revenge, and thereby hangs the tale.

There seem to be two concerns about an outsider seeking justice in a closed society, in this case an American action hero in Japan. The first is that the story never rises above caricature, and you get John Wayne or Wesley Snipes levelling vengeance against monolithic, karate-fighting emperor worshippers or yakuza or salarymen — it doesn’t matter, because they’re all the same, like the Indian braves in a Western or the security detail on "Star Trek."

The other concern may be filed under "white ninja," wherein the author and his hero are so enamored, so ensorcelled by the East, so deferential that they go immediately native and lose all sense of contrast.

Hunter leans over the railing, but he doesn’t fall in.

As his did in 2001’s Pale Horse Coming, which reworked Aeschylus’s Seven Against Thebes, Hunter again touches up a classic hero tale. This time he brings the Attack of the 47 Ronin on Kira’s Mansion from 1703 into the present. This is a Japanese historic national moment not unlike the Alamo. Hunter’s not being cagey — he’s telling a mythology about super-warriors, and battles between great evil and, if not actually good themselves, then at least the defenders of good. Hunter lays it out simply between oppressors and defenders; the motivation matters.

Philip Yano finds that "Samurai had become international." It is the warrior ethos that transcends nationality and the technicalities of method. It is this that allows disbelief to be suspended during Bob’s sword training, that, while he isn’t a samurai in the specifics, he is in spirit. He’s the distillation of pure warrior.

Hunter is such a good writer that, even in a simple adventure and morality tale, he can’t help but convey nuance, such as Japan’s national midlife crisis or the personal one when Bob Lee falls off the wagon and strains his marriage.

Anyway, that’s not what The 47th Samurai is about; it’s about establishing the wickedness of the bad guys and setting up the showdown with the good guys and then turning them loose on each other. Hunter does this better than the top ten on the list of those who write thrillers for their day job.