Six-Gun Samurai

Six-Gun Samurai is a short and relatively entertaining book, but one I don't think is suited to modern audiences. There's obviously a thread of Orientalism that runs through the whole thing, which I suppose was more common at the time this was written (1981) but I suspect most audiences today would cringe at.

I just want to take an aside to note that I do consume a lot of schlock, usually in the cinematic realm, and I'm not opposed to exploitation films and the ninja movies of the 80's. I think a big part of why this book rubbed me the wrong way was that while it's clear Lee is a bit of a history buff (at least when it comes to Western firearms and Japanese military history), the way he presented Japanese things was kind of weird. It was always like, “he put on his gehtas, his wooden sandals, and stepped out.” The clumsy use of Japanese terms (which in many cases are misspelled or poorly consteucted - “Ichi biru kudasai” instead of “Biru wo ippai kudasai”, “saki” instead of “sake”, “dom arigato” instead of “doumo”, and many more) felt like he was trying to show that he knew his stuff, but came up short. And did a lot of Orientalization while depicting feudal Japan. Anyway, back to the content.

There was a lot of portrayal of racism of the kind you'd find in the Old West, which I was fine with (the portrayal, not the racism). But the way one of the non-white characters was depicted kind of felt like a caricature to me. I wasn't sure whether Lee was trying to emulate the way a pulp story would flatten “ethnic” characters into stereotypes or whether he just writes that way.

The sex scene felt like it came a bit out of left-field and you guessed it, had more Asian mysticism. There was also a lot more sexual violence than I was expecting going in.

This was the first “Western” novel I've read and I'm not sure if some of the things I disliked came down to genre conventions or the author's choices. If you can get past the egregious Orientalism and sexual violence, you have yourself an interesting and somewhat silly fish-out-of-water swashbuckler story that you can finish in an afternoon. Still, I don't think I'll be reading the other entries in the series.