In Japan, as we learn in copious flashbacks, parallel to the present-day story, he was treated as a different kind of outsider. Born and raised in Japan, Nicholas feels adrift in America, its ways still alien to him, but after his years there he feels that it has changed him, buried his true self beneath layers of foreign ways of thinking and feeling. We first encounter Nicholas as he leaves a high-powered advertising career, although looking back from the vantage point of the book’s end, it’s hard to imagine him putting up with such a job. Nicholas Linnear, the protagonist of Eric Van Lustbader’s 1980 novel The Ninja, plays a similar role as both an audience identification character and an insider who can access secret teachings and relay their meaning to American readers. Starting as an American black belt, he is humbled by the recognition of how little he knows, but his journey toward mastery is shared with the reader it’s a heady formula and one that would be repeated throughout the 1980s.

Hayes’ non-fiction book The Ninja and Their Secret Fighting Art, published in 1981, starts from a similar premise, laying out the basic philosophies and some of the techniques of ninjutsu while describing Hayes’ own search for a teacher who might admit him into the inner circle. 114Īs American audiences were first introduced to the ninja (at least those who weren’t already delving into the martial arts cinema of Japan and Hong Kong), a common narrative ploy was to hook the audience’s identification with an American or European initiated into the ways of the shadow warriors, learning about them along with the reader or viewer. Another aspect of musashi, known as Kensei, the Sword Saint, was that he used bokken –wooden swords–in actual combat–claiming that he did so because they were invincible. It taught the art of wielding two swords at once. Among other things, he founded the Niten or Two Heavens school–or ryu –of kenjutsu.

The ninja book by eric van lustbader