For Westerners unschooled in the way of the movie samurai, the classic image of the loyal retainer doubtless looks something like Obi-Wan Kenobi -- or the late John Belushi. A genial riff on the great ...

Sometimes it seemed as if that was all there were. All there ever had been. All there ever would be. There was this scrap of earth — just a big rock, really. And there was a cave in the rock, which ...

Our May book takes us on the most action-packed adventure yet for NPR's Backseat Book Club. In the Newbery Honor-winning Heart of a Samurai by Margi Preus, we meet 14-year-old Manjiro, a Japanese boy ...

If you want to see Japanese swords and armour — and you don’t happen to have a time machine — you’ll usually need to head to a museum. However, we recently came across an astounding collection of ...

Some are born great, and some are born lowly, get shipwrecked, live in exile and brave a perilous return home to achieve greatness. Such was the astonishing true trajectory of Manjiro, a 19th-century ...

Margi Preus' Heart of a Samurai tells the story of Manjiro, a fisherman's son who dreams of becoming a samurai. When his boat is shipwrecked off... Our May book takes us on the most action-packed ...

"Heart of a Samurai" is a fictionalized account of the remarkable true story of Nakahama Manjiro, who played an important part as a translator during the opening of Japan at the end of the Tokugawa ...