Legends of the Samurai

By: Hiroaki Sato

Narrated by: Walter Dixon

Over the decades, the reputation of the samurai has grown to mythical proportions, owing to such films as Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai and Yojimbo, as well as works such as James Clavell's epic Shogun.

In Legends of the Samurai, Hiroaki Sato confronts both the history and the legend of the samurai, untangling the two to present an authentic picture of these legendary warriors.

Through his masterful translations of original samurai tales, laws, dicta, reports, and arguments accompanied by insightful commentary, Sato chronicles the changing ethos of the Japanese warrior from the samurai's historical origins to his rise to political power.

A fascinating look at Japanese history as seen through the evolution of the samurai, Legends of the Samurai stands as the ultimate authority on its subject.

©1995 Hiroaki Sato (P)2016 Gildan Media LLC

Lots of interesting tid bits.

Even if the reader anglicized the japanese words and phrases, as this seems to bother some folks, I thoroughly enjoyed these retellings of old legends very much, and would definitely recommend this work for anyone interested in the Samurai class. Anglicized Japanese dosen't negate the research and compilation that ie presented here.

Poetry and Philosophy

This book has a lot of fantastic stories of the samurai and tide to those stories are their poems and philosophy about how they lived, fought, and died.

Like nails on a chalkboard....

With so many Japanese names, places, quotes and poetry, couldn't they get a reader who could pronounce them correctly? The reader was good if it was English, but treated what is a beautiful language, terribly. I believe it did this book a great disservice. Listening to the readers pronunciation of Japanese, was like nails on a chalkboard. There was lots of good information, but the mispronunciation for me was very distracting and frustrating. Unfortunate.

Pronunciation

The content itself was great. Really cool stories and some background provided to explain the culture of Japan for people unfamiliar to it.

The narration was pretty bad. The narrator should have looked up Japanese pronunciation guides, which are pretty easy for English speakers to grasp. Either that, or a different narrator who already knew at least a little Japanese should have been hired. As someone actually studying the language, I found the Japanese excerpts impossible to understand.

Inconsistent Japanese pronunciation

It would have been better if the narrator could really speak Japanese. In terms of the content, some chapters are good, many weak.