Summary
Narrated in the third person by an unnamed omniscient narrator, Black Samurai opens in a Japanese village north of Tokyo in 1973. US Army Colonel Leo Dimitri Tolstoy, along with twenty-three other men and six killer Dobermans, are executing a night raid on three houses with twenty sleeping samurai inside. Tolstoy knows he must kill the martial arts masters as part of his plan to kill Toki Jakata Bi, the granddaughter of Master Konuma. Tolstoy has just kidnapped her and plans to execute her in the US in ten days. The samurai will hunt him down if he doesn’t kill them first.
With his grenades and M-16 rifle ready, Tolstoy leads his men to the houses. They have been instructed to leave no survivors, and to kill the dogs too, as they have become too vicious. The blood-thirsty dogs go in first and attack the samurai. Bullets and explosions rock the buildings as bloody heads and limbs fly. In the melee, the narrator introduces Robert Sand, a Black American who is the only outsider Sensei Konuma has ever accepted for samurai training. He is considered the best of the group of samurai. Sand leaves the second house through the window with his prized 200-year-old short sword (tanto) drawn. He silently kills two American GIs on his way to the Sensei’s house, taking one of their guns, which he uses on two other soldiers inside the house.
Sand laments that the raid he has always anticipated is finally happening. He gets to the Sensei to discover he has been shot twice in the chest. Before dying, Konuma calls Sand “Sandayu,” referencing a legendary samurai from medieval Japan. Sand wonders what it means that the Sensei uses this name for him. Sand sheds a tear but immediately resolves to kill Colonel Tolstoy. He jumps out the window, dispatches another GI, lobs a grenade at others, and then flees to the trees where the Americans had been waiting. From the first house, Tolstoy shouts out to not let him escape.
The narrator comments that in 1966, Sand was a skinny GI running in the darkness, a twenty-two-year-old sergeant on a month-long leave from Vietnam in Tokyo. Seeing four white Americans harassing an elderly Japanese man, Sand tries to intervene and is shot twice in the stomach. As he writhes in his own blood, Sand can’t believe what he sees: the gray-bearded elderly Japanese man engages in hand-to-hand combat with the GIs, snapping their bones and incapacitating them. Sand passes out and wakes in the American hospital in Tokyo. A nurse tells him he died on the operating table but was brought back to life.
After two and a half months in the hospital, Sand is discharged, and then immediately released from the Army without explanation. An embassy official named Jenkins enters his room with the old man—Master Konuma. Jenkins, translating for Konuma, says Sand is “special” and Konuma wants to train him in martial arts. He is courageous for trying to save Konuma’s life, and so Konuma wants to give Sand life. Sand wants to run away, but instead he follows Konuma, a decision he will never regret.
The narrative returns to 1973 and we see Sand running as Tolstoy’s men fire their rifles at him. Sand runs, thanking the dead Sensei in his mind for his insistent training. Sand knows he could run the twenty miles to Tokyo, but Tolstoy and his men have vehicles and will catch up. Sand decides he must run for the stable of horses the samurai train with. Sand takes cover behind the Americans’ vehicles, waiting with his rifle to pick off soldiers who walk away from the burning houses.
Sand considers how he has only ever known Tolstoy through people’s warnings that he is a dangerous man who massacred the inhabitants of two villages in Vietnam. He never expected him in Japan. When he runs out of bullets, Sand runs for the stable. He shouts at locals to turn out their lights and go inside. The man who minds the stable sets Sand up with a mare named Oki. Sand kills two more raiders on his way out of the stable using his sword and the horse’s kicks. He begins riding to Tokyo to meet with William Baron Clarke, the only surviving ex-President of the United States.
While riding, Sand thinks about 1966. His work with the samurai started at 5:30 every morning, and he performed menial tasks like cleaning weapons and uniforms. He believed he would never get used to eating raw fish. He resented his work, thinking of it as “slave shit.” But gradually Sand learned to get through his tasks quickly so he could take part in the martial arts training, which he takes to “as few Japanese ever had.”
Konuma watched his development from a distance, only once commenting directly that Konuma was “like Sandayu. Always have courage. Practice.” Sand wondered if maybe he had been a courageous samurai in a past life, and had been reincarnated. One night, Sand impressed two of his fellow samurai by easily fighting off the attacks of two drunk Japanese men in a bar. They referred to him as “black brother.”
Analysis
The opening chapter of Marc Olden’s Black Samurai introduces the major themes of violence, terrorism, revenge, valor, and service. The opening pages are also a deceptive inversion of the reader’s expectations: Rather than begin with a scene from the point of view of the novel’s protagonist, Olden begins in the mind of the antagonist, Colonel Leo Tolstoy. While Tolstoy’s name is an allusion to the great Russian author, the character is nothing like the literary giant. In Black Samurai, Tolstoy is a psychopathic war criminal whose involvement in the My Lai massacre—a real-life mass murder of South Vietnamese citizens by US troops that took place during the Vietnam War—puts him in disgrace with the US Army.
To get his revenge against his home country, Tolstoy plots a terrorist attack that begins with the kidnapping of Toki Jakata Bi, the wife of a prominent South Vietnamese politician. Because he knows the woman’s grandfather, the samurai master Sensei Konuma, will exact his revenge if he discovers his granddaughter has been kidnapped, Tolstoy launches a preemptive raid while the elderly Konuma and his samurai students sleep. Olden details Tolstoy’s attack in gruesome detail, highlighting the man’s capacity for ruthlessness to establish the threat he poses to humanity at large.
It isn’t until several pages into the novel that the reader meets Robert Sand, the Black Samurai of the book’s title. In contrast to Tolstoy and his hired terrorists’ psychopathy, Sand and his samurai brothers, Kuri and Maka, calmly decide amongst themselves the best course of action when their house is under assault. Because Sand is the strongest warrior among them, the samurai send him out the window to rescue Konuma before Tolstoy’s men can kill him; meanwhile, Kuri and Maka sacrifice their lives to slow the heavily armed raiders. While all three samurai could simply have jumped out the window and escaped into the forest, they display a valor and commitment to service by staying to fight.
Olden builds on the theme of revenge when Sand reaches Konuma just as he dies. Sand decides then to use the painful memory of Konuma’s death as a reason for exacting his revenge against Tolstoy and his men. Just like Tolstoy, Sand is motivated by a desire for vengeance, but Sand’s desire is righteous, while Tolstoy’s is irrational. Throughout the rest of the novel, Olden will pit protagonist and antagonist against each other as they vie to see who is more committed to achieving their vengeful goal.
Having established the mystery of how Sand wound up being the only Black American samurai in Japan, Olden includes a flashback to 1966 that establishes Sand’s origin story. As a private in the US Army, Sand was shot while trying to defend Konuma from the harassment of American soldiers. In an instance of situational irony, it turns out that Konuma, despite his advanced age and lack of weapons, needed no help. While Sand lay in his own blood, Konuma beat the men senseless using martial arts skills. Wishing to honor and make use of Sand’s courage, Konuma brought Sand into his samurai training school. To complement Sand’s natural valor, Konuma taught him discipline and fighting skills, shaping Sand over the course of a few years from a foolhardy GI into the most deadly samurai alive.
