The journey begins.
Ronin is a 2013 Historical Fiction novel by Spanish author Francisco Narla. It was his second work in the genre, following Assur (2012), and it covers the story of the first contacts between Spain and Japan in the 17th century.In 1600, the Sengoku Period is in its last throes. The forces of magistrate Ishida Mitsunari advance on the Castle of Fushimi, where a stronghold of vassals loyal to Tokugawa Ieyasu, besieged by a betrayal, wait to die in a suicide battle. Among them, however, veteran samurai Saigo Hayabusa receives a secret mission, the most crucial of his life: to flee away from the battle and, becoming a Rōnin, a samurai without honor, discover the identity of the lord that has betrayed Ieyasu, even if he has to travel to the end of the world to get it.
Meanwhile, the mighty Spanish Empire crumbles under the corruption of the Duke of Lerma, lieutenant to the weak king Phillip III, whose its subjects seek fortune where they can find it. Spanish soldier Dámaso Hernández de Castro gets sent to the of faraway archipelago of Manila, where he expects to gain enough fortune to be able to ask the hand of his beloved, menina Constanza de Accioli. However, he ignores that his friend and apparent benefactor Hortuño de Andrade has disguised as a chance what is actually a trap.
The stories of those two warriors will become entangled when they discover they both seek to solve the same mystery.
This work contains examples of:
- As You Know: The prologue of the book has Torii Mototada giving a lengthy explanation to Saigo about the events that led to their current situation, even although a high-ranked veteran like Saigo should be well aware of all of all of them. This is justified because it turns out there were some details Saigo did not know after all.
- Artistic License – History:
- The novel follows somewhat pop culture in implying that firearms weren't considered honorable nor widely used by samurai, as the usage of arquebuses by Ishida's forces is seen as both disgraceful and a huge gamebreaker in the siege of Fushimi. In real life, samurai never had a problem with guns: they adopted them very enthusiastically in most cases, and all the sides in the Sengoku period used them in plenty whenever they could since at least the 1550s, half a century before the events of the novel.
- The battle of the San Diego is portrayed in a way that insinuates External Retcon by implying the historical version is just what De Morga wrote to save face. The main difference is that, according to historical sources, the Mauritius crew was decimated and sailed away in a skeleton state, while in the novel's "real" events they seem to have barely suffered casualties and instead depart looking like victors. This still doesn't add up much, however, considering the defeat of the Mauritius was instrumental to force it to abandon Philippines altogether and return to Netherlands, which would not be easily explained if their crew was still operational as in the novel.
- As the author admits in the book's notes, the background of the Hasekura expedition to Spain is changed completely. In real life, the Spanish shipwreck that reached Japan in 1610 was named San Francisco, not San Jacinto as in the book, and it was meant to reach Acapulco, not Japan itself. Given that the rest of differences are fairly minor, amounting to dates and names of characters (as well as posterior events that are not relevant), it's even a bit odd that the author elected not to adhere to them, when it would have changed very little.
- In the novel, set in 1610, Japan is portrayed as an unknown and hostile land, only explored by some crazy missionaries, to the extent that a ship from Manila is sent there with full expectations that the savage Japanese will kill or enslave everybody on board. In real life, the Portuguese Empire had a stable trading post in Japan since the 1570s, while the Spanish Empire had initiated diplomacy with the Toyotomi regency in 1590 and the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1608. By the time the novel is set, Japan was a perfectly familiar country to the Iberian Union and there was in turn a sizable Japanese presence on the latter's Pacific posts.
- Speaking of the Portuguese, they have relatively little presence in the the novel compared to real life, where they were the premier country in contact with Japan. The entire Nossa Senhora da Graça incident, which shook the Tokugawa Shogunate and its commercial connections right after the shipwreck of the San Francisco, is completely absent from the book.
- The real Antonio de Morga died in 1636, while the one from the novel is killed by Saigo in 1614.
- Artistic License – Martial Arts: The novel repeatedly claims European swords are "fragile" compared to the legendary katanas, even having instances where the former's blades are broken by a single katana stroke. In real life, Japanese swords simply don't have the massive advantage in metallurgy or design required for such stunts, but rather its direct opposite. Contrary to what pop culture claims, the complicated folding methods used to forge katanas were just a way to compensate for the poor quality steel found in Japan, which would hardly give it an edge over any decently forged Iberian steel blade. Similarly, while the katana's shape does make it excellent to slash and cut, breaking the opponent's blade during a fight with any kind of sword is a freak event if the quality of the weapons is not involved (virtually no swordfighting style aspires to achieve a breaking in combat, because it is infinitely easier to simply disarm or wound), and such a move would be especially ineffective against the highly flexible blade of a Spanish rapier, which would likely just bounce it off or be knocked aside. If anything, rather than an European sword, the sword most likely to break against a katana would be another katana, and even this would be an exceedingly rare event.
- Historical Villain Upgrade: Antonio de Morga Sánchez, a high-ranking colonial official and historian in real life, was certainly a General Failure and almost certainly corrupt, but by all accounts he was not as vile as he is presented in the book.
