Review: Netflix’s Yasuke Traces the Propulsive Odyssey of an African Samurai

The anime series is, at its center, a comforting fairy tale of clear-cut good and evil.

Yasuke
Photo: Netflix

Netflix’s Yasuke is, loosely speaking, a work of historical fiction. The anime series, created by LeSean Thomas, riffs on the mostly forgotten story of Yasuke, an African man who arrived in Japan in the late 16th century as a slave or a servant of an Italian Jesuit missionary and ultimately became a samurai. The show’s events draw from accounts of Yasuke’s life, like his first meeting with feudal warlord Nobunaga Oda, who supposedly, having never seen an African person before, believed that Yasuke had inked his skin black. The series also fills in holes in the historical record with fantastical flourishes, as its depiction of war-torn Japan is home not just to samurai, but also to mechs, werebears, and sorcerers.

In the series, Yasuke (LaKeith Stanfield), once the right hand of Nobunaga (Hira Takehiro), runs a ferry in the remote countryside. He drinks his days away, trying to stave off the nightmares that remind him of his lord’s death two decades earlier, when a shadowy figure referred to as “the Daimyo” (Amy Hill) crushed Nobunaga’s military. Flashbacks elucidate the lead-up to Nobunaga’s downfall, chronicling his campaign to unite Japan and the bristling of reactionaries against his heterodoxy. Nobunaga’s relative progressivism is evident in his championing of both Yasuke and Natsumaru (Wen Ming-Na), a rare female samurai, as well as in his suggestively tender relationship with a man in his entourage.

Advertisement

In addition to intriguingly exploring the impact of Nobunaga’s iconoclasm, these flashbacks explore Yasuke’s veneration of Nobunaga and his star-crossed affection for Natsumaru, poignantly grounding his trauma and solitude. Yasuke’s unwavering commitment to Nobunaga’s vision—and his belief that communities are collectively responsible for keeping children safe—eventually convinces him to accept a daunting task: to smuggle Saki (Maya Tanida), a young girl with tremendous but uncontrollable magical abilities, past hostile forces to a mysterious figure with the potential to help her wield her gifts against the Daimyo. Their odyssey and the flashbacks are dotted with crisply animated, propulsive battle sequences. These skirmishes sometimes cut to first-person shots from Yasuke’s perspective, effectively highlighting the fear he inspires in his foes, and they always revel in astonishing spectacle.

In one dazzling, breakneck brawl in the series, Yasuke vertically slices a bandit in half and decapitates another; both moves trigger explosions of blood, thick like tomato paste. The combat sequences smartly communicate Yasuke’s impenetrable confidence through the stoic deftness with which he economically dispatches enemies, the wryness of his occasional one-liners, and the percussive but mellow score by Flying Lotus (who’s also an executive producer on the series alongside Thomas and Stanfield). Elsewhere, a hallucination that Yasuke experiences while near death unspools more abstractly, with smoky textures, vivid natural imagery, and hues that trickle across dark frames like watercolor on canvas.

Advertisement

Yasuke and Saki are hunted by emissaries of the Daimyo, as well as an unrelated quartet of mercenaries: Nikita (Julie Marcus), a towering Russian woman who shapeshifts into a bear (Julie Marcus); Achoja (William Christopher Stephens), an African shaman; Haruto (Darren Criss), a sentient robot; and Ishikawa (Dia Frampton), a stylish brawler armed with a sickle. While captivatingly animated, this motley crew of fighters is thinly characterized. Ishikawa has no personality beyond her playfulness, and Haruto often malfunctions in his role as comic relief, his dialogue never moving past the tired trope of the socially awkward robot. Achoja expresses an affinity for Yasuke that’s evocative—they’re the only black people in sight—but the series leaves the particular dynamics of their shared otherness unmined.

It isn’t long before we meet the band’s employer: Abraham (Dan Donohue), a Catholic clergyman who infuses the series with delectably over-the-top villainy. “Business brings me to Japan, as I assume it did you,” Abraham tells Yasuke in episode two. Later, he tortures Yasuke for information about Saki, using golden brass knuckles—one labeled “DEXTERA” and the other “DOMINI,” which, when combined, form the Latin phrase for “the right hand of the Lord.” Abraham is a fun nod to the antagonists of many a JRPG, where men of God tend to shed their pious facades to reveal eldritch horrors. But he ultimately exists solely on the level of decontextualized symbolism, limited to his role as a stand-in for Western religious imperialism. His personal motivations, besides his wish for hegemonic power, elude us.

Advertisement

The Daimyo is similarly lacking in nuance. This demigod of sorts—seemingly part human and part spider—lives simply to consume her enemies (she looks at Saki like a vampire would a powdered neck). Yasuke’s virtue, in contrast, stems from his reluctance to exercise his herculean might. After Nobunaga’s death, he left his katana sealed inside his home, untouched for ages. He finally draws it to defend a village terrorized by the Daimyo’s brutes, having found a reason to fight again in his stewardship of Saki. For all its gore, Yasuke is, at its core, a comforting fairy tale about good versus evil. Though unconcerned with the motivations of megalomaniacs, it conveys the true function of institutional power: to engorge and exert itself.

Score: 
 Cast: LaKeith Stanfield, Tanida Maya, Gwendoline Yeo, Hira Takehiro, Wen Ming-Na, Paul Nakauchi, Dan Donohue, Amy Hill, Noshir Dalal, Jan Chen, Julie Marcus, William Christopher Stephens, Darren Criss, Dia Frampton, Emily Woo Zeller  Network: Netflix

Niv M. Sultan

Niv M. Sultan is a writer based in New York. His writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Drift, Public Books, and other publications.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.