I have long been interested in firearms and edged weapons.
I have a small collection of guns, knives and swords that adorn my basement
office’s walls and bookcase shelves, alongside my photos, maps and other
mementos of my travels and my time in the U.S. Navy.
My keen interest in weapons does not imply that I have visions of attacking a high school or shopping mall. Like most hunters, target shooters and collectors, I see weapons as fine instruments, historical artifacts and tools for self-defense.
The American gun culture, it seems to me, is based on the fact that our freedoms were won and have been preserved by our proficiency of firearms and other weapons and our willingness to use them in our defense. Ask the Nazis, ask the Imperial Japanese.
I recall visiting Japan as an 18-year-old sailor while stationed aboard the USS Kitty Hawk in 1971. The aircraft carrier was temporarily relieved from combat operations off the coast of Vietnam and we sailed to Sasebo, Japan for our scheduled R&R period.
The Japanese had been my father’s bitter enemy. He served as an Underwater Demolition Team (UDT) frogman in the Pacific during WW II. The old chief participated in some grueling and bloody battles on the Japanese-held beaches and islands, yet he held no rancor against the Japanese and he appeared to be as excited as I was about my visit to the Land of the Rising Sun.
I became particularly interested in Japan in 1965 when I read Ian Fleming’s thriller You Only Live Twice. Although as a teenager I enjoyed the 1967 film, starring Sean Connery as James Bond, I thought the movie was a bit silly. The film’s only saving grace was the tremendous screen presence of Connery and the music soundtrack by the great John Barry. I was disappointed that the film makers did not make use of the novel’s fantastic plot or tap into the cultural differences between the West and Japan, as Fleming did so well in his book.
I prepared for my visit to Japan by re-reading the novel, reading a couple of travel books that I picked up and I had my ever-ready "travel bible," which included a chapter on Japan. My travel bible was an old paperback edition of Ian Fleming’s Thrilling Cities.
The book was a collection of travel articles Fleming wrote for the London Sunday Times in 1959 and 1960. The articles were compiled in a book in 1963 and the cover art featured a suitcase with four travel stickers attached. One sticker portrayed a girl in a bikini, another was an Ace of Spades playing card, the third was the skull & crossbones symbol for poison, and the last was a semi-automatic pistol. Cool, I thought.
Written above the suitcase was the beckoning call to "Join the creator of James Bond on an adventure-charged visit to the world’s most EXCITING, EXOTIC and SINFUL cities."
Shortly after the carrier docked in Sasebo, I boarded a train bound for Nagasaki. Out of uniform and wearing my Hong Kong-tailored black suit with an open-collared shirt, a friend and I visited some of the cultural spots in the city and then we moved on to the local bars. Walking up a narrow street while barhopping, I spotted a small store that could have been an antique shop or a pawn shop, but I had no idea as the signs were in Japanese. But what I spied in the shop window quickly drew me in.
In the center of the window was an old and glorious set of Samurai swords. I didn’t know anything about Samurai swords at the time, other than the cursory knowledge I gleaned from the books I read, but these swords looked authentic to me. I bowed to the proprietor, an elderly man, and I pulled out a handful of Yen, pointing towards the swords in the window.
His response was in Japanese, spoken softly as he continued to bow up and down. I bowed back, having read somewhere that the more you bow, the more humble and polite you are. Of course, the proprietor was always two bows ahead, as he had a lot more practice at this than I, and I had consumed a good bit of Sake before entering into negotiation.
Thankfully, a young woman customer spoke English and she politely informed me that the swords were not for sale. She explained that the swords belonged to the proprietor’s ancestors. I bowed again, twice, and quickly bowed out of the store.
It would take another 25 years before I finally bought a set of Samurai swords for my collection.
So it was with some interest that I picked up Stephen Hunter’s The 47th Samurai. The thriller features Hunter’s character Bob Lee "Bob the Nailer" Swagger, a former U.S. Marine sniper from the Vietnam War. Hunter has written several novels about Bob Lee and his father Earl Swagger, a WW II-era Marine who won the Medal of Honor on Iwo Jima. Earl Swagger became an Arkansas state trooper after the war and was killed in the line of duty when Bob Lee was a young boy.
Both Bob Lee and Earl are rugged individuals with a more than a proficient knowledge of firearms and a strong sense of justice and personal honor.
Hunter has written several novels that featured Bob Lee, such as Black Light and Point of Impact – recently made into the film Shooter. Hunter has also written novels featuring Earl Swagger in his time, including Hot Springs and Havana.
In The 47th Samurai Hunter features both father and son in alternating chapters in a story about a Japanese Officer’s sword, which Earl obtained after his heroic action in taking out a Japanese pill box single-handily on Iwo Jima.
A stoic man not interested in war souvenirs, he generously gives the sword to a young, dispirited Marine officer who was wounded in the fighting. Many years later, a retired Colonel in Japan’s Self Defense Forces, the son of the late Japanese officer, visits the 60- year-old Bob Lee in Idaho and asks him for the return of the sword.
Bob Lee Swagger tells the retired Colonel that his father rarely discussed the war and he does not have the sword. But the idea of returning the sword becomes something of a quest and Swagger hunts the sword down and then travels to Japan to return it to the Colonel.
As it turns out, the sword is discovered to be much more valuable than either Swagger or the Japanese Colonel knew. The valuable, historical sword attracts the attention of a Yakuza assassin with illusions of grandeur and a wealthy Japanese porn film mogul.
Swagger, who feels a strong bond and a strong sense of obligation to the Japanese Colonel – two former soldiers whose fathers fought bravely against one another - takes on the Yakuza. Although he was once a master sniper, he quickly learns how to use a sword in place of a rifle in his battle with Japan’s organized crime group.
Hunter hated Tom Cruise’s film The Last Samurai (so did I), and he said he wrote this novel as a rebuke to the film. The idea that an American can quickly master Japanese swordsmanship and defeat Japanese Samurai in a sword fight was plain silly. Swagger, who at 60 is still strong and athletic, learns to adequately handle a sword, but he is no match for the masters who have studied and trained for years and years. He has to use good, ole American ingenuity – he cheats.
The novel is an excellent thriller, worthy, I think, to sit beside other Western thrillers based in Japan, such as You Only Live Twice and James Clavell’s Shogun. Hunter does his research and the characters and events of the novel are exciting and extraordinary, yet they are also authentic and believable.
Stephen Hunter is an interesting writer. He’s the Washington Post’s movie critic and films play a big part in the book with Swagger watching the classic Japanese Samurai films as part of his training. Where in previous books Hunter’s interest and knowledge of firearms is apparent, in this book his research is applied to Japanese history, culture and Japanese swordsmanship.
Hunter has told interviewers that he knew he wanted to be a writer since he was 10-years-old and his interest in firearms also developed early. He recalls watching a TV episode of Dragnet in which the TV cops break out the big guns for a shoot-out. Unfortunately for the young Stephen Hunter, his father, a university professor, disapproved of firearms and would not allow them in the house. His father later became a murder victim.
Hunter served in the state-side Army for two years and he later became a reporter with The Baltimore Sun. He said he went through a period of "creepy liberalism" and sang the liberal song of banning all guns. Then he happened to see a magazine with a gun on the cover and he realized his "inner gunslinger," as Mary Carole McCauley of The Baltimore Sun so aptly put it. Hunter soon purchased his first gun.
Heavily influenced by Ernest Hemingway (he calls himself Hemingway lite), he wrote his first novel in 1980. That novel was called The Master Sniper and it featured a WW II German sniper. He later read a book about Marine Gunnery Sgt. (Ret) Carlos N. Hathcock, who was a legendary sniper during the Vietnam War, and Hunter based his Bob Lee Swagger character on Hathcock.
I like Hunter’s attitude towards so-called serious literature. "To me "Literature" means a book without a gunfight," he told McCauley.
Or a sword fight, I might add.
Note: The column originally appeared in the Orchard Press Online Mystery Magazine in 2007.
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