47: The True Story of the Vendetta of the 47 Ronin from Akô

This is the story of a few men who valued justice more than life. They were members of the large Corps of Samurai in the feudal domain of Akô in western Japan. But when their lord committed the crime of drawing his sword within the castle of the Shogun, the law decreed that he should be sentenced to death, that his heir would not inherit the domain, and all of his vassals would become ronin, evicted from their homes and deprived of their income. All 308 samurai in Akô knew the law and accepted it. And if their lord had succeeded in killing the man he attacked in the castle that would have been the tragic end of this episode. But their lord was subdued and failed to kill his enemy; which meant that yet another law came into play: the Principle of Equal Punishment. 47: The True Story of the Vendetta of the 47 Ronin from Akô tells the harrowing tale of how all this was argued, what the consequences were, and what ultimately became of those forty-seven men who remained. 47 Ronin tells the tale in immense detail—with maps, graphics, and gorgeous illustrations.

Thomas Harper worked at the Centre for Japanese and Korean Studies at the University of Leiden, where his academic specialty was The Tale of Genji and its readers. In 2015 he and his co-compiler Haruo Shirane published Reading The Tale of Genji: Sources from the First Millennium, prior to which he had written several scholarly articles on this subject. He is also the translator of Tanizaki Jun'ichirô's In Praise of Shadows.