Ninjas – or shinobi – were men of the shadows. Before invading our literary and cinematic imagination, they lived in the age of warlords, in feudal Japan of the 16th century. One should not picture them dressed entirely in black, masked and perched on a rooftop, but rather dressed like country folk, blending into the crowd, undetectable. Their discretion almost causes them to vanish from the sources, which speak of them above all as rogues, thieves, henchmen, killers, arsonists…
Who were they truly? Pierre-François Souyri, historian of medieval Japan, invites us to follow his investigation into the most fragmentary traces left by these warriors, to whom almost supernatural powers have been attributed. Beyond the legends, which most often emerged in the 19th and 20th centuries, the author retraces, from previously untapped sources, the reality of these men — despised, forced into guerrilla warfare in the mountains around Kyoto — developing original combat techniques, who became the spies and mercenaries of the Tokugawa shogunate.
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