"Through his description of one historical event in Japan s national experience, Noel Perrin has written a book as tight and elegant as haiku. The story is a fascinating one: Japan s introduction to, mastery of, and subsequent abandonment of, the gun.... Perrin s work is so crisp and interesting, and so loaded with background information and revealing anecdotes, that the whole peculiar episode it describes jumps to life from its pages." (text taken from Amazon)