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The Last Samurai: The Life and Battles of Saigo Takamori. By MARK RAVINA. Hoboken, NJ.: John Wiley and Sons, 2004. xvi, 265 pp. $30.00 (cloth); $16.95 (paper).
When I arrived in Kagoshima in the late 1980s, I was struck by the ever-present image of Saigo Takamori, from monumental statuary to boxed sets of cookies formed in his likeness at the train-station gift shop. Over the course of living there for a year, I heard numerous romanticized accounts of Saigo's glorious seppuku on Shiroyama. Although I listened to these tales with a grain of salt, I never made any serious inquiry into Saigo's life.
Reading Mark Ravina's thoroughly researched biography, I was not surprised to find that the cold hard facts of Saigo's death lacked the glory of the popular versions that I had heard. Despite its realism, The Last Samurai: The Life and Battles of Saigo Takamori is not a work of radical iconoclasm, nor does it read like a detached report. Many of the images of Saigo from previous biographical accounts hold up reasonably well under Ravina's scrutiny, and his considerable literary skill makes the book a lively read. It is, to my tastes, a perfectly balanced analysis of Saigo the human being, Saigo the historical...