The Signore: Shogun of the Warring States

The Signore retells the story of Japan’s first modern ruler, Oda Nobunaga, whose encounter with the West led to his destruction. Like the colorful, rapidly changing scenes of an old Japanese picture scroll, the events of this historical novel unfold in a series of unforgettable glimpses of misery and magnificence, cruelty and compassion. Caught up in the late sixteenth-century struggle to unify Japan, a group of Portuguese missionaries react with curiosity, bewilderment, and admiration to the contradictions of this foreign land. It is this need that brings them into contact with the enigmatic central figure of the story: the young lord Oda Nobunaga, who is obsessed with the task of imposing unity on a seething mass of rival forces. But the brilliance of the novel’s climax is shattered at a single stroke by […] sudden death. Thus, in its ending, this work—so thought-provoking in its picture of the meeting of cultures—also seems to invite the reader to find beauty in the cruelty and impermanence of existence itself.