Revisiting A.B. Mitford’s The 47 Ronin: Japanese Tales of Vampires, Ghosts, and Renegade Samurai
Two weeks ago I reviewed the film 47 Ronin, which Universal Pictures labeled a flop only a day after its U.S. release.
At that point the picture had earned about $85 million worldwide. That take has now increased to $116 million (according to BoxOfficeMojo), still well shy of its $175 million budget. Whether or not Universal’s premature announcement doomed the film, it’s now clear they weren’t wrong about its ultimate fate.
While browsing the remainder tables at Barnes & Noble yesterday, I stumbled on a curious title: The 47 Ronin: Japanese Tales of Vampires, Ghosts, and Renegade Samurai, by A.B. Mitford. I assumed it was a guerrilla tie-in; a cheap reprint timed to capitalize on the release of the movie. Except it was published nearly two years ago, in 2012, and there’s nothing cheap at all about the beautiful design, with striking endpapers and gorgeous color art on nearly every page.
I was right about at least one thing though: it is a reprint. It was originally published as Tales of Old Japan in 1871, one of the very first tomes to bring tales of Japanese monsters to Western shores.
Algernon Bertram Mitford was a British diplomat who later became Baron Redesdale. He developed a keen interest in Japanese folk tales while serving as attaché to the British delegation in Japan from 1866 – 1870 where, among other things, he witnessed the dissolution of the last feudal Japanese military government — the Tokugawa shogunate, ruled by the shoguns of the Tokugawa clans at Edo Castle — and the founding of a modern nation-state under Emperor Meiji.
Mitford was writing at a time when Japan was beginning to open to the West for the first time, less than 20 years after American Commodore Matthew Perry infamously sailed into Tokyo Bay with modern steam ships and explosive shell guns, gave the Japanese two white flags, and told them to hoist the flags when they wanted him to cease shelling the city and surrender. Perry forced the opening of Japan with the Convention of Kanagawa, and Mitford, writing a decade later, is a textbook case of white-guy-stupid, especially in how he’s perpetually surprised that the Japanese don’t greet Westerners with open arms and a bottle of warm saki.
