Golden Years
The Illustrated Ninja, Part III:
The Illustrated Ninja, part IV
Sarutobi Sasuke / Kirigakure Saizo
The Illustrated Ninja, part V
The Ninja Home, Weapons, The Ninja Legacy
The Illustrated Ninja, part VI
An Exceedingly Brief History of Japan
This book is dedicated to those ninja so good at their jobs we’ll never even know their names.
FOREWORD
You know your ninja. You’ve seen every movie—from the 1967 James Bond film, You Only Live Twice (the first ninja screen appearance abroad) to Eighties classics like Enter the Ninja and the more recent Ninja Assassin. Your collection of ninja comic books is embarrassingly large, spanning the “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” and “Usagi Yojimbo,” Frank Miller’s 1980s ninja-inflected reboots of “Wolverine” and “Daredevil,” to every appearance of Storm Shadow and Snake Eyes in “G.I. Joe.” You’ve followed ninja through anime—”Ninja Scroll” to “Naruto.” And it goes without saying you’ve vanquished the video games: “Shinobi,” “Mortal Combat,” “Ninja Gaiden.” The list goes on. And on.
You may notice, however, that your favorite characters do not appear within the pages of this book, or that their profiles do not match what you have read or seen onscreen. This is deliberate. Actual, historical ninja are fascinating enough subjects without needing to muddy the waters with fantasy. We gathered intelligence from a wide variety of academic and historical sources, mainly Japanese-language, in an attempt to piece together the most likely descriptions of people and events.
Ninja Attack! contains more than a thousand years’ worth of true stories of Japan’s most famous masters of espionage. Their successes and failures. Their allies and rivals. Their dedication to their families, their masters, and their craft of unconventional warfare. A lot of their stories are wilder than the plot of any ninja action flick, but here’s the twist. None of it is fiction. It’s historical fact.
That said, this book certainly doesn’t represent the alpha and omega of ninja
