坂の上の雲（八）

坂の上の雲 #8

by Ryōtarō Shiba, 司馬 遼太郎

「本日天気晴朗ナレドモ浪高シ」。明治三十八年五月二十七日早朝、日本海の朝靄の中にロシア帝国の威信をかけたバルチック大艦隊がついにその姿を現わした。国家の命運を背負って戦艦三笠を先頭に迎撃に向かう連合艦隊。大海戦の火ぶたが今まさに切られようとしている。感動の完結篇。

350 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1968

About the author

Ryōtarō Shiba (司馬 遼太郎) born Teiichi Fukuda (福田 定一 Fukuda Teiichi, August 7, 1923 – February 12, 1996) in Osaka, Japan, was a Japanese author best known for his novels about historical events in Japan and on the Northeast Asian sub-continent, as well as his historical and cultural essays pertaining to Japan and its relationship to the rest of the world.

Shiba studied Mongolian at the Osaka School of Foreign Languages (now the School of Foreign Studies at Osaka University) and began his career as a journalist with the Sankei Shimbun, one of Japan's major newspapers. After World War II Shiba began writing historical novels. The magazine Shukan Asahi printed Shiba's articles about his travels within Japan in a series that ran for 1,146 installments. Shiba received the Naoki Prize for the 1959 novel Fukuro no Shiro ("The Castle of an Owl"). In 1993 Shiba received the Government's Order of Cultural Merit. Shiba was a prolific author who frequently wrote about the dramatic change Japan went through during the late Edo and early Meiji periods. His most monumental works include Kunitori Monogatari (国盗り物語), Ryoma ga Yuku (竜馬がゆく; see below), Moeyo Ken, and Saka no ue no kumo (坂の上の雲), all of which have spawned dramatizations, most notably Taiga dramas aired in hour-long segments over a full year on NHK television. He also wrote numerous essays that were published in collections, one of which—Kaidō wo Yuku—is a multi-volume journal-like work covering his travels across Japan and around the world. Shiba is widely appreciated for the originality of his analyses of historical events, and many people in Japan have read at least one of his works.

Several of Shiba's works have been translated into English, including his fictionalized biographies of Kukai (Kukai the Universal: Scenes from His Life, 2003) and Tokugawa Yoshinobu (The Last Shogun: The Life of Tokugawa Yoshinobu, 2004), as well as The Tatar Whirlwind: A Novel of Seventeenth-Century East Asia (2007).

(from Wikipedia)

Alternative Names:

Fukuda, Teiichi
Ryotaro, Shiba
Shiba, Ryoutarou
Ryoutarou, Shiba
Sima, Liaotailang
司馬遼太郎
司马辽太郎
Shiba, Rëotaro
Шиба, Рёотаро
司马辽太郎
司馬, 遼太郎
司馬遼太郎
司場遼太郎

Reviews

[長谷川 純一郎 · Rating 5 out of 5]

This novel tells about the time when Japan was a brand-new country they had just pretty much thrown out everything after the Meiji Restoration and started to rebuild completely. Eventually Japan found a pretext for challenging China. Chinese soldiers were not very loyal—they didn’t have much nationalist consciousness yet. As this novel shows, Japanese soldiers were bursting with loyalty. Japanese had all just become aware of their own nation. It’s hard for us to imagine today, when Japanese are so peace-loving, what it was like to live in that era when war was “really cool.” They were ready to prove that they could play like “the Big Boys.” They had the best navy—at the time, better than the American navy—and in a very short time, they defeated China. And then they went on to defeat Russia. All this is captured in the wide sweep of the book author's, Shiba Ryotaro in "Saka No Ue No Kumo"(Clouds above the hill).