#shiba ryotaro
This is probably the biggest news that’s happened in Bakumatsu-related fandom since I joined fandom. After years of wondering and waiting, Shiba Ryotaro’s Ryoma ga Yuku, his most popular novel and the genesis of the current Ryoma boom, is being translated into English.
Full story on Japan Forward. The first volume is out, three more volumes slated to be translated by 2020. Amazingly, the entire project has been financed by a Japanese fan who wanted to bring the novel and Sakamoto’s story to English readers. So, I hope we can repay his investment by buying the novel he and the translators have worked so hard to bring us.
Volume 1 is available on Amazon as a Kindle digital edition. If you don’t have a Kindle, you can read it on your computer or other device with a free Kindle app. I’ve linked to the U.S. site but it’s available in 100 countries. I got it for $9.99 CDN: a cheap price for a 526 page volume. There’s no hardcopy available at this point in time.
So, if you’re not already scrambling to buy it, let me sell you on the novel. First of all, it’s good. I haven’t had the chance to read the entire volume yet, but I immediately did the scan-through, reading sections and taking a look at the whole story, and it’s really, really good. It’s funny and exciting, covering Sakamoto Ryoma’s early years till he flees Tosa domain without permission. There are a lot more purely fictional escapades and hijinks than in previous shorter translated Shiba Bakumatsu works. This is first and foremost a novel, and a very funny one. Here’s Sakamoto meeting Katsura Kogoro for the first time:
Ryoma felt sorry for Katsura. And he was the sort of man who, when he feels sorry for someone, tends to go too far in what he says: “Oh don’t be so hard on yourself. You see I am a spy.”
Katsura was so surprised to hear this that he could hardly breathe. Here he had cleared the man from the suspicion of being a spy, only to have him proclaim he was a spy and then go on to say, consolingly, “So you don’t need to worry about having done some injury to your domain. Your intuition about me was correct, and you acted just as you should have."
”Is he a simpleton?“ wondered Katsura again.
As you read the story, you can really see how Shiba shaped the way these historical figures are characterized in all forms of fiction today. The novel also has an excellent extensive introduction by historian Henry Smith who explores how the novel came to be written, its historical reliability (mixed), its relationship to Marius Jansen’s English research on Sakamoto, and the Ryoma legacy today.
Definitely will have more to say about this book later. For further reading on Shiba’s significance, check out my previous post: What We Learned from Shiba Ryotaro: Sakamoto Ryoma and Hijikata Toshizo.
