Over at All the Anime, I review Lockley and Girard’s Yasuke: The True Story of the Legendary African Samurai, and pronounce it to be great fun, albeit not all that historical.

“Poke around Asian history for long enough, and you will find flashes of striking diversity – the Italian girl buried in a medieval grave in Yangzhou, or the Persian camel drivers celebrated in Tang dynasty porcelain. Reading the 14th-century Travels of ibn Battuta, we find him dropping in on a fellow Muslim in a Chinese harbour town, admiring his ‘fifty white slaves and as many slave-girls.’ You can bet there’s a story, there.”