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Ninja, February 2013
Hardcover / e-Book
1,000 Years of the Shadow Warrior
William Morrow
February 2013
On Sale: February 5, 2013
304 pages ISBN: 0062222023 EAN: 9780062222022 Kindle: B0089LOM5Q Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
In this revelatory book, acclaimed author John Man's
thrilling historical account brings to life the world of the
ninjas, the Japanese "shadow warriors," whose otherworldly
skills as assassins and spies still seize our imaginations
like few characters before or since. Ninja is the first
major history of these legendary masters of stealth warfare. Out of the violent chaos of medieval Japan, a remarkable
band of peasants from the mountainous Iga and Koga provinces
rose to become some of the world's most feared warriors.
These poor villagers trained to perfect the art of
ninjutsu—the deadly union of martial skill and deception—to
defend themselves against far more powerful warlords,
samurai, bandits, and warrior monks who sought to exploit
them. They disciplined their minds as much as their
bodies—sitting under waterfalls to purify themselves and
adhering to mystical religious beliefs. By 1500, the ninja's
extraordinary talents, from infiltrating cliff-top castles
to carrying out daring strikes for the imperial shoguns,
were in demand across Japan. Today, however, these real-life ninjas are overshadowed by
legend and pop-culture caricatures. Could they fly? Climb
walls? Cast spells? Survive being boiled alive? Or make
themselves invisible? Drawing on a wealth of historical
texts, local Japanese sources, and his long study of
medieval Asia, John Man unravels the authentic ninjas,
taking us back a millennium to their origins in China,
through to their heyday in the bloody civil wars that ended
with the unification of Japan in 1600. But the story does not end there. Man argues the Japanese
tradition of shadow warfare survived quietly for centuries
before reemerging through the Nakano Spy School, the elite
twentieth-century military-intelligence academy whose
graduates operated one of the most extensive spy networks
during World War II. Now in his nineties, one former Nakano
soldier named Onoda Hiroo may be the "last of the ninjas." Compelling and absorbing, Ninja propels us from feudal Japan
to the modern day, revealing at last the fascinating true
history behind one of the world's most enduring legends.
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