Sword of Honor

A sacred weapon incites vengeance in Japan.

THE 47th SAMURAI

By Stephen Hunter

Simon & Schuster. 372 pp. $26

Bob Lee Swagger, the hero of Stephen Hunter's 13th novel, The 47th Samurai, is a type we recognize immediately: a heroic figure who might have been at home battling with Beowulf or serving King Arthur. He's with us still, scarred, abused by governments and politicians, but ever committed to a high sense of duty and conduct. D.H. Lawrence famously said that the American hero is a cold, isolate killer, and Swagger is indeed a killer, but having adapted to the more modern expectations of a hero, he also has a loving family around him to whom he is quite tender. He comes from a long line of warriors, or, as they are often referred to in this novel, samurai. Such figures are not meant to be humans like you or me, folks who've never slain scores of honorable foes in battle or sewn up our own gaping wounds with a needle and thread and nary a whimper, displaying nothing but a manly grimace and cool efficiency. That's why we want to read about them.

Swagger's father, Earl, was himself a notable warrior hailing from the scrub-oak barrens of Blue Eye, Ark. In this novel, a long-ago battle that the father survived is intertwined with the quest Bob Lee embarks upon in contemporary times. During World War II there was great bloodletting on an island in the Pacific, during which Earl displayed exemplary courage and found himself face to face with a Japanese officer who displayed the same honorable qualities. Earl gains ownership of the officer's sword, and six decades later the search for that sword leads Bob Lee into a sort of violent communion with the legacy of his father, the Japanese officer and, in a sense, all warriors past and present.

The sword turns out to be utterly unique. It's of great spiritual value to the Japanese, a legend thought to have been lost forever. When Bob Lee returns the sword to the son of the Japanese officer, a gesture from one warrior to another, Japanese gangsters massacre the family and steal it. Bob Lee takes the butchering of his new brother in arms personally, of course, and vows vengeance. He is willing to go into Japan alone to slay the evildoers, though he does not speak the language or know much about the culture.

There is a tradition in manly writing of supplying the reader not only with a fictional experience but also with short primers on how one ought to do things: Hemingway described how best to set a grasshopper on a fishhook or bomb a bridge; Ian Fleming's Bond novels told readers how to order salmon, where the best cigarettes came from, what brand of wristwatch to wear. Hunter spends many interesting pages on the history of swords and sword fighting, the way of the samurai, the identifying marks that the great metal craftsmen imprinted on their deadly works.

It all comes in handy because this present-day novel has a great deal of sword fighting, as if everyone involved had agreed to abide by archaic codes of conduct and bring back the old-time spirituality and dignity to acts of bloodshed. As in so many epics of long ago, people are split, hacked apart, dismembered while still alive.

Here is a rather mild example of the graphic, even loving detail with which Hunter describes the violence: "All limbs and necks were severed. Torsos were sundered diagonally and horizontally. In two cases, pelvic bones had been cut through, seemingly with one clean stroke. In another case, rib bones were sheared in two at roughly a forty-five-degree angle to the spine. All spines were severed. . . . The cleanness with which the bones were separated at the site of each incision suggests a weapon traveling at considerable velocity."

If the wholesale violence is not a deterrent, readers will find that Washington Post film critic Hunter is a great entertainer, one of our finest practitioners of the classic blood-soaked and propulsive American thriller. With fluid, confident prose he writes big stories of a man, mostly alone, who must go forth for us all and slay the dragon. And, dear reader, there are yet dragons about, cleverly passing as rogue elements of the government, gangsters, terrorists from abroad, disguised but still with us. ¿

Daniel Woodrell is the author of "Winter's Bone" and seven other novels.