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stoutfellowI finished reading Ryoma this morning.
The bad. The author isn't much of a stylist. The book is written novelistically; he gives verbatim transcripts of conversations, even in situations in which it's virtually impossible for anyone to know just what was said. I assume that he reconstructed them from his source materials - journals, letters, and memoirs by the various people involved - and I'm willing to cut him some slack on that, but there's an abundance of "hollering" and the like. It may be accurate - Sakamoto Ryoma seems to have been a boisterous fellow - but a little variation of language might have been nice. And is it necessary to remind us that Mutsu Yonosuke was to be "one of Japan's greatest foreign ministers" virtually every time he's mentioned?
The good. It's a gripping story, well-told. Hillsborough makes clear the intricate and shifting struggle among the various power centers - the Shogunate, the Imperial court, the great clans, and the meddling French and British - and the way in which Sakamoto, working inside and outside the system, managed to build the coalition that finally brought down the last of the Tokugawa shoguns. Along the way, he played a role in building a modern navy for Japan, established the first Western-style corporation (a forerunner of Mitsubishi), forced his opponents to accept international norms of business and law, and very nearly made the Meiji Restoration a bloodless event. (That bloodshed did come is not his fault, as he was assassinated shortly after the Shogun's agreement to abdicate; had he survived, his talents as a mediator might have prevented or limited the fighting that followed.) The social constraints within which he worked and against which he struggled all his life; his fixity of aim - the preservation of Japan from foreign domination - and flexibility of method to achieve that aim; his constant openness to new ideas and disregard for useless conventions - all of these make him a fascinating character.
The book is long, and starts rather slowly, but once Sakamoto begins to evolve from rebel and assassin to statesman and merchant adventurer the story is hard to put down.
The bad. The author isn't much of a stylist. The book is written novelistically; he gives verbatim transcripts of conversations, even in situations in which it's virtually impossible for anyone to know just what was said. I assume that he reconstructed them from his source materials - journals, letters, and memoirs by the various people involved - and I'm willing to cut him some slack on that, but there's an abundance of "hollering" and the like. It may be accurate - Sakamoto Ryoma seems to have been a boisterous fellow - but a little variation of language might have been nice. And is it necessary to remind us that Mutsu Yonosuke was to be "one of Japan's greatest foreign ministers" virtually every time he's mentioned?
The good. It's a gripping story, well-told. Hillsborough makes clear the intricate and shifting struggle among the various power centers - the Shogunate, the Imperial court, the great clans, and the meddling French and British - and the way in which Sakamoto, working inside and outside the system, managed to build the coalition that finally brought down the last of the Tokugawa shoguns. Along the way, he played a role in building a modern navy for Japan, established the first Western-style corporation (a forerunner of Mitsubishi), forced his opponents to accept international norms of business and law, and very nearly made the Meiji Restoration a bloodless event. (That bloodshed did come is not his fault, as he was assassinated shortly after the Shogun's agreement to abdicate; had he survived, his talents as a mediator might have prevented or limited the fighting that followed.) The social constraints within which he worked and against which he struggled all his life; his fixity of aim - the preservation of Japan from foreign domination - and flexibility of method to achieve that aim; his constant openness to new ideas and disregard for useless conventions - all of these make him a fascinating character.
The book is long, and starts rather slowly, but once Sakamoto begins to evolve from rebel and assassin to statesman and merchant adventurer the story is hard to put down.
