I learned about The Ninja in 1995 from an acquaintance who said it was, in his opinion, one of the coolest books he had ever read. He regaled me one afternoon on the phone with a recitation of all the epic sex, sword fights, and Eastern mysticism that made it kick so much ass. Explaining in great detail about how the main bad guy disembowels a dude with a claw weapon so sharp it cuts vertically through a bullet-proof vest, Matt certainly piqued my interest in the story the way only a seventeen year old male can pique the interest of another seventeen year old male about the bizarre sort of East-meets-West nonsense one can expect from a thriller written about a trope which burnt itself out in pop culture faster than zombies ever did.
I vowed to one day track down and read this book which had so enthralled him, then we changed the topic of conversation to something else: probably Magic the Gathering or Penn & Teller, two more of the vices Matt and I shared high-school-age laughs over.
Well, fast forward twenty or so years, and I finally found a hardcover floating around the used bookstore where I work. A litany of memories returned, and I realized that, while I had promised Matt I'd read it, hadn't done so yet. I bought the book, took it home, and plopped it on the ever-growing mountain that is my TBR pile, where it languished for another several years.
Until I saw the memory posted by an old high school friend, talking about Matt, reminding everyone to take care of themselves. Matt had passed away back in 2005 at the age of 28 due to health complications stemming from his weight, leaving behind a loving wife and children. It hit me: ten years after the last time I spoke to him on the phone or hung out with him playing cards, Matt had died. I never read the book he loved so much, never got to discuss it with him beyond what he told me that one day over the phone. So, twenty-five years after I first learned of its existence, I cracked the covers, not knowing what to expect, but having seen enough "American Ninja" movies to assume I had a fairly good idea.
Let's get one thing out of the way: The Ninja is an erotic thriller published in 1980. I was all of three years old when this book came out, so by the time I was old enough to be interested in reading something called "The Ninja", it was no longer tearing up the best-seller charts though it did come back into print from time to time when Van Lustbader penned another entry in the series. It's about as thoroughly late-70's/early-80's as it's possible for a book like this to get, with characters visiting discos and New York holding its reputation for squalor along 42nd Street, filled with shady theaters and red-light clubs galore, the way an addict clutches his near-empty bottle of whiskey.
It would be easy to write off The Ninja as being yet another of those endless, cranked-out-for-a-buck stories you'd find crowding the Men's Adventure shelves of your local Walden Books of the day. By all rights, it should fit right in with the exploits of Remo Williams from The Destroyer, or Mack Bolan of The Executioner. And, to a certain extent, The Ninja is this sort of story: a protagonist who typifies the East vs. West mentality, having been born to a British father and Asian mother, never accepted by the Japan he calls home, but trained in its deadliest fighting techniques nonetheless; an antagonist named Saigo who is, yes, a ninja; a heaping dose of sex (not all of which is the hetero- variety either -- we've got lesbianism, men doing boys, and even some incest thrown in for good measure); a smattering of Japanese words amongst the English text; sayings attributed to Miyamoto Musashi and Ieyasu Tokugawa; an overriding philosophy that states it takes a ninja to stop a ninja. If you were going to crank out an East-meets-West thriller in the late 70's, this is at first glance exactly how you'd do it.
And yet, when Eric Van Lustbader penned this novel, the ninja so commonly depicted in Western popular culture simply didn't exist yet. Years before American Ninja, Enter the Ninja, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and countless anime and manga turned 'ninja' into a trope of its own self, Lustbader set out to explore the ideas and philosophies of bushido in a way accessible to Western readers, yet respectful to Eastern culture. That's not to say he doesn't take creative liberties along the way, but if Robert Ludlum could do so with Jason Bourne and Tom Clancy with Jack Ryan, it seems wrong to fault Lustbader for doing so with Nicholas Linnear.
Lustbader treads right through topics like Hiroshima, the US occupation of Japan, and the cultural conflict between not just Japan and the United States, but also Japan's relationship to much of the rest of Asia, especially China. The main antagonist of the book might be a full-blooded Japanese, but the crimes he is avenging stem from Western interference in, and misunderstanding of, Japanese culture, both in the present-day of the late 20th century and the post-War reconstruction period. Raphael Tomkin, the book's secondary antagonist (who is more responsible for the modern-day events of the story than the 'bad guy ninja'), is Western through and through, arguably more corrupt and devastating on the whole than Saigo. Tomkin's scuttling of an international business deal with one of the Japanese zaibatsu (powerful industrial and financial conglomerates), and the resulting loss of face among the Japanese which requires blood redemption, is what sets the whole novel in motion, but the conflict between Nicholas and Saigo has been brewing for the last two decades.
The Ninja is not a quick read. At least, it wasn't for me. I'm the kind of person who can tear through a 400-page novel in a day or two, but Lustbader's prose isn't built for this. It, like bushido itself, is meant for the sort of patient reader James Patterson has spent the last twenty years slaughtering with punchy, one-chapter-every-two-pages thrillers. It's filled with long, meandering passages where little of importance seems to happen, punctuated with scenes of what, at the time, would have seemed utterly immortal brutality and depravity. Fully half the book takes place in the past, dwelling on everything from Nicholas growing up in Japan, where his father is working with Gen. MacArthur to fundamentally change Japan's political and military landscape, to a secondary character's memories of fighting in the Pacific and encountering foes who utterly defied every attempt the Americans made to understand who and what they were facing.
At first glance, this seems like a mistake made by a novice writer. Was Lustbader tossing in everything but the kitchen sink, pleased as punch with his ability to poke the keys on a typewriter and wear out the typesetter's italic font pieces, as some other reviews on here seem to think? Originally, this was my thought as well: The Ninja spends an awful lot of time talking about nothing in particular, mired in the past just as its characters are. But then I realized: that was the whole point. Much of the philosophy espoused by both Saigo and Nicholas comes from Miyamoto Musashi's The Book of Five Rings. Musashi's book is short, coming in well under 100 pages in every translation I've ever seen. You can read it in an afternoon.
But that's not the point.
Musashi didn't write a book for a reader to consume in a single sitting, he wrote a book with the assumption that the reader would stop and contemplate every one of the points he was making. Virtually all of his instructions conclude with a statement like, "Medidate on this well," and "Think about this carefully," and "Take time to consider this." If you read The Book of Five Rings in a single day, you're robbing yourself of the single most important part of Musashi's teachings: reading it is not enough to make you a warrior.
Lustbader, I am convinced, took this theory to heart with his prose, and crafted a story which demands a reader stop and think. Frequently. Western audiences, especially those of the 1980's, could not just be told, "meditate on this for a while". Instead, Lustbader put together a story which weaves and dances from place to place, point to point, time to time, filling a gap here, a clue there, and forcing readers to slow down and engage with the story. You can burn through The Ninja in a couple of days and be mildly entertained with the blood spectacle and sexual escapades, but you'll do so at the expense of the experience Lustbader intended. Every backtrack is an opportunity to 'meditate' on the lesson at hand, drawn out beyond what any editor would allow today, because Lustbader's "translating" the experience for readers. Doc Deerforth tells Nicholas his long story about his own encounter with shadowy Japanese assassins and his personal witness of the kamikaze strikes on American naval vessels not because Lustbader wants to pad his page count, but because it lends that much more weight to Deerforth's later encounter with Saigo. Without the former, the latter is impossible. Such is it with much of the book: without the past, the present becomes meaningless.
You'd think a book written like this would have withered and died on the vine in 1980, but just the opposite was true. The Ninja spent twenty weeks on the NY Times Best Seller list, sold millions of copies, and to date Lustbader has produced five sequels, all of which are available both in print and digital editions. The public ate The Ninja up like starving orphans turned loose at a fancy buffet. And yet, it's the sort of book which you'd never see touched by any traditional publisher today thanks mainly to the demise of the ninja's pop-cultural credit and the aforementioned James Patterson effect on thrillers today. What Lustbader conjured in 1980 was a right-place, right-time phenomenon which I have a hard time comprehending even today. An awful lot of movies and books owe a debt of gratitude to this book, which treats the titular topic (and its audience) with far more respect than expected. It's not life-changing, it's not life-affirming, and it's very much the antithesis of today's disposable, interchangeable, one-and-done beach reads. And yet, it has a staying power other books in this vein wore out decades ago. In cinematic terms, "The Ninja" is 1974's Jaws compared to today's Marvel Cinematic Universe outings. Both are summer blockbusters, but both are profoundly different experiences, and the former would have an impossible time competing with the latter in this day and age. Like Musashi, Lustbader's thriller stands the test of time if you're willing to put in the effort to engage with it on its terms, but we're unlikely to see its likes again.
I don't know what a seventeen-year-old me would have made of The Ninja. But I do know what a seventeen-year-old buddy made of it. He loved the hell out of it. Matt, I know you'll never read these words, and I'm sorry it took so long for this book to find me. But thank you for falling in love with it and regaling me with all the awesome bits on that phone call twenty-five years ago. It was one hell of a recommendation, big guy. I hope this review is repayment enough.
You were right.
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