My book Samurai Swordsmen will finally be published in September (in the UK and the rest of Europe), after a nine-year journey through mostly stormy seas. The USA release will follow several weeks later.

Should the book fail to find readers, I shall spend the remainder of my days muttering dark things about the decline of civilization.

This volume has occupied me for years. At more than 270,000 words, it is by far the most comprehensive work I have written on the Shinsengumi and the fall of the Tokugawa Bakufu. While centered on Kondō Isami, Hijikata Toshizō, and the Shinsengumi, the book is also a broader narrative of the political and military collapse of the Tokugawa order during the final years of the samurai age.

In many ways, Samurai Swordsmen continues and expands the historical world of Samurai Revolution. Together with The Last Shogun, the third book of the Samurai Revolution Trilogy (now in progress), it forms part of a larger attempt to narrate the fall of the Tokugawa Bakufu and the men who shaped its final decades.

More updates soon.

Romulus Hillsborough

[The Shinsengumi sleeve badge bearing the character makoto (“sincerity”) is courtesy of the Ryozen Museum of History.]

From my forthcoming Samurai Swordsmen:

At around four o’clock in the afternoon, “at dusk on that early spring day, someone came to my house to tell us that ‘Sannan is going to commit seppuku,’” Yagi recalled. The boy and his father “rushed” to the Maekawa house just across the narrow street—and the scene they witnessed was “pathetic.” “Just as I passed through the front gate of my house, there was a girl rushing by,” whom Yagi recognized as a woman from the Shimabara pleasure quarter who “had become intimate with Sannan.” Taken by surprise, the boy, “without saying a word, stood in front of the gate and watched as the girl ran over to the latticed bow window on the west side of the Maekawa house, and while knocking [on the window] screamed” Sannan’s name “over and over.” Soon Yagi approached the house and “silently stood there watching.”

Samurai Swordsmen: The Definitive History of the Shinsengumi amid the Fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate (1863–1869) (Helion, 2026) is now in production.